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Programme Notes

Canticles of Light

I have known the Latin texts for this piece since my childhood. As a boy I sang them in versions by two great English Renaissance composers - Thomas Tallis and Robert Whyte. Their music exudes comfort, and the texts, sung at the service of Compline in the evening and Matins in the morning, speak almost of a personal and private relationship with God.

Perhaps these timeless texts speak to us even more poignantly now. Within my piece, the texts in the first two sections 'Te lucis ante terminum' and 'Christe, qui splendor et dies' actually speak of darkness - they ask for God's light to protect us through the night and to allay our fears. The last 'O nata lux' speaks with a more positive and hopeful voice, that God's light will give us hope with the new light of the day.

Fragments from his dish

Fragments from his dish was commissioned by Reading Phoenix Choir in 1995. It is a group of five part songs all to do with some aspect of food and drink. Grace – The Clean Platter begins religiously with words of Robert Herrick but bursts into a wildly secular setting of Ogden Nash. Whines from the wood is a riotous poem about the pleasures of drink by G.K. Chesterton.

Organ Dances

When I was approached to write this work, I was asked for a piece that would be accessible, practical, and that could create a largely secular sound context for the organ. I was made aware of the potential practical difficulties of mixing the organ with instruments, as in most situations the organ and the soloist would be quite a long way physically from the orchestra and conductor, and the size, sound colour, and quality of the organ could vary enormously. This gave me the idea of writing dance-like music - this implied to me a more secular context, and it enabled me to imagine direct non-developmental music, with a rhythmic impetus to help ensemble and clarity.

Organ Dances is scored for organ solo, two percussion players, and strings. The work is continuous, and even though it has five different “dances”, it falls into an overall shape of roughly three equal sections (fast-slow-fast). The dances are not all specific, but have dance characteristics: the first is a jazzy rondo; the second a clumsy pedal solo over pizzicato strings, hi-hat, and woodblocks, that I imagined sounding and looking like “an elephant in a tutu”!; the third is part czardas, part square dance, part Irish jig; the fourth is a pavane; and the fifth is a part organ solo, part tutti dance, driven along by a 3/8 + 4/4 rhythm.

I am very grateful for the help and encouragement that I have had along the way with this piece, and in this regard would like to thank Peter Hurford, Paul Keene, Thomas Trotter, Libby Larsen, and my son Mike.

The Making of the Drum

i. The Skin
ii. The barrel of the drum
iii. The two Curved Sticks of the Drummer
iv. Gourds and Rattles
v. The Gong-Gong

In 1984, I was very fortunate to visit Uganda, where a drum-maker made for me a beautiful drum with a snakeskin head. I’ll never forget sitting in the plane to come home, and seeing by chance the baggage handlers loading my drum with incredible respect and care. The drum to them was a living spirit.

These poems are a celebration of how that spirit is brought alive. The ritual of the construction of the drum is enacted, as the component parts are drawn from the surrounding nature, a nature that gives of itself in an almost sacrificial way. We hear how the goat is killed for its skin, the tree, which bleeds cedar dark when cut, is given for the body of the drum, and how the sticks and rattles are taken, all to begin a new life as companions to the gods, music and the dance.

This piece was commissioned by the Oxford Pro Musica Singers and is was given its first performance on the occasion of their twentieth anniversary.