Jane Austen Suite

In 1998, inspired by close acquaintance with two antique gilded harps, I decided to compose a work in a style that would remind them of their younger days! To think myself into a thoroughly Regency frame of mind I played through antique music books until I was so immersed in the style of the period that I could close the books and continue playing in the same vein without any anachronistic intrusions.

The books were a leather-bound volume of popular piano salon pieces by long-forgotten composers, written out in a neat copperplate ink script: "The Manuscript Books of Mary Heberden, Datchett Lodge, 1819 & 1826" and a similar collection of harp pieces compiled by one Eliza Euphrosina Saris at about the same time.

By these means I hope to have produced music of the kind which Jane Austen might have imagined her fictional heroines playing, the sort of music that all well-bred young Regency ladies would have wanted to perform before an admiring audience, no doubt silhouetted with their harps before the French windows, making the most of the opportunity to display their slender fingers upon the strings and their delicate ankles as they moved the pedals.