Andrew Toovey - Nearly there (2017) for solo piano with speaker, performed by the composer.

Nearly there is a short solo piano piece comprising of a series of sequential chords of cadencial material. It can be performed as a solo piano piece, but for this recording I also added myself reading (naturally with hesitations and corrections) a part of the text on cadences in the Harvard Dictionary of Music (1970 edition) edited by Willi Apel.

The idea of adding a text came from recently working with fellow composer Colin Blundell in Benslow Music – in one of his pieces he wanted random texts overlaid with each other, in my piece I specifically wanted a text connected to the subject matter of the composition. This piece was written especially for the birthday of composer Robert Nettleship as, at the time he was taking a journey to Amsterdam, I was more recently on a train going to Birmingham, so I filmed part of that journey as the visual element for this composition.