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Programme Note

Domestic Life is an arrangement of tunes from an "entertainment", This Town's a Corporation Full of Crooked Streets for Voices and Ensemble, written in 1969. The original version with piano was made in 2000 for the birthday of Margaret Turner, and this edition for recorder and string orchestra (with xylophone) appeared the following year, at the suggestion of John Turner. The texts for the original work were all connected with Liverpool, including poems by Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten, as well as Liverpool children's rhymes, and the style of the music, especially in the songs from which this short piece is derived, was very light and almost Merseybeat. All three tunes, which are played without a break, come from the same movement of the "entertainment". It was fun to write music after a manner which became part of the Liverpool scene shortly after my own schooldays had finished, and the piece is essential a very light pièce d'occasion.

© Copyright 2001 by John McCabe