Sphinxes was composed in 1972 and first performed that year by the Dublin Symphony Orchestra under Colin Block. The title has nothing to do with ‘cold winds in desert spaces’, as an unusually imaginative critic opined, but was suggested by the section of that name in Schumann’s Karnaval which I was constantly playing at the time. The piece begins with a sustained f-natural which builds up to an atonal crash, and this simple dialectic is explored throughout. With the exception of a highly percussive climax peppered with trombone glissandi, the central sections evoke (without directly quoting) certain popular tunes that tormented my childhood. The ending echoes the beginning, but the f-natural has tuned into a cluster.