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	Programme Notes S - Z


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Programme Notes S - Z

Sea/Air
Sensing
Souvenirs de Voyage
Sone, Water, Stars
String Quartet No.1
String Quartet No.2
String Quartet No.3
The Swing of the Sea
Symphony
Terrain
Trio
Vista
Zlata's Diary

Sea/Air

I wrote this short (but very demanding!) piece for David Campbell in 1985. As the title suggests the music contrasts two elements, fast-moving patterns, and slow, still material. Each is developed and the two are interlocked, often in very rapid alteration; the fast music becomes skittish and violent, the slow music spacious and lyrical just as sea and air can be turbulent or calm.

Sensing

Sensing was written in October 2003 for Helen Reid, partly as a 'prelude' to Scriabin's 9th Sonata, partly in response to her request for a short piece to use in a project on synaesthesia, but not least as a 'thank you' for her many fine performances of an earlier work of mine, The Memory Room. In tribute to Scriabin, the music explores a variety of keyboard 'touch' and 'colour/taste' - in terms of harmony and texture, moving from a hesitant, fragmentary opening towards music more sustained and expressive.

Souvenirs du Voyage

1. L'Invitation au Voyage I
2. La Vie Anterieure
3. L'Invitation au Voyage II
4. Elevation
5. L'Invitation au Voyage IIIa
6. Spleen
7. L'Invitation au Voyage IIIb
8. Recueillement

The five poems by Baudelaire chosen for this work incorporate many images central to the poet's thinking, notably real or imaginary journeys (physical or spiritual), the sea, and premonitions of death. I have placed the poems in the above sequence so as to form two interlocking cycles (nos.1, 3, 5, 7; and 2, 4, 6, 8), reflecting an overall 'journey' from optimistic anticipation (1 & 2) through contrasting experiences (4 & 6) to peaceful acceptance of death (8). The optimism of no. 1 is slowly transformed through the succeeding verses (3 & 5) into the ironic comment of the no.7. The work has a large-scale tonal structure which finally resolves on to a G flat in the final song. Each song has one (or sometimes two) clearly defined tonal centres: though the detailed musical argument is consistently more chromatic that that statement implies.

Souvenirs du Voyage was written for and is dedicated to Jane Ginsborg and George Nicholson and completed in January 1980.

Stone, Water, Stars

Stone, Water, Stars completes a trilogy of pieces inspired, in different ways, by the city of Venice. Music from the Chamber Concerto (1984) and Venexiana (1985) is quoted here and the three works share a certain amount of basic material.

In this piece Venice becomes an allegory, a metaphor for music itself; as a city built on water it is a uniquely poetic and suggestive exemplar of improbable human achievement, as well as, now, a place of memories and fantasies, a map of the labyrinths of the imagination.

The title is taken from the writings of the arts historian Adrian Stokes. It suggested three kinds of musical organisation - stone as constructed 'symphonic' order, water as intuitively arranged fantasy, and stars as pre-ordained musical structures - and more speculatively, three stages of human aspirations, from water to stone to stars. In one respect the piece is about the interdependence of those compositional approaches, just as Stokes finds the magic and meaning of Venice in the conjunction of stone and water.

This interdependence of elements applies also to the form of the piece. The musical architecture is derived from two sets of proportions superimposed. This makes a double form, analogous to Palladio's 'soave armonia' of ratios designed to produce spatial consonance in, for example, the two interpenetrating temple fronts which form the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore. I have used the proportions, borrowed from renaissance architecture and Leonardo's studies of the human form, to govern some other aspects of the music from large shapes to the smallest rhythmic details.

The double form of the piece is heard as six main sections and, within that structure and cutting across it, marking proportions and striking the hours, a sequence of bell chimes. So time is organized architecturally as a series of proportions, and, fancifully as a compression of two days and nights into the twenty minutes of the piece.

The six main sections are a slow, dark introduction (1) leading to an allegro (2) with brass and percussion to the fore, which builds to the first climax. This immediately collapses to reveal a slow barcarolle- like episode (3) followed by a volatile scherzo (4) with multiple bells at its central climax. This gives way to a varied and compressed re- working of the allegro (5) followed by a final slow section (6) which reaches the third and main climax of the piece after which there is a gradual dissolution to a quiet ending.

The music is at times labyrinthine, a rapid succession of cross-cut or superimposed moments, and at others more directional; at times the sounds of Venice are there, at others we are in an abstract musical city. Frequent glimpses are caught, at different distances, of the two chords which, in alternation, will form the basis of the main climax of the piece. They are finally discovered just as one might, in Venice, discover the Piazza after wandering in the stone maze. And memories intrude, in the nocturnal barcarolle and over the final climax with its firework display of references, memories of music composed in Venice, from Monteverdi to the present day.

Stone, Water, Stars was commissioned by the B.B.C. and composed January-February and July-October 1987.

String Quartet No.1

I. Lento – Allegro
II. Lento sostenuto - Allegro molto - Moderato - Allegro molto

The Quartet, my first since a student effort, was composed in early 1987 for the Lindsay Quartet to a commission from the University of Exeter. The work is in two movements, playing for about 25 minutes, and is, in a sense, best understood as two journeys each starting from the same point and reaching identical endings but by quite different routes.

Part I is a sonata-allegro complete with slow introduction. True to this classical scheme, the introduction sows the seeds of much to come. The allegro is by turns airy and graceful, tense and aggressive; these characteristics roughly define a first and second subject respectively. However the movement becomes less and less classical as it progresses. So the recapitulation does not resolve the tensions and conflicts between the subjects but builds in energy to the point where a coda throws the two together in superimposed tempi. Viola and cello abruptly cut short the deadlock in an arbitrary and deliberately unresolved ending.

Part II begins with the same music as Part I, as if heard from a distance and drained of its former energy. Here it is allowed to expand into long paragraphs of slow music which gradually build in intensity, tumbling into a short but furious allegro molto with distortions of the more aggressive ideas from Part I. Whereas at the climax of Part I the music split into two duos, here it soon fragments completely into four different musics each in their own tempo. Order is restored as the music calms down again, and a long cello line winding down to its lowest register leads to a gentle and lyrical passage, with two tiny episodes of exotic night-music. A short burst of fast music provides the conclusion that was not achieved at the end of Part I. Now the identical concluding gesture seems properly final.

String Quartet No.2

My Quartet No.2 was written in Spring 1991 for the Lindsay Quartet, in response to a commission from David N James. The first performance was given at a chamber music weekend at the Castle Hotel, Taunton by the Lindsay Quartet, on 15 February 1992.

I wanted to write a piece of real chamber music, intimate and conversational in tone, drawing the listener in to its worlds; the result is a rather inward-looking, reflective work, not without a capricious aspect, but only occasionally raising its voice.

There are four movements, playing in all for about twenty minutes. The first is close to a sonata form in its alternations between two musics, a melancholy Andante and a more confident Allegretto. A short, ghostly scherzo (Allegro molto, leggiero e preciso), built on a number of tiny ideas heard at the start, is followed by a sustained, song-like Adagio, disturbed, only briefly, by agitated figuration towards the end. The finale starts as another scherzo (Allegro), all pizzicato, and cross-fades into a moto perpetuo (Presto), all arco.

String Quartet No.3

Preciso, secco, meccanico — Lento, sostenuto, cantabile — Animato, energico, giocoso

My Quartet No.3, which plays without a break for just under ten minutes, is about song and dance. A dry, mechanical dance, a dance of bones, full of most playing techniques apart from normal bowed sounds, yields to a slow and sustained song at the heart of the piece. This then leads back to a return of the dance, this time transformed into a dance of flesh and blood with everything that was enclosed and restrained now open and generous.

The work, commissioned by the London String Quartet Foundation with funds from the John F. Cohen Foundation, was written in autumn 1999 as the test piece for quartets taking part in the 2000 London International String Quartet Competition. I tried not to let this aspect of the task affect the outcome too much and simply wrote the quartet I wanted, which would, if it were well conceived and in turn well understood, be the right sort of opportunity for an ensemble to show its musical strengths and not merely a technical steeplechase.

The Swing of the Sea

I made this straightforward setting of Lawrence Durrell's Water Music for Mary Weigold's Songbook in December 1992, trying to catch something of Durrell's unique way with things Mediterranean.

Symphony

I: Molto Moderato/Energico
II: Allegro molto -
III: Molto Adagio e sostenuto
IV: Allegro moderato: Presto

Without necessarily setting out to write a symphony it soon became clear to me that this was what I was doing. A large-scale, essentially abstract discourse in a number of movements, working with the friendly ghosts of the symphonic tradition, the time-honoured thematic and motivic ingredients, a number of small, infinitely malleable ideas, it would be misleading not to call the work a symphony, however late in the day it might be for such ventures. The slow movement was written first (in autumn 1994) then other work intervened before I picked up the symphony again in the summer of 1995. It was completed in June 1996.

After a brief but turbulent introduction, the first movement begins with a curtain of quietly sustained string music as a backdrop to lyrical horns; this is immediately contrasted with a vigorous little flourish for clarinets. The rest of the movement is made from these two different ideas (first and second subject, if you like), but the balance between them changes completely. The strings’ music starting in 34-part chords becomes more and more linear as the number of parts reduces - by the end of the movement to two, and each appearance of this music is shorter. The clarinets’ idea grows from one part (with a tiny but crucial rhythmic figure - long, short, short - on the wood blocks) to full wind, brass, and percussion, and each time this music increases in length, so that, in effect, the strings with their lyrical counterpoint are snuffed out by the ever more assertive, and increasingly harmonic, wind band. Cutting across this structure at four points is a refrain-like ‘chime’ for keyboards, bells, harp, and flutes, apparently quite unrelated to all the other music. It acquires an ever darker undertow at each hearing. The structure of this movement is deliberately formalized in strict architectural proportions, the impression reinforced by the partitioning of the orchestra into clearly distinct groups. The movement is preludial, in the sense that, throughout the symphony, I have tried to throw the structural and expressive weight of the piece forward.

The full tutti is then unleashed in a violent scherzo, unremitting in its energy and drive. This is a full-scale development of the wind/brass music from the first movement, rhythmically highly organized, an “infernal machine”, at times ‘jazz-rock’, at times ‘symphonic’. There are only two points of respite, a short ‘trio’ about a third of the way through, pre-echoing the next movement, and a momentary recall of the horns’ music from the first. But towards the end as the low strings begin a slow processional the scherzo gradually fades out as the strings again begin to ‘sing’ and the movement leads without a break into the adagio.

Whereas the scherzo developed the rhythmic/harmonic elements from the first movement, now the melodic lines of the strings, unable to blossom there, are extended and developed at length. The sarabande-like sections of string-dominated music alternate with episodes for horns and alto flute, a central climactic passage in slightly faster tempo, and a remote, mysterious passage involving piccolo and double basses. Here there is a distant recall of the chime from the first movement, pre-figuring its important role in the finale. A sudden change of perspective brings this to the foreground leading to a fusion of the strings’ sarabande with the horns/alto flute material, and a richly scored climax winding down to a serene close.

These three movements have moved through a tonal sub-structure from C to F in the first movement, Bb to Eb by the end of the third. This cycle of descending fifths is now reversed, the finale returning to C and working through an ascending cycle via G and D to end on A, the furthest remove from Eb. Few of these tonalities function, or are immediately audible, in a traditional sense, because the surface of the music is generally highly chromatic; but my harmonic language now depends on these foundations, and the possibilities of interplay and shift between tonal and non-tonal elements gives a maximum of expressive potential. It the cross-fade from scherzo to slow movement is borrowed from Elgar’s Symphony No.1, the pick-up at the start of the finale of the trumpet’s final C (over Eb major) is a steal from the same juncture in Mahler’s Fifth. And the mention of those two composers declares debts, due also to others, if less obviously.

The finale attempts to pull together many of the hitherto different and carefully separated ideas, particularly from the first movement, re-working them and eventually combining them. Most of the music is very fast, a kind of “colour-fugue” on one line (derived from the horn ‘subject’ in the first movement) which builds, via a number of very contrasted episodes of ‘chamber music’, to a climax dominated by the first movement’s ‘chime’. After a quiet passage re-working the opening string harmonies from the beginning of the work there is a climactic coda, the music ending with the same noise from which it emerged.

The Symphony was commissioned, in a remarkable and enlightened gesture of private patronage, by the David James Music Trust. I am greatly indebted to Mr James’ generosity which has enabled me to write this large-scale piece. The work is dedicated to my mother, and to the memory of my father who died shortly before I began writing it in 1994.

Terrain

I have lived in the Marches for nearly ten years, with views to several counties. My workroom has two windows, one looking west to Wales, and the massive escarpment of the Black Mountains, the other east, over England, the Golden Valley and the rich country that rolls to the Malvern Hills on the horizon.

Terrain tries to encompass this great landscape in its many different moods. No two days are the same, but beyond those continual variations and contrasts, is the slow, inexorable passage of the seasons. The music of this landscape is essentially an abstract symphonic structure. Nonetheless the work is full of programmatic detail depicting, for example, effects of light and weather. The work is in two main parts linked by an interlude; the first is an extended slow introduction and ‘sonata-allegro’, the second a ‘scherzo/finale’ incorporating a slow episode. Ideas from the first part are re-worked and transformed in the second.

The first part of the piece was suggested by the westerly view to the Black Mountains in winter, both in icy calm and violent storm. The sound-colours are mostly very dark, the music harmonic and ‘vertical’, often heavily orchestrated. In an interlude, evoking the bubbling curlews of spring and its silvery-grey light, the eye and ear turn, so to speak, through 180 degrees to the Golden Valley in summer and, for a landscape less of mass than of detail, the music is now contrapuntal and ‘horizontal’, lightly scored for many different ensembles from within the orchestra. The sound-colours are mainly bright.

The turning through time (seasons) and space (landscape) is mirrored in the harmonic basis of the piece. The key centres move in a circle of descending fifths from Eb minor to B minor in the first part, and after combining E minor and Bb major in the interlude, ascending (also in fifths) from F to A major in the second part. The slow sweep round the horizon comes full circle as the tiny introduction to the piece is finally reached again.

Terrain was commissioned by the BBC and composed during the spring and summer of 1992.

Trio
for clarinet, violoncello, and piano

I wrote this short piece in late summer 1988. There are three movements, two slow ones framing a central scherzo. Each movement is preceded by the same introduction, "rotated", so as to end with a foretaste of the music to come. The relationship between the clarinet and cello ranges from cool remoteness, through nervous co-existence to loving friendship though not always in that order.

This work was commissioned by the Muhlfeld Trio with funds made available from GLA.

Vista

Vista is the first in a planned sequence of pieces, this solo to be followed by varied and increasing combinations of instruments all to include piano. The sequence will form a musical reflection or interpretation of aspects of Italian renaissance and baroque gardens. These gardens sometimes told a story, typically derived from mythology as filtered through Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Change, growth, and a purposely limited content all suggested to me a musical equivalent in variation form, which will be what the pieces mainly explore.

The most important elements of 16th/17th century Italian gardens were green planting (apart from cypresses, mainly in box and yew and including mazes, avenues and 'green theatres'), sculpture (generally allegorical or symbolic, often light-hearted or grotesque), and water (active and capricious in fountains, cascades and 'giocchi d'acqua' still and reflective in pools and basins, or both in 'water theatres').

Vista likewise introduces three musical elements which are varied and developed as the piece evolves. Ideas are heard, as it were, from different perspectives and distances, and like a garden vista, reveal possibilities to be explored in the later pieces in the sequence.

Since writing The Memory Room for William Howard in 1990/1 I have long wanted to write him something new. As a dedicated gardener and garden lover himself, I hope this piece will prove a suitable successor.

Zlata's Diary

1: September - November 1991
The school year starts again, but politics and war loom.
2: March - April 1992
Barricades go up in Sarajevo, and a girl is killed on the bridge near the flat where Zlata lives with her parents.
3: April 1992
Zlata's friends leave Sarajevo.
4: May 1992
The family take shelter from the mortar attacks in the cellar.
5: June - July 1992
From her broken windows Zlata sees the deserted park and hears the shells. "War is now my life".
6: July 1992 With no food in Sarajevo the family pick cherries from their tree.
7: July 1992
Zlata's mother makes the dangerous journey to work, running across the bridge. "I didn't know the river was so wide...".
8: September 1992
A friend's birthday party is interrupted by shell fire. "That's how we celebrate birthday's here".
9: October 1992
Zlata faces the winter without water, gas or electricity. In a room which is dangerous to be in because of the shelling, her piano keeps her company.
10: January 1993
Zlata watches the snow but it's not safe to go out. "Keep going Zlata..."
11: May 1993
A mouse causes panic in the household.
12: July 1993
After the news of her diary spreads Zlata is filmed for American TV. "Our lives are so different. Yours is bright light. Ours is darkness."
13: September 1993
Sarajevo is a dead city.
14: December 1993
Zlata and her family have escaped. "Now we're bathing in the lights of Paris...when a glimmer of this light shows in the darkness of Sarajevo, then it will be my light as well..."

Zlata's Diary is an account by a thirteen-year-old Bosnian girl, Zlata Filipovic, of the time (1991-93) before and during the siege of Sarajevo. It describes, simply and movingly, the impact of war on a child. It seemed to me very appropriate to try and match this quality in a musical setting for children's chorus, and I have kept to the spirit and shape of the diary. The settings are like brief diary entries themselves with the music (for SA chorus, with chamber orchestra or piano duet) as direct and straightforward as I could make it. The text is, for obvious reasons, a very much abbreviated version of the book, so that the piece moves rapidly through the two years of the diary in less than fifteen minutes, but I have tried to include most of the main episodes in the story.

The piece was commissioned by Mary Denniss, director of Highcliffe Junior Choir, with funds made available by Southern Arts Board and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts. It was written in early 1995, during some of the worst of the 'troubles' in the former Yugoslavia, but it might stand as well for any time in which people, and especially children, find themselves caught up in events beyond their control, or even understanding.

programme notes A - F | programme notes G - K | programme notes L - R | S - Z

Programme Notes S - Z

Trio for clarinet, violoncello, and piano

Trio
for clarinet, violoncello, and piano