Commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Instrumentation: Chamber orchestra (2.2.2.2 - 2.2.0.0 - timp - str)
Duration: 20'
storm, rose, tiger
The title is adapted from a phrase in Borges' short story The Circular Ruins. Amongst many other things, this story is an allegory of the creative process, narrating a magician's attempts to dream a human being in minute detail, dedicating himself to the task with such fervent passion that the dream-creature becomes a living man. It is a strange and compelling story, with a great deal of resonance for me as a composer: the magician's struggles as he strives to bring his creation into focus, his commitment, his bouts of self-doubt, his decision to destroy what he has made and start again, the bittersweetness with which he sends his work out into the world; all these are familiar waypoints on the creative journey.
Rather than a programmatic mirroring of the story through music, there were two features in particular which seemed to relate to musical processes I was interested in exploring, and so provided the starting point for work on the piece. The first feature is the idea of bringing something in and out of focus, of 'seeing' musical material more or less clearly, perhaps like the sort of transformations we experience in dreams. The second is the fundamentally repetitive nature of the magician's task, its incremental nature, night after night. The musical analogue I planned was to explore three types of material in sequence (storm; rose; tiger - though these are to an extent arbitrary labels rather than descriptions), repeating the succession several times and transforming each component through expansion or compression, whilst playing with ideas of 'focus' within each section.
Such was the plan, but music often has a mind of its own. While this was my starting point and many of the above elements will be readily audible, the finished piece follows its own logic.
I have made extensive use of so-called 'microtones', particularly in the latter sections of the piece. These are notes that lie outside our familiar western 12-note scale and, in my music, are derived from quarter-tone approximations of the harmonic series. These unusual pitches serve two roles: to blur on the one hand and to evoke a new musical landscape on the other. The blurring occurs as bending and glissandos around standard pitch-units, an offshoot of my initial thoughts on types of focus. The 'new musical landscape' comes from using harmony where notes outside a piano keyboard are an integral feature. Here the term 'microtone' is something of a misnomer, as I never use an interval smaller than a standard semitone; rather I am interested in those larger intervals that fall in the gaps - a semitone and a half, for example, or the interval between a major third and minor third - that give the harmony a special and often (to my mind) glowing, radiant quality. In short, I am aiming for a special type of beauty that the microtonal resource enables.
storm, rose, tiger falls into a number of distinct sections. A turbulent opening gives way on its repeat to a long melody in the winds. The strings shadow this wind line and gradually overwhelm it with ornamentation. There follows a grotesque dance, after which there is a return to the opening material presented in greatly expanded form: intensely expressive string polyphonies eventually freeze into simple harmonies, while sotto voce winds create increasingly elaborate patterns. The final section is a passacaglia, circling around a repeating modal (microtonal) pattern, beginning with the violins alone and eventually incorporating the entire orchestra.
Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta
Instrumentation: Large ensemble (2,1,2,1 - 1,1,1,0 - 1perc. - harp - baritone - 1,1,2,2,1)
Duration: 22'
First Performance: 29 May 2011. London Sinfonietta, Leigh Melrose (baritone), Nicholas Collon (conductor), Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
Candlebird
The five songs of Candlebird are all settings of texts by Don Paterson. The selection and ordering are my own; four songs are taken from Rain (2009) and the final song is from Paterson's earlier collection God's Gift to Women (1997). The choice was, initially, merely personal preference; I was attracted to those poems that 'spoke' to me. That said, I knew from the outset that I wanted the primary vocal impulse to be lyric - in other words I set out to write songs, in a rather traditional sense perhaps (though I didn't necessarily remain faithful to this desire!) - and so the regular metric- and rhyme-schemes of the poems I chose struck me as being particularly suited to musical setting.
Only the central song is a Paterson 'original': the others are his versions of texts by Robert Desnos, Antonio Machado, and Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf. Paterson has described this 'versioning' as a remaking, a process in which he remains faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of the text; not an attempt to capture the original author's voice but an independent poem of his own, albeit one based on a earlier work. This is, I feel, very similar to the process of setting text to music, and the resulting nesting of versions appealed to me, from untexted music at one extreme, to my musical versions of Paterson's versions of pre-existing poetry at the other.
In the first song, 'The Landscape,' the voice triggers orchestral passages of gradually increasing harmonic density. These suddenly release on to an open sonority that remains frozen while a long trombone melody using a quarter-tone inflected scale glides on top. 'Sky Song' is a simple alternation of orchestral and vocal lines. In the third song, 'Motive', the texture is woven from an unpredictable sequence of scurrying fragments, their configuration continually changing while the harmonic underpinning remains constant. 'The Wind' is an exuberant polyphony of dances in which strings, wind and voice live in related but entirely separate worlds.
The final song, 'Candlebird,' is really a song-within-a-song. This is set as a melismatic central section in which the baritone moves freely through many quarter-tone derived scales. Bordering this, intensely expressive string polyphonics gradually shed their ornamentation until they fuse into a simple sequence of harmonies, their repeated cadence bringing the work to a close.
Commissioned by John Reid with generous support from the RVW Trust.
Instrumentation: Piano solo
Duration: 10'
First Performance: 19 September 2010. John Reid (with Nicholas Mulroy, tenor).
Lieder ohne Worte
I. Der Dichter, als Prolog
II. Mein?!
III. ...mein Herz ist zu voll
These three short piano pieces are reflections on Schubert's cycle. In their way, they are songs too: the first, a recitation; the second, port-a-beul (dancing nonsense rhymes); the third a long lyrical aria.
Der Dichter, als Prolog borrows its title from the first of Müller's Die schöne Müllerin poems (which Schubert chose not to set). Like Müller's text, it presents an external speaker introducing the world of the song cycle, the forest, the brook, and distant horn calls.
The second piece continues directly from the triumphant Mein!, the over-exuberant repetition of key phrases from this song perhaps suggesting that the miller's cry, "die geliebte Mullerin ist mein! ist mein!" is more a delusional demand than a celebratory acknowledgement.
In Pause, the tenor sings “Ich kann nicht mehr singen, mein Herz ist zu voll” (I can sing no more, my heart is too full). The third piano solo, which follows immediately, takes this line as its basis: the idea of a heart filling with song to the point of overflowing.
Lieder ohne Worte are dedicated with great affection to John Reid, and their commission was generously supported by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust.
Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Wigmore Hall
Instrumentation: piano, 2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos
Duration: 10'
First performance: 9 May 2010, Wigmore Hall, London: Aronowitz Ensemble
Commissioned by Oliver Coates.
Instrumentation: Cello and Piano
Duration: 5'
First Performance: 8 March 2009. Oliver Coates (cello) and Daniel Driver (piano) in the Wigmore Hall, London
.
Let it be nameless
It is beyond the touch
of utterance and life
II.
She runs and runs.
In all the long years
never has she carried such sunshine
III.
Saftly, saftly lichts
the morning star. The black
abyss will nae oot it
(From Through the Letterbox: Haikus by George Bruce, Renaissance Press. Reprinted with permission.)
Three short pieces: a musical response to the poetry of George Bruce, the last surviving poet of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, who would have been 100 this year.
I. Piano and cello fused together as a single instrument, singing from a great distance.
II. Inside a beam of light.
III. A never-ending lullaby.
