Music by Jeremy Thurlow

Song of Simeon

Jeremy Thurlow — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:37:52 +0000

Last winter around Christmas I wrote a Magnificat: it was strange, and in the end quite exciting to immerse myself in words I’ve known very well for years and years but haven’t ever set to music before (see a post about this). In England, the vast majority of occasions when a choir sings a Magnificat are Choral Evensongs, so it really made sense to follow up that piece with a Nunc Dimittis, setting the words of the old man Simeon when he sees the infant Jesus. At some point last year I mentioned to composer Robin Holloway that I’d written the Magnificat and was now thinking about a Nunc Dimittis, and he said – you’ll enjoy it: the Magnificat is an awkward text to set because it’s all chopped up into short separate sentences, but in the Nunc everything flows on in a single unfolding vision.

Looking at the two texts I can see exactly what he means, but strangely, I ended up finding the Nunc much harder to set. I got stuck just once in the Magnificat, and found a way through that within a few days. In the Nunc I made only a very uncertain start, and then got stuck for several months; later attempts in the summer to make a fresh start did little better. It could simply be that it wasn’t a top priority, but at any rate, the musical ideas wouldn’t come.

The next thing that happened was that Geoffrey Webber offered to give the first performance of the Magnificat with the fantastic choir of Gonville & Caius College – but it was agreed of course that I’d write a Nunc Dimittis to go with it. And then, once Christmas was done, there actually wasn’t a huge amount of time left in which to write it. The sticking point (‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation…’) didn’t open up straight away, even then, but when it did, what turned out to have been the crucial issue was rhythm. It was only when I found the right rhythm, and with it momentum, flow, that the melodies and harmonies came, and then they came very easily. All the earlier attempts went nowhere because they weren’t in the right underlying tempo, metre, groove.

So it’s done now, and I’m really looking forward to hearing the first performance, at Evensong on Sunday 5th February – it’s a superb choir and I’ve no doubt they will do it proud. It’ll be an exciting service, with a new set of Responses by Robin Holloway and an anthem by Cheryl Frances Hoad.

And now I’m beginning to have an idea for a completely different setting of the Magnificat…

(to hear some of my other choral music, go to >listen/voices)

Light matter revisited

Jeremy Thurlow — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:06:45 +0000

It’s two years since CCD turned the Senate House inside out and filled it with laser beams and dancing bodies, as part of the University’s 800th anniversary celebrations. For two nights this august space pulsed with the movement of newly-made dance, including one that I wrote with choreographer Isobel Cohen (other scores were written by Ewan Campbell and David Earl, and also, at several centuries’ distance, Christopher Tye). The events were captured on video, but sound quality was less than thrilling; I’m delighted that it’s now been possible to edit and clean up the recording of the piece Isobel and I wrote and I’m putting it up here where it can be seen and heard.

The dancers are all members of Cambridge Contemporary Dance: the piece takes as its theme Isaac Newton’s experiments with light and colour. See for yourself: Light/Dance

pipe carol

Jeremy Thurlow — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:22:59 +0000

Not the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, but a request from recorder-player Robert de Bree for a solo piece, for two recorders (played at the same time). It’s for a Christmas concert Robert is giving with a Dutch choir in a historic church – so he’s asked if I can base the piece on the Christmas plainchant Puer Natus, in some way. Robert, who plays various kinds of recorder and oboe, all instruments known for their ability to play just one note at a time, is a frustrated contrapuntalist, who was overjoyed to discover a kind of Sicilian folk music where two pipes are played by the same player, not just as a drone, but playing independent lines. He has learnt to play the folk music, but wants to broaden the repertoire.

In my piece the plainchant becomes a kind of pied-piper spell, or rather two kinds, as the soprano and tenor recorders make their way through the melody at very different speeds. From time to time they join in a duet…

escaping eye – the movie

Jeremy Thurlow — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 12:08:04 +0000

I posted earlier this summer about a new piece I wrote for recorder-player extraordinaire Robert de Bree. The piece is called Ladder of the Escaping Eye (a title from Miró: several of his paintings include a frail, spindly ladder, climbing steeply and improbably out of the picture-space. As in Landscape with rooster above). I had the idea that, as well as being done ‘straight’ as a solo recorder piece, it might also be interesting to make this into a film.

Robert came over and played the piece through in June, in Robinson College Chapel with its wonderful acoustic and glowing light, and I asked filmmaker Adriana Timco to film it for me. Later in the summer I was on holiday in a small village deep in France called Charras, which has a beautiful chateau, whose grounds are full of wonderfully crumbling stone staircases, and I took some video of them.

And later, back home, I had some fun putting them together into a short film. I’m no film maker – in fact I’d never even opened iMovie before – so it’s unashamedly cast in a homespun, rough-and-ready style, and it’s not going to win any prizes for technical finesse. I have no tripod, the video is hand-held and wobbly, the sound is low-resolution, and so on. But it was fun to do, and I do like the light on the stone at Charras, and the rhythmic repetition of steps and shadows. Anyway, see for yourself -

> Ladder of the Escaping Eye

contemporary Khattak

Jeremy Thurlow — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:40:03 +0000

Last year I saw Anuradha Chaturvedi dancing in Indian Classical ‘Khattak’ tradition – it was a vivid, grippingly intense kind of dance and I was particularly struck by the fantastically beautiful and elaborate movements of the hands and the eyes. Though Anuradha has learned and continues to practice traditional Khattak dance, she is also interested in creating new forms of dance and in new kinds of collobaration.

So… to cut a long story short, this seemed like a great opportunity to me, and the result will be performed twice later this month, once in a ‘Total Performance Extravaganza’, involving all kinds of fabulous contemporary music performers, composers and interactive ideas at Robinson College, Cambridge (Saturday 16 July, 9pm) and then again in a rerun of that event in Kings College London, Strand, on Tuesday 19th at 8pm. The new dance piece is called Quiverful: Anuradha has devised the dance and will perform it; I’ve written the music which is for violin and vibraphone (Guy Button and Serge Vuille, from the Ealdwick Ensemble). I hope to post up a video of the performance soon.

> [added later - 3/9/11] – And now I have videos of the first two performances. The first was in the chapel of Robinson College – Quiverful – and the second in the Great Hall of KCL, where not only are the setting, the acoustic and the vibraphone different, but also, Anuradha takes the dance in some fascinating new directions – Quiverful2.

Friday night in the warehouse

Jeremy Thurlow — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:30:11 +0000

Carmen-Elektra has pulled off another unforgettable evening, filling a huge disused warehouse with lights, staging, some seriously LARGE speakers, an orchestra, a bar, a dance troupe, singers (one of them dressed as a toy lion with sunglasses) and last but not least, a big, enthusiastic and wonderfully attentive audience.

This was a double bill of Terrible Lips, an exciting new opera by Kate Whitley, and my video opera A Sudden Cartography of Song. Performances of both pieces were committed and intense, drawing on Cambridge’s very best singers and players, conducted by Will Gardner and Harry Ogg. See more pictures of both pieces.

It was fantastic to have Alistair Appleton (who wrote the words and made the video) come to speak his own lines. And Alistair and I were delighted with the energy, professionalism and sheer beauty of the singing, and of the production, both imaginative and sensitive, by Thom Andrewes. All in all it was an evening to remember. Carmen Elektra believe that if you rescue new music from ‘old-music’ venues and etiquette, and let it do its own thing, people will want to hear it. They’re certainly making a good case with productions like this. There is talk of a Rite of Spring in a Peckham car park next. Not to be missed.

lips and maps

Jeremy Thurlow — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:02:18 +0000

I’m delighted that CARMEN-ELEKTRA are going to put on a production of the video-opera that I wrote with Alistair Appleton a couple of years ago for the Spitalfields Festival. Carmen Elektra have a fantastic track record of putting on new opera in new spaces for new audiences. This time they’ve found a huge warehouse off the Newmarket Rd in Cambridge, soon to be demolished, with a great acoustic and – once the lights and the sound system are in – a great atmosphere too. It’s fantastic that Alistair will be doing the narration (which he wrote – he also made the video). The piece is being done in a double-bill with Kate Whitley’s new opera Terrible Lips, a sci-fi thriller which should be spectacular.

There’s more about this in a recent post on the biting point

A SUDDEN CARTOGRAPHY OF SONG and

TERRIBLE LIPS

Friday 17 June, 9pm.

ladder of the escaping eye

Jeremy Thurlow — Sat, 21 May 2011 13:21:56 +0000

I’ve been writing a piece for recorder-player extraordinaire Robert de Bree, after hearing him at Kettle’s Yard recently. Somehow the ideas came out ladder-shaped, and started getting tangled up with some paintings by Joan Miró, whose currently the subject of an exciting exhibition at Tate Modern. What’s come out is a solo recorder piece of about 6 minutes, which can be performed ‘free-standing’, say, in a recital (we’re planning one for Amsterdam in 2012).

But I’m also tempted to explore the connections with Miró’s paintings, and with images of ladders and steps more generally, by developing the piece into something more multi-media. One plan is to make a film which explores a kind of snakes-and-ladders labyrinth against the sound (and at times, the sight) of Robert playing the piece. This could be viewed online, or screened as part of one of Robert’s live performances. Another idea is to set up some gallery performances which engage with paintings and perform amongst them. The Miró paintings would be fantastic – Tate Modern, are you listening?…

sounds of spring

Jeremy Thurlow — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:48:33 +0000

Last month I enjoyed the chance to hear a short piece for four horns and choir which I wrote a few years ago for the opening of an outdoor theatre. This is our Eden, a song of gardens, flowers and trees. It was beautifully performed by horns and singers alike – and it’ll be recorded on a CD this summer, along with the carol As Joseph was a-walking.

Meanwhile, I’ve been writing a new piece for violin and piano, for Guy Button. Spring seemed to be what was in my mind, and a rather Italian, Vivaldi-ish spring too, hence the name Primavera. It’ll get its first two performances next month in London (GSMD, July 5) and Winchester (July 6).

Parsifal, post-acopalypse

Jeremy Thurlow — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 23:35:44 +0000

On Tuesday I saw Wagner’s Parsifal performed by ENO at the Coliseum. Before going I’d glanced at a couple of reviews and was told that the singing and playing was superb, and the staging bleak, grim, but not trivial or factitious. And I’d have to agree with all of that. The isolation as well as the bonds that tied together the beseiged little community made perfect sense in this setting; the frailty of belief and the search for hope also.

One of the comments I did not agree with, though. Or not exactly. ’The final act shows a single railway line leading into a dark tunnel. For Lehnhoff, Wagner’s mystical racism has only one destination: Auschwitz.’

The setting in all three acts (that is, for all of it except the brief scene in Klingsor’s magic castle, a place of darkest fantasies) is desolate, war-torn, post-apocalyptic. The knights themselves resemble Holocaust survivors, as Igor Toronyi-Lalic has suggested in The Arts Desk. And for me, the final scene, in which Kundry (who does not die, here) leads Parsifal and everyone else out along the broken railway tracks, seemed strongly to suggest that they were all going out, away from Auschwitz or whichever broken place it was, to seek new life. In other words, while it’s possible to read the ideology of Parsifal in Nazi terms, Lehnhoff didn’t try to avoid these sinister associations: he confronted them head on, and found a way forward which left at least a little room for the positive spirit of Wagner’s score, without trivialising its dark side.