"My music tends to pull between two very different characters: the passionate and the contemplative. The former is often expressed through kinds of lyricism, the latter through subtly altered repeating patternings, quite often broken into fragments. Sometimes these occur in the same work, and the music’s course has to do with moving away from “heat” into serenity. In others, the temperament is more a kind of steady state. Stylistically, my music often bridges quite different musical types too, frequently at the border between tonality and atonality. Recently, this has crystallised into a number of works rooted in a wide range of other music, including Dowland, Couperin, Chopin and Tom Jobim. Quite different to transcription, my pieces dip in and out of these past works - structurally exploring ideas of merging, layering and juxtaposing materials; expressively reaching for that poignancy of feeling, fragile yet intense, that memory may provoke." [M.Z.G]