Why Serendip?
Serendip was of course the name coined by Horace Walpole for Sri Lanka in 1754 from the folk talk 'The Three Princes of Serendip'. It's meaning describes the condition of making or creating lucky finds - happy accidents. It applies here primarily because the three components of this piece were created separately to each other and yet manage to work as an overall composition when they were placed together in the final mix.
On looking back over the whole album, it might be the case that Serendip would have made a better title for the collection as the four 'home grown' pieces were mostly constructed by bolting various pieces of existing music together. Cranmillion does have a sense of thematic unity to it as the sound wanders in and out in the same key throughout, but it was still put together by recording the pipes, the strings and the synths separately and then introducing them in layers. For A Brief Second... was put together in two parts between the main body and the coda. Shutter on the Scene was also constructed in parts, with the sense of holding the piece together given by the chord structures played by the piano and echoed within the choirs later; the percussion section of that piece was intended for another project entirely. Although these were all planned out in some sense, a certain degree of serendipity permeates through the whole project, which partly explains why it happened so quickly. Like someone else's experience, a good fairy - verte or otherwise - was watching over this one.
This is also available on YouTube.
Instrumentation: