In the Seven Runic Songs I experimented for the first time with a method of organizing musical materials that I use to this day. I refer to it as the "star-form", even though, as I say, it is more a method of organization than itself a definition of form.

We all remember how as children we first learned to draw a five-pointed star without lifting the pencil from the paper, thus as a "single-line drawing". It is also possible to draw a seven-pointed star in the same way (or actually any number of points greater than 5, except 6).

Imagine that these points now represent movements in a piece of music, and the line passing through the points represents the way musical materials appear and reappear. Thus the ending of the first movement will recur as the beginning of the third, the ending of the third as the beginning of the fifth, and so forth. (There are many possible variations on this, for example, the ending of the first movement might be developed or treated to some kind of variation in the beginning of the third, rather than restated intact.)

In the case of the Seven Runic Songs the beginning of each movement is the intact restatement of the ending of the previous one along the line. The quiet, very introspective nature of this piece was well served by this approach, I think, as it feels very much like the process of soul-searching. An idea is examined, then taken up again later and spun off in a new direction.