instrumental music
Programme notes: piano music | orchestral music | chamber music | wind band | organ music
Piano music
The Will of the Tones
In this piece I tried to recreate in modern terms the Romantic notion, which I’ve always found exciting, of music as some kind of living organism, animated by the inexorable drive or ‘will’ of the sounds which make it up. The idea resonates with more recent thinking, too, about the way that genes blindly but powerfully shape the development of the bodies of which they are part. The piece begins with the whole body of the piano being stirred into resonance by a series of bright, strong, single notes, which gradually multiply and evolve into something both fluid and weighty, with a life and an energy entirely its own. This is virtuoso music, and it’s conceived on a grand scale, even though in fact it’s only about 10 minutes long. The Will of the Tones was written for Matthew Schellhorn, who gave the première in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in November 2004.
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Strangers on a shore
This was the first piece I wrote after moving into a Scottish fishing village some years ago. I was fascinated by the rocky shoreline, with its strange shapes and folds, and when I’d written the piece the title of the old standard Stranger on the shore came to mind. There’s no musical connection, and even the scenes suggested are very different, at least as I imagine them, for my piece is not a Romantic reverie so much as a chance encounter between strangers who will never know each other. listen
My secret music remembers me
This piece was written in memory of Paul Jorets, a delightful, kindly man of wide-ranging knowledge and enthusiasm whom I got to know while in Antwerp for two days at a conference. A little later I heard he had been killed in a car crash. This is a tribute offered on the basis of an all-too-brief acquaintance.
A singing line wanders through the piece, and each note of the melody trails fleeting wisps of harmony, which vanish as soon as they can be grasped. At times this melody gives way to a solemn lament, which wells up out of the background.
Tout abus sera puni
This short piece is a meditation on oppression and control. The idea came from a phrase I happened to see in a trivial context (a sign on the Paris metro) and which I found very striking, so much that in the end I took it as the title for the piece. It’s only a routine bureaucratic regulation, but to a foreign eye the words taken literally seemed to encapsulate an expression of totalitarian power, impressive and terrifying for being so absolute, all-encompassing and monolothic.
The musical ideas follow a harsh course, with any more delicate or personal utterances quickly stamped out. But as the piece developed, I found myself increasingly unwilling to go along with this, and towards the end, despite everything, something quite different manages to blossom.
Music for strings and hammers
Commissioned by spnm and fuseleeds06 for performance as part of Rolf Hind’s Artistic Season 2005/06, this six-piano piece was originally a single movement written for Many Hands, a multi-piano concert which took place as part of the FUSE Festival in Leeds in May 2006. Excited by the grand spaces and many levels of the Leeds Corn Exchange for which the piece was written, I began what is now the second of two movements with the idea of a single grand piano building up a groundswell of slowly pulsating harmony on one side of the stage. Against this background, the uprights in the centre strike up a sharp-edged, snappy conversation, joined in due course by the honky-tonk. Slowly, a deeper background dialogue also begins to evolve between the two grand pianos on opposite sides. Throughout, the two grands proceed at their own majestic tempo, independent of the busy central group. When the celesta enters later on it introduces yet another layer, though gradually it begins to engage in the uprights’ conversation. The piece ends with the whole ensemble in a riot of sonority.
For the second performance of the piece, in Cambridge the following year, I composed a new movement whose quiet calm acts as a foil to the energy of the main piece, which it precedes. Scored for only(!) four pianos, it explores gentle, affectionate disagreements in dialogues across wide spaces, and at contrasting tempi.
Orchestral music
Search engines
For me, those two words side by side – search / engines – conjure up powerful images. There’s not only the vision of new machineries, but also a sense of aspiration, of deep enquiry. In the background are legendary forebears: Stevenson’s Rocket, Babbage’s Calculating Engines, the Hubble space probe, among many others. ‘Search engine’ is an artful choice of name for today’s explorers of the worldwide web, and resonates with the imagery found on many web browsers –glimpses of the infinite recesses of outer space; search beams scanning across the darkness, probing the myriad pinpoints of distant light.
Together, the two words suggest voyages of discovery, pioneering and even heroic, through territories at once spatial and mental, technological and imaginative. It’s these evocative images that form the starting-point for my piece.
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Flare
for chamber orchestra.
Flare: a bright, hot flame; an urgent signal, born of emergency; a rocket.
Chamber music
String Quartet
I had circled warily around writing a string quartet for some time – such a weight of precedent and achievement was intimidating – but when I finally jumped in it felt like coming home. There’s nothing to hide behind; but equally, nothing gets in the way: the four instruments make a perfect medium for exploring musical trains of thought and feeling, and can turn in a trice from the drama of four individuals in conversation, or in conflict, to a unanimity which breathes as one.
The first movement of my quartet was composed in 2003, as a tribute to a supporter of music in Cambridge. By happy serendipity, another homage offered on the same occasion by poet John Kinsella chimed beautifully with my piece, so much so that we agreed to link them together at the first performance:
The growth of ancient stone at twilight
is sensed by one whose sight
is honed by the pulse of the river,
math of bridges, microcosm of pasture.
The piece was premiered by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet, who were kind enough to ask for more.
I soon developed a shadowy image of three movements, all different, with the original piece as the first. But it wasn’t til earlier this year that I turned these vague imaginings into reality. The second movement is driven by a seething energy, occasionally interrupted by the strains of some fantastical bucolic knees-up. Kept well in the background in the first two movements, matters of pain and conflict come urgently to the fore in the third, which ultimately manages to work through the crisis and regain some of the music’s earlier serenity.
The complete quartet is being premiered by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet in the Maverick International Music Festival, Woodstock, New York, in July 2008.
Wheels within wheels
for cello and piano
Some ancient Greek astronomers imagined the heavenly bodies to be controlled by a large wheel rotating around the earth, on which a smaller wheel also turned, though at a different pace and in a different alignment, and on this another wheel, and so on. Fixed onto the rim of the smallest wheel, whose rotations are themselves turned in various planes by the larger wheels, a planet’s path serenely traces several distinct cycles simultaneously, and a return on one level may be a departure on another. This notion provided many of the ideas for this piece, in which various aspects of the cello’s largely placid melody are transformed and ultimately, each in their own time, return. Similarly, the piano follows its own cycles, and in each instrument different kinds of music continually emerge and evolve. The somewhat dark tone of the ending was a surprise to me as I wrote it.
Wheels within wheels was commissioned by David Christophersen.
Breath
for mixed ensemble
Originally I imagined that this piece would contain a large variety of contrasting ideas, moods and textures, but as the work progressed it turned into something rather more single-minded. At the same time the array of instruments I had planned to write for gradually shrank, until it crystallized into the slightly unusual ensemble you will hear tonight. An important stimulus for the composition was imagining the regular, repetitive, unflagging cycles of a living body, especially that of breathing: this image forms the basis of most of the musical ideas and of the way that they evolve. The piece was written for Michael Downes and ensemble CB3.
Man-cockerel meets the donkey-bird
for clarinet, violin, cello, percussion & piano
1. Man-cockerel meets the donkey-bird
2. Potion in the acorn-cup
3. Acrobat
4. Riding the wildman
5. Fox-doctor’s diagnosis
6. Snail attack
The idea for these tiny pieces came from an exhibition I saw over the winter at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Among the many treasures on display I was particularly struck by a book known as the ‘Macclesfield Psalter’, whose Latin Psalms are liberally adorned with minutely detailed illustrations of the most bizarre and eccentric scenes. The pictures show a reckless freedom of imagination, and are not in the least inhibited by the texts that they accompany. All but one of the titles above derive from these pictures, but as far as the music is concerned they should not be taken too literally: several were added after composition, and the pieces are not so much trying to reproduce specific images as to emulate their exuberant sense of fantasy.
Man-cockerel meets the donkey-bird was written for the Curious Chamber Players, Stockholm, thanks to a commission organised by Malin Bång and Jim O’Leary.
An innocent abroad
for clarinet, bassoon and piano
The main challenge in writing this was to find a sound-world for which these three instruments would be the ideal medium. The piece pits the simple against the unpredictable: at times the melody is knocked off its stride; at other times it falls into a new, more complex kind of equilibrium.
Ancient Stone at Twilight
for string quartet
Around springtime in 2003 the poet John Kinsella and I were asked to write something for the Fitzwilliams to play at a concert dedicated to a mutual friend. The plan was that having agreed on a general sense of style and mood we would write our pieces separately. I was about three-quarters of the way through my piece for string quartet when John’s poem arrived, and it seemed to go so well with what I’d been writing that I decided to make another version of the piece, weaving in brief snippets of the poem sung by a soprano. Tonight’s performance presents the music as I originally conceived it, for string quartet alone. The poem makes a good starting point for listening to the piece:
The growth of ancient stone at twilight
is sensed by one whose sight
is honed by the pulse of the river
math of bridges, microcosm of pasture.
Animals
for wind sextet
1. Pastoral
2. Sleep
3. Fight or fly
I have always enjoyed the strongly individual character of the different wind instruments, which seem to me almost like different animals, each with their distinctive quirks of behaviour and their own repertoire of habits and sounds. This is especially evident in the wind sextet, a delightfully heterogeneous ensemble so unlike the consistent and unified string quartet. This piece does not attempt to portray any actual real-life animals, but it does imagine in musical terms a number of different creatures, each with its own particular style and mannerisms. The three movements each explore a mode of behaviour: the first imagines an array of everyday activities, perhaps foraging, preening or playing, with only occasional squabbles. The titles of the second and third movements speak for themselves.
Animals was specially written for the Aquilo Wind Ensemble and for their performance in the 2006 Cambridge Festival.
Wind band
Swings and Roundabouts
My starting point for this piece was a rather zany assortment of short, cheeky ideas, which led me to think of toys and children’s games. The ideas are brightly coloured, and often have a mechanical feel, going round and round, or swinging to and fro, hence the title. As they build up through the opening section they might suggest an imaginary toyshop – perhaps a rather sinister one, as some of the toys get out of hand. Lyrical woodwind melodies interweave in the second section, and then dissolve into a gentle pattern-making which I thought of as daisy-chains. Outdoor percussion brings back an insistent beat, setting the scene for a counterpoint of jazzy lines, almost a fugue. From here on more and more ingredients are gradually stirred in, including a brass chorale, the lyrical woodwind tune, and the clockwork figure with which the piece began.
Swings and Roundabouts was written in the spring of 2008 for Brandon Green and the Zephyr Ensemble, who gave the first performance in May of that year.
Organ music
Dry-Stone Wall
Rising Dough
The music of Rising Dough is conceived as a mass of seething transformation, a ferment of active ingredients welling up from inside and continually recombining. This image of organic flux is explored within a framework of entries and episodes, as in the middle section of a fugue (that is, after all the voices have entered). Following the opening crescendo, three subjects (with three very different contours: falling, rising and undulating) are introduced simultaneously. At each subsequent ‘entry’ they reappear not only in a different arrangement one above another, but also in a different combination of relative speeds.
Rising Dough is a virtuoso showpiece, setting great challenges for player and instrument alike. It was written for Mark Hindley, who gave the first performance in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh in 1998. More recently I added a short companion-piece, first performed by David Goode. Dry-stone walls are found across the north of England: formed entirely of natural stones with no cement, they are beautiful, and building them is an ancient art. As its name suggests, Dry-Stone Wall is put together as a simple mosaic of different-shaped sounds. Complementing the organic with the inorganic, it serves as a prelude to Rising Dough’s ‘fugue’, and also as the calm before the storm.
