with Footsoles of Wind (1993) based on the last year of the life of the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud. A parallel development to this was his increasing interest in writing for dance, an art-form particularly suited to Volans's open conception of formal structure and he has collaborated with the choreographers Jonathan Burrows, Siobhan Davies and Shobana Jeyasingh. The key work which confirmed this new direction is Cicada (1994) for two pianos, which was inspired by his experience inside one of James Turrell's Skyspaces. The piece involves very gradual adjustments of tone, harmonic colour and tempo being applied to a repeated sonority based on a B-flat major and A major triads. Described by the composer as his first minimalist piece, Cicada'''s reduction in content and largely flat surface is a departure from the generally high degree of activity which marked many of his earlier works. Although there is no recognizably African material present in the piece, the existence of interlocking patterns, inherent rhythms and open non-developmental forms demonstrate how African elements continue to inform his work in a background capacity. In a number of works since Cicada, Volans limited the content and pursued a similar policy of incremental changes at the margins of the material. The reduction of material in these pieces is even more extreme than in Cicada and exemplifies a tendency which Volans has described as follows: Two works in particular demonstrate this tendency – String Quartet No. 6 and the Concerto for Double Orchestra. String Quartet No. 6 is not in fact a string quartet at all but a piece for two spatially separated string quartets which can be performed live with both quartets or with one live and the other pre-recorded. The vast majority of the piece consists of just two chords which overlap between both quartets creating a blurring of the harmonies not unlike the blurring of colour fields in the paintings of Mark Rothko, which served as the piece's inspiration. In the Concerto for Double Orchestra (2001) static harmonies are spatially distributed back and forth between a split orchestra with a focus on the "edges" of the chords through accented pizzicatos and dynamics rather than "bleeding" them together. Both of these works demonstrate Volans's concerns with moving the site of musical discourse to the margins of the material, a strategy inspired by his lifelong interest in visual art. The music tends to focus on the