Among my first piano compositions was Six Pieces for Pupils who Dont Like Exams. Baby Grand is the sixth of these and is composed for four hands (in this version I multitracked myself and used some double-speed recording techniques). ... Then in the 1980s I received two once-in-a-lifetime commissions ... The first was to compose music for a film by Irish film-maker Bob Quinn, called Budawanny. The music (which had to be piano music) was the play a central tole in this film, which was shot as a silent movie in black and white with captions appearing when people spoke. It required seventy minutes of music to be composed for it - uninterrupted by anyone talking over it (a composers dream) ... The second commission was from Dublins Gat Theatre to compose music for a production of Oscar Wildes play Salome, which required a piano player onstage throughout the show, playing non-stop for almost tow hours. For this Baby Grand CD I have included five pieces from that suite, but have replaced Salomes Dance with a new version recorded in concert in 2003. Mansard is from a 5CD set called Babel which took me ten years to compose (1989-1999). Each track corresponds to a room within an imagined giant Babel tower. --Roger Doyle, Autumn 2005.