Arnold Bax wrote nearly thirty short piano pieces during and immediately after the First World War. These were largely written for his friends and contemporaries, mainly female, at the Royal Academy of Music, not least the pianist Harriet Cohen, thirteen years his junior, with whom he was involved in a passionate affair. When he emerged as the leading British composer of the day in the early 1920s, the availability of these pieces as sheet music meant that his new admirers had music that they could attempt at home, though Bax never wrote down to his audience and none of the pieces were easy.

It was through the keyboard that Arnold Bax came to music, and when he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in the autumn of 1900, the surviving manuscripts of his earliest compositions suggest he was soon a capable pianist. His technique grew quickly, and in the headlong, complex piano parts he wrote for the songs he produc