Programme Notes

Between Two Waves of the Sea (2004)

Between Two Waves of the Sea was commissioned by Jane, Anne, and John Arthur in memory of their parents, Jean and Peter. Its two movements, each lasting about ten minutes, are built around the interplay between live orchestral music and pre-recorded sections, which were composed alongside the live material and are played via a sampler. The recording functions in various ways: sometimes it is barely audible, like something half-heard in the distance which gradually reveals itself; at others it is like a separate orchestra playing in the next room; at others again it challenges the live orchestra as its mirror image in passages of conflict. The two elements are rarely in the same tempo as one another and the interplay between them is like a dialogue between different kinds of time, or between life and death.

The recorded, or 'virtual' part of the piece contains flashbacks and premonitions of things yet to come, and in the centre of the work it increases the density of musical time, forcing nearly all of the material of the piece into just a few seconds. Towards the end, music which has been buried in the piece right from the beginning is allowed to emerge, and we hear the twelve fixed pitches which opened the work forming a new, valedictory music. This idea appears in T.S. Eliot's poem Little Gidding, from which my piece takes its title:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

© 2004 Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Concerto for Solo Percussion and Gamelan (2001)

I. Maestoso - Tranquillo
II. Crotchet = 69 - crotchet = 92 -
III. Very Still

This piece was inspired by pictures of deep space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which show nebulae - enormous clouds of dust and gas which are thousands of billions of miles long. There is an intense grandeur about these distant objects, which contain extraordinary hues and colours and which radiate a peculiar, eerie light.

For reasons I can't explain, the resonance of some of the gamelan instruments seemed to reflect this sense of the unearthly, perhaps the numinous; Indonesian custom has it that the gongs of the gamelan were originally used as a kind of celestial signalling system amongst the gods, although it was not this that influenced my choice of subject matter.

The first movement is a prologue. There is a chorale (Maestoso) followed by a longer passage specifically concerned with the clouds in the universe where new stars are incubated and born. Here there is no division between the ensemble and the soloist; perhaps the music of the gamelan actually gives rise to the soloist, whose existence as a separate unit is not really established until the next movement.

This concentrates on the periodicity and the mechanical aspect of the universe. There is regularity and irregularity, which becomes growth; some of the soloist's music is directly inspired by the sounds of pulsars - stars which send out radio waves in regular pulsations from far across the universe.

The final movement, which follows the second without a break, is partly about light and partly about the demise of the universe. It opens with a second chorale; then, as the music progresses, the ensemble's components are gradually turned into beams of light by the soloist, until the soloist and ensemble together are radiating an intense white glow.

Scientists now believe that the universe, which has been expanding since the first seconds of the big bang, will not collapse together again in a 'big crunch' as previous theories had predicted, but go on expanding forever into infinity. If this is correct, the stars and galaxies will all move further and further apart until they run out of fuel and are extinguished one by one, leaving the universe a cold, dark place.

© 2004 Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

The Flea (2000)

This piece was written in response to a commission from David Clasen for a work for solo male voice which would be suitable for singing in an informal setting, and could easily be memorised. It is a setting of John Donne's famous poem in which the poet tries, by more and by less logically argued means, to seduce his mistress.

© 2003 Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

MARKE but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sinne, nor shame, nor losse of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than wee would doe.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where wee almost, yea more than maryed are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloyster'd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make you apt to kill mee,
Let not to that, selfe murder added bee,
And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three.

Cruell and sodaine, hast thou since
Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty bee,
Except in that drop which it suckt from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and saist that thou
Find'st not thy selfe, nor mee the weaker now;
'Tis true, then learne how false, feares bee;
Just so much honor, when thou yeeld'st to mee,
Will wast, as this flea's death tooke life from thee.

John Donne (1572-1631)

Inventions in One Part (2000)

I. Meccanico - un poco rubato
II. dotted crotchet = 60
III. Libero e semplice
IV. crotchet = 80c.
V. quaver = 116c.

The piano repertoire abounds with pieces which dazzle the listener with pyrotechnical displays of what can be done with ten fingers and eighty-eight keys. This can focus attention on the overall welter of sound and away from individual notes, or even emphasise the technical wizardry of the player at the expense of the actual music. When I was asked to write a piece for the pianist Karl Lutchmayer, I decided to go to the opposite extreme and compose music which allowed the sound of just one note at a time to be heard and appreciated.

The first invention contrasts a mechanical ostinato with a plangent, flexible melody; the second explores two separate musical materials which eventually become one. The third piece (which was the first to be composed) allows single notes to unfold a slow cantilena which rises and then falls. The fourth invention is unstable, constantly slipping and eventually plunging downwards to the very bottom notes of the piano; the last piece starts at the opposite extreme, playing with a kind of brittle and strained hilarity in the top octave of the keyboard until it finally spirals out of control.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

'Kyrie' and 'Sanctus' from Messe de Nostre Dame (2001)

I. Kyrie
Kyrie I (x2) - Plainsong Kyrie – Christe - Plainsong Christe - Christe - Plainsong Kyrie -
Kyrie II - Kyrie III
II. Sanctus

Any arrangement involves the destruction of some elements of the original piece, and the amplification of others. In approaching the Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377) to make these versions of the Kyrie and Sanctus for eight instruments, I felt it very important to retain the things which, to my ears, make the piece so extraordinary. Machaut’s harmony and rhythm are in themselves so rich, intense and mysterious that I decided to conserve all the rhythmic and pitch relationships of the orginal work.

Both movements divide the ensemble in two. In the Kyrie, the strings take the four polyphonic parts of Machaut’s setting whilst the wind frame this with an isorhythmic elaboration of the plainsong on which the piece is based. The percussion is used as a rogue element, structurally similar to the wind but sounding sometimes timbrally closer to the strings.

In the Sanctus, the ensemble is literally in two different places at once. The violin, viola and crotales create an enveloping space like a resonant acoustic into which the other instruments play the original polyphony.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines (1992, rev. 1994)

This piece began life as part of an abstract ‘image’ of words, abstract sound, light and movement which appeared and disappeared in a split second. It then lay dormant for several months until it became possible to work on it intensively during a stay in Italy in 1992; the final, revised version was completed in March 1994.

The text and music move from the first instant of existence, of being, through the generation of life and the beginnings of consciousness to death, decay, and the ultimate cessation of day and night. At every point in the poem an analogy is present between the individual and the cosmos, between the organic cycles of biological life and the periodic movements of the sun, moon and stars on which they depend. This motion is present on a musical level in the form of a constant pulse whch runs virtually the entire length of the work, until, near the end, it is cut off abruptly by chords in the piano as the moment before the dawn halts is stretched, and time stands still.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas

Millennium Scenes (1999)

Music for large orchestra in two parts
I: Feroce – Largo – Dance – Interrupted Dance
II: Chorale 1 – Intimo – Berceuse 1 – Grandioso – Brutale – Chorale 2 – Berceuse 2 – Coda

This piece was composed in 1998-9, during the run-up to the turn of the millennium. Alongside several forecasts of the end of the world, there was a very real nervousness about terrorist attacks and the unpredictable consequences of computers failing to recognise 1st January, 2000: a feeling that almost anything could happen. At the same time, and with a kind of hubris, plans for elaborate and costly celebratory shows such as that at London's Millennium Dome were under way. I remember reading in the newspapers at the time that sponsors could not be found for the Dome's Faith Zone, the exhibition exploring the spiritual, emotional and moral dimensions of humankind. The irony of a spiritual void right at the centre of our celebrations seemed very telling.

While working on the piece, I had in mind a series of fleeting images or cinematic scenes - a TV commercial, perhaps, a couple arguing, laughter, a dead animal on the road, religious fervour, a child being hit - almost anything, in fact, but all of them real events taking place around the turn of the millennium. I felt that such a film would tell a very different story from the one to be told as part of the official festivities; and so my piece became a response to their apparently empty triumphalism.

Millennium Scenes is also a very private, very sad piece. I didn't intend to write this kind of music at all: I would like to have composed something freer, less oppressive, even uplifting. Instead, the piece crystallised into something heavily laden with the past, nostalgic and backward-looking (Part II), and something highly energised, violent and forward-looking (Part I). And because the one seemed to invite the other, the boundaries between the two are not always clear: a little fragment of Part II turns up, inexplicably, near the end of Part I; and later, the calm exterior of the music in Part II seems increasingly fragile as it is assailed, then overpowered and destroyed, by the brutal return of music from Part I.

The atmosphere of 1998-9 already seems a distant memory; as we now know, the global dangers and insecurities that we so feared would begin not with 1st January 2000, but the tragic events of 11th September 2001. As time passes, however, the need for understanding between faiths and cultures is all the more evident and urgent. We must consider this if we want to ensure that our descendants will be there to bring in the year 3000.

…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

(Extract from The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats)

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

‘Non mi comporto male’ (1993)

'Non mi comporto male' was first performed by Stephen Wolff, for whom it was composed, at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, York on 27th May 1993. It won the SPNM George Butterworth Award in 1997.

The music moves through five short sections, subtitled Fantasia, Flamboyant, Inquieto: meccanico, Maestoso and Adagio. Some way into this final section the theme on which the piece is based gradually emerges, gathering itself together like water droplets and becoming explicit for the first time.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Notturno (1998)

The three movements of this piece each explore aspects of a rather unpredictable, imaginary nighttime.

In the first movement, a smooth central section is framed by rhetorical instrumental dialogues; this music is associated with a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo which describes an old tree, a refuge to birds of the night, which "resounds with a rapid beating of wings", and "from on high... listens intently to the abyss". The central panel of the movement is formed by a sort of distant, blurred polyphony, lit up at intervals by bright chorale-like passages.

The second movement is an interlude in cyclical form. As it rotates, the music follows through a trajectory rising from the opening viola solo.)

The third movement re-treads the same harmonic ground as the first, but this time the music has been pushed towards extremes. The very slow central chorale, associated with the breathless calm of an uninhabited nighttime landscape, is juxtaposed with fast, rough music like something of the brutality which seems to accompany man wherever he goes.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

The Persistence of Memory (1994-5)

This piece has its origins in two diverse sources: the painting by Dali from which the title is derived, and a strange memory from my visit to India five years ago.

Whilst staying in a small town near Bangalore, I became ill and had to remain in bed for several days. During the nights, one could hear the hour struck independently from several directions in seemingly random polyrhythms. I came to believe that the sound was made by workers who sat on the rooftops of factories nightly, telling the town what the time was by banging on slates and pieces of metal. In my delirious, half-waking state, it often seemed that time had atrophied, or even changed direction; frequently it seemed that four o'clock in the morning had come before two, and these weird temporal disturbances became absorbed and gathered into my dreams and fantasies.

These ideas affect the piece in more or less direct ways. Tempi are sometimes at odds with other rhythms in the music, pulses appear and disappear, and near the end a single chord buckles and distorts under the strain as its constituent notes are forced out of tune.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Phoenix (2006)

Phoenix was composed between March and September 2006. The music hinges on the relationship between the piano - the only instrument in the ensemble whose notes die away as soon as they are played - and the four other instruments. The piano's only hope of sustaining a single note is through constant, rapid repetitions (just as a succession of points, if they are close enough to one another, looks like a line), whereas all the other instruments can not only sustain, but get louder as the note proceeds. The title refers to the mythical bird which was said to rise from the ashes of its own funeral pyre every five hundred years - a bright image of rebirth which kept coming to mind as I worked on one of the final passages.

Phoenix was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta with the generous support of Henry Greenfield, and was written in memory of his wife Joanna (1940-2005).

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Rituals of Hunting and Blooding (1999-2000)

I. Terror of the Hunted
II. The Blooding

The initial idea for this piece was as music for dance, and although the conception changed subsequently, the first part of the work is still, in effect, a series of interlinked dances. A drama is enacted between the instruments in which the clarinet plays the part of the hunted, pursued through a maze, or a hall of mirrors, by the other instruments. In the first minute or so of the piece, the gap between hunter and hunted is continually diminished as the music is cramped into an ever-decreasing space. The claustrophobia of this situation is played out obsessively again and again throughout the movement like total internal reflection, or the horror of history repeating itself.

The second part of the piece is the blooding which occurs at the end of the chase. Here an entirely different ritual takes place; the instruments - flugelhorn, alto trombone, and bass clarinet in its upper register - act as a unit, playing a chorale which recurs throughout the structure. Whether the blooding is that of death or of birth remains open.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Saraband/The Way the World Ends (2006)

In each of these two short movements, the violins are pitted against the other stringed instruments, with each group playing a quite different kind of music. The Saraband (the early, boisterous form of the dance, rather than the stately one) for the lower strings is intruded upon, then overpowered by, solo violin cadenzas. The Way the World Ends opens with a slow hocket in natural harmonics, which alternates and is then combined with an undulating cantilena for muted violins, before returning to its starting point.

Saraband/The Way the World Ends is dedicated to Clare Robertson and John Kenyon.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Seven States of Rain (2002)

This piece invokes the poetry of rain in its various moods and forms: the teasing interplay of the first, sporadic drops; a rapid but heavy irregular sputtering; the overarching fullness of a shower; a very fine rain; the large, warm droplets of a tropical monsoon; its occasional violence; and the grey, eternal, drenching sheets of rain of an afternoon somewhere in England.

The seven interlinked sections contain two basic types of material: isolated points of sound in sections I and II, and continuous, chordal music in III and IV. In sections V, VI and VII, the two tendencies are combined. Although the roles of the instruments vary from time to time, the piece is conceived as a duet, or a dialogue between equals. To facilitate this, some preparation in the piano brings the sound of the violin and piano closer in timbre. The sections of the piece are as follows:

I: A plucked violin solo, followed by a passage of quick-fire interplay between the violin and piano - II: a very short, quiet section of isolated droplets - III: an expansive melody for the violin (now bowed) over crashing piano chords - IV: a quiet chorale in which the violin and piano continually swap parts - V: a multilayered section involving the return of ideas from section II, a chordal idea of increasing intensity in the middle range of the piano and a gradual build-up of bass resonance - VI: this tension is dispelled in a scintillating shower which gradually calms, giving way to - VII: a chorale for solo piano, associated with the endless, grey rain of an afternoon.

Seven States of Rain is dedicated to Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

La Terra Imparreggiabile

Threnody (1995)

I know the truth - give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look - it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

1915, Marina Tsvetayeva, trans. Elaine Feinstein

Two Pieces for two clarinets

These pieces are two renderings of an underlying melody. In the first, entitled Grizzly Bear Jam because of its ferocity, playfulness and rhythmic instability (which reminded the composer of a jam session), the two players explore the melody first in unison, then in blurred heterophony, and finally in two increasingly polarised and opposing parts. Song to End Mourning is a fantasia which opens with the melody divided between the instruments in two gradually unfolding cantilenas, and moves through an arabesque-like episode to a moment of great intensity.

© Richard Causton
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press