pal imp sest /pælimpsest/ noun
1 an ancient document from which some or all of the original text has been removed and replaced by a new text.
2 (formal) something that has many different layers of meaning or detail: a study of the novel as a palimpsest with one textual layer over another.
An important issue in the writing of Palimpsest is the miniature forms of the first three movements. After writing several compositions of 30-40 minute durations, I wanted to explore the very short timespans of one to two minutes. The idea was to present three distinct, closed circuits in short movements, and to let the fourth movement enclose this material and span a longer period of time than the three combined. As a startingpoint, I took a piano-part from a recent ensemble piece of mine. I couldn’t remember just how this part was made, maybe this is why it attracted me as a structure in itself, and I decided to treat it as a found object that could have been some ancient musical structure. This notion of reading, re-examination and cross fertilization of musical ideas, both ones own and ideas belonging to the canon of western music, has interested me for some time. The found object became the second movement, which is a very simple texture based on the harmonic content of my “redescovered” piano part. The first movement also relates to a found object, and is a structure of free floating gestures  where the linear momentum (hopefully) is replaced by the energies of superposition, intersection and transitory states. The other aspect of a palimpsest, the notion of many different layers of meaning in a text, relates to the last of the four movements. In this, characteristic features of the first three movements are set in motion against each other within the constraints of a cyclic pattern. The different materials expand gradually from an initial state where the material is contained in a supressed manner, dominated by the slowly evolving cycles. Or one might say that the earlier layers of the palimpsest become visible through the development of this last movement.
"I make one image, though "make" is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me & then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess; let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict." (Dylan Thomas)