Iridescence and Tapetum lucidum (2023) are part of a cycle of ten pieces for piano, with Iridescence using the same piano preparations as Annea Lockwood’s Ear-Walking Woman. The sea permeates the movements of this piece – it is there and not there at the same time. Over the course of about four years, I lived in a very special house overlooking the Belfast Lough. According to some, it used to belong to a sea captain. On clear days, Scotland was visible just across the water with hills and wind turbines. The sound and smell of the sea was constant. Storms threw down tree branches and fling salt onto the windows. There were many birds: plump eiders, redshanks, oyster catchers, shags, guillemots, corvids and gulls dropping mollusk shells onto the rocks to get at the tender flesh inside. There were rock pools, crabs, limpets, snails; sea vegetables: dulce, sea radish, scurvy grass. Seals sunbathed and curved their tails into the air; sometimes, you saw little sea otters. Container ships huddled in the bay to wait out storms, their lights gleaming in the night. There was a little cove with the submerged cave, waves churning, cold-water swimmers in all seasons and weathers, starfish gleaming from the depths below, a whole unknown forest beneath the surface. Then, the beach: sadly, full of plastic, glass, golf balls, lighters, toys, bottles, and depending on rainfall, toilet paper. I am grateful to Bill Thompson’s cameo as captain of the CSS Alabama in 1864 on Tapetum lucidum.

Xenia Pestova Bennet