“Abiya” is an acronym, coined by the early kabbalist Isaac of Acre from the initial letters of the Hebrew names for the four worlds (emanation, creation, formation and making) which, in Kabbala, constitute the entirety of creation. At the start of my piece, the hierarchical organisation of the four worlds is mirrored by a texture in which the same material (groups of widespread chords) is stated on four levels. Each level gradually moves away from the opening texture, the outer ones in in a straightforward goal-oriented fashion, while the inner parts develop in a more freely associative, tangential way. At four points there is an attempt to paper over the cracks created as a result of the disengagement of the four levels of activity in the form of a type of musical red herring. The discourse is made to act as accompaniment to a florid type of music, different form anything heard thus far. This music is both “non-pianistic” and anachronistic, evoking a distorted memory of monodic vocal music from the time of Monteverdi. In the fifth and final section all four strands are drawn together again. Each now consists of a melodic line complete with its own accompaniment – a distant echo of the sound of the huge iron-keyed gamelan of Tenganan in the east of Bali, which I heard perform in the Summer of 1974. This music, too, is subjected to variative procedures. The four highly complex lines which result from these are both too strenuous for the material to bear and extremely tricky for the performer to articulate, so the work finally disintegrates into silence. Abiya was written in 1 995 and commissioned by Ian Pace (who gave the first performance on 21st March 1 997 at Conway Hall, London) with funds made available by the Holst foundation. It is dedicated to Ian Pace and Henrietta Brougham. The work has the distinction of being mentioned in Blair Babylon’s 2015 romantic novel Every Breath You Take: "Flicka had convinced their piano coach at Tanglewood to let her change the concert program at the last minute because she was bored with Chopin and wanted to play something modern, Abiya by James Erber, and they had set up a specially tuned piano just for her piece."