More on Notes from Underground

Who better to write - or talk - about this piece than the man of letters who produced the words, Sean O'Brien. Apropos of the - then - impending repeat performance at the Newcastle Poetry Festival 2017, O'Brien gave an interview on the subject. As to me, I probably said as much as I need to say about this piece in last year's blog entry.

Today's is only an update on this piece's afterlife so far. The Newcastle performance - Gateshead, in fact, in Hall Two at Sage - was one to be proud of. Voices of Hope, still fresh from their BBC Choir of the Year triumph, gave a committed, thoughtful, polished performance. Marcus Farnsworth showed impressive knowledge and understanding of the piece with his deep, characterful and vocally splendid rendition. Hugh Brunt held everything together as conductors should: firmly, confidently, without fuss. The players of Royal Northern Sinfonia did what one expects them to do, past masters of their instruments that they are.

Before that, at the Sigismund Toduța Festival 2016, Notes from Underground received a performance that shed a different light on the piece at the Philharmonic Hall in Cluj-Napoca. The young conductor Vlad Agachi had the difficult task of making the piece happen with a student orchestra. It is, of course, no ordinary student orchestra, but that of the Gheorghe Dima Academy. They generously appointed an entire orchestral string section rather than the expected one-player-to-a-part. The result showed me a whole new range of possibilities I had not foreseen, and made me decide to reorchestrate the piece for full orchestra.  Cristian Hodrea was an imposing vocal presence and Cappella Transylvanica gave a breath-takingly well prepared performance. I felt privileged to see their talents poured so generously into this music.

Río Bravo, update

Since the première at Lincoln Center, Río Bravo has undergone a significant revision. The aim, as ever, is to make the piece as effective as possible for the widest possible range of performers. This claim may seem questionable given the pervading technical difficulty in most of my work. But the truth is I do try. 

I am not at liberty to share publicly New Juilliard Ensemble's recording. Until such time as a recording can be made available to a general audience, here is a computer demo of the revised version.  We now the limitations of computer demos, but dissemination is important, so needs must.

Río Bravo

Río Bravo is a piece for large chamber ensemble, of eleven minutes’ duration. It was commissioned by Joel Sachs for his New Juilliard Ensemble. 

The size and makeup of the ensemble are similar to those in Notes from Underground, the work I wrote in 2015 to poems by Sean O’Brien. For this reason, among others, I had intended the new piece to be a natural continuation to the previous one. 

As well as feeling like the natural thing to do, it is always reassuring to be able to pick up from where one left off.  A phrase by Octavio Paz comes to mind: a poet has no biography - his work is his biography. It would be untruthful to say that my work is intentionally autobiographical, but there are many ways in which surroundings, atmospheres, social context and historical moment determine one’s musical thinking. In this broader context, one’s state of mind, which is the result of past, recent and contemporaneous experiences, are, inescapably, a strong factor too. 

Then there is the element of continuity. I would not class this as inescapable, but it does also seem a natural thing to do to take material from the last piece as the springboard for the new one. Often towards the end of a compositional process, with the deadline looming large, something happens, and idea comes up that serves to break a deadlock, to turn a corner. This idea performs its useful role, the purpose for which it was conjured up, but then, instead of staying there, it refuses to go away. It shows to have an afterlife, an energy which the immediate use that was made of it has not exhausted. That is the typical candidate to be a springboard for the next piece. 

For the Juilliard commission, I had decided quite clearly what I wanted to do: my intention was to revisit the Kobold. For those who don’t know - and I certainly didn’t before my collaboration with Sean O’Brien - the Kobold is a presence, a being, a sprite. This is not the place to explain at length, but suffice it to say that the Kobold is often found in underground locations. O’Brien invoked it as a creature of the mines, and this, of course, has strong echoes of el Tío, the presence that rules the mines up in the Andes. 

The Kobold gets only a passing mention in O’Brien’s Notes from Underground. Accordingly, the musical treatment it receives there is perforce ephemeral. In 2015 this left me with a thirst for more; the Kobold had much to offer yet, and I had only skimmed its surface. The Juilliard commission was to be the opportunity to grapple with it as it deserves: a whole new piece devoted to it. But it was not to be.

Life intervened. December 2015 saw some of the worst floods ever seen in England, and the very worst occurred in the north. The river Tyne flowed through Newcastle with a strength not seen in 240 years. Whole areas in towns such as Corbridge were invaded by the overflowing North Tyne. My particular location up in Northumberland – bordered by the river Rede, and within a few hundred yards of its confluence with the North Tyne – was certainly not spared. On 5 December the Rede grew to many times its usual, flooding fields and dwellings. Compounded by runoff water coming from the neighbouring hills, this made for a rather worrying situation. Mercifully the old stone house where I live was spared the worst (“They knew how to build houses in them days” goes the local wisdom. And where to build them, one might add; near two rivers we may be, but we have seen a lot of weather in the last decade, but somehow have come out unscathed). But the sense of threat persisted. December wore on, the rain refused to abate and the same combination of meteorological factors happened, albeit with lesser intensity, another four times. A sense of relative safety only returned around mid-January. 

The experience of seeing the Rede, a melodious companion of many years, turning into a roaring, destructive monster, had a strong effect. So did seeing towns close to me, like Hexham and Corbridge, flooded, and hearing the many tales of distress from Cumbria in the west. What was going on was impossible to evade. Not for the first time, I found myself in situation where compositional plans seemed an indulgence that reality could not afford. Of course music cannot change things, let alone climate - or climate change, for that matter. But, in times disaster such as this, as some people where writing to the press, others were praying and others were talking things over in the pub, I could not abstract myself from the pressing reality to write music about Kobolds. I had to write about storms, about rain, and, above everything else, about river. I persisted for a while, insisting on my fruitless sketches about the Kobold. Then I yielded to the surrounding reality, and began to plan a piece about the river. The … was fairly obvious. There was to be a gentle, melodious music to start with, and then the same material was to be transfigured to be stated as menacing, violent, destructive. This did not take much thought at all, and the general state of emergency urged me to get down to work - as did the agreed completion deadline for New Juilliard Ensemble. I even had a title in mind: Río Manso, Río Bravo. (Note to bilingual readers: I have not forgotten Spanish titles do not carry capitals in every word, but this title was to be a playful allusion to possible river names.)

Since I was surrounded by stormy weather and by daily news about floods and destruction, it was the second section in the proposed scheme that felt most relevant, so I started composing that. What came out was, unsurprisingly, music that was aggressive, urgent, obsessive even. I intended to develop that to a length equivalent to one-half of the piece’s duration. But it grew, like the river. It grew beyond its allocated duration, and it took over the piece. This was not the time for gentle rivers. This was the time to be aggressive, urgent and obsessive. 

The resulting piece, Río Bravo, was premièred on 21 April by New Juilliard Ensemble conducted by Joel Sachs. It is always thrilling to go to New York, specially if it is to hear a new piece at Lincoln Center. The players from Juilliard are always outstanding, and this time was no exception. I had been apprehensive about the demands of the percussion part, particularly the vibraphone sections. I need not have worried, since the appointed percussionist turned out to be none other than Sae Hashimoto, a virtuoso of uncommon character and technique. 

Joel Sachs put together a fascinating programme of recent music. Special revelations were composers Saad Haddad, Joshua Cerdenia and Rica Narimoto. Each had an individual statement to make and the the players and conductor gave confident renditions of one impressive piece after another. 

The New York Times printed the most noncommittal review I ever remember reading. Perhaps many composers have a similar story to tell. Hostile reviews, I have had a fair share of them. Indifferent ones too. But non-reviews? The only comparable precedent that comes to mind is a review in The Guardian apropos of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Bliss in 1969: “In it, Mr Davies uses combinations of instruments.” End of review. 

After the Gathering at Alwinton Church

In the bewitching setting of Alwinton Church, near Alwinton in the Upper Coquet Valley, Norhumberland, there is a concert series that has been making ripples for several years now, Alwinton Church Summer Concerts. It is curated by one of the doyens of British contemporary music, the composer John Casken and, reflecting this man’s enlightened ideas, the programmes are distinguished by an edgy eclecticism. 

Once I had the pleasure of collaborating with Professor Casken to co-promote a project in his series, arising from the knowledge exchange venture Northumbrian Exchanges at Newcastle University, and involving my esteemed colleagues Jamie Savan and Matthew Rowan. 

More recently - two years ago, I believe - I was recruited as an adjudicator for the Alwinton Composers’ Competition, another initiative of John Casken. This included a workshop of the shortlisted pieces and a première given by the magnificent ensemble Psappha.  

It is therefore a pleasure to see my association with Alwinton continue, this time with the première of a work of mine, yesterday, Saturday 7 May. 

The work is After the Gathering, a commission from Kathryn Tickell and The Side. As any British music lover knows, The Side is one of Kathryn Tickell’s current bands, one that explores the traditions championed by its members, namely folk and traditional on the one hand, and classical and contemporary on the other. Acting consistently with The Side’s well-integrated diversity, they have commissioned composers from differing backgrounds to write pieces that explore common territories between these genres. One commission went to Django Bates. Another to Ian Stephenson. Another came to me. 

The common ground in this case is my longstanding love of traditional music of the Northeast of England, and of Kathryn Tickell’s work in particular. I chose her tune The Gathering for a more extended treatment, one where the original melody is never stated from beginning to end, but where some of its distinctive elements are developed in the context of a texturally and harmonically experimental soundworld. As ever, while doing this I found myself once more addressing that perennial interlocutor, the inexhaustible landscape of Northumberland. 

The four musicians of The Side - Kathryn Tickell, Amy Thatcher, Louisa Tuck and Ruth Wall - did a splendid job engaging for the first time with a piece which is by no means easy. If this was the first performance, the thought of how this music will sound when they have been playing it for a while sends me aflutter.  

I was touched by the good response of the audience. The series has a loyal, sensitive following, and given the calibre of the artists I was in no doubt that the church would be full. But I must admit to some apprehension prior to the concert, as to how the new work would be received in the context of a programme full of the unadulterated beauty of traditional tunes, and new tunes by Tickell and Thatcher. But it seems that I need not have worried. The audience was either exemplary polite, or they followed and reacted to the piece with interest and warmth. Thank you, Alwinton. 

Let us not forget this year’s composers’ competition. The adjudicators this year were John Casken, Alistair Anderson and Kathryn Tickell. They chose Gather Here (no relation!) by Helen Walker.  This was a very sensitive treatment of the four instruments in an idiom that integrated well some tradition with some contemporary scoring practices. The piece fitted perfectly The Side’s approach, and it is not surprising to hear that they are intending to adopt Gather Here in their regular repertoire. 

Notes on Notes from Underground

This project is attracting some public attention. Several weeks before the date I heard the première was nearly sold out. The local press has given it some coverage, a number of Twitter accounts have mentioned it, and last Saturday’s The Guardian (10 October 2015) printed an excellent article by Sean O’Brien himself, ‘How I fell under WH Auden’s spell’, outlining O’Brien’s rationale for the project. 

It is satisfying to see professional wordsmiths engaging with the project, and to let the professionals handle it, so to speak. My only attempt to explain my side of the story was slightly lost in translation at The Journal - I don't use “focuses” as the plural of "focus" and I would not describe any part of an orchestra as “elite sub-sections” (what would that mean?).

Rightly, since the commission and the première are part of the Durham Book Festival 2015, much of the attention focuses on the words, on O’Brien and on Auden. I feel fortunate to bask in some of that reflected glory, grateful for the commission and hopeful that the audience, even if attracted more by the words than by the music, will appreciate the concert, the première and the sublime three movements from Das Lied von der Erde in Schoenberg’s arrangement. And yet, conscious that those whose primary interest is musical may be interested in the composer’s viewpoint, I want to add a few remarks to complement those already in the public domain. 

Notes from Underground is a song cycle for baritone, chamber choir and large chamber ensemble, with words by Sean O’Brien (b. 1952). Both the words and the music were commissioned by Durham Book Festival 2015. 

From the earliest conversations it became clear that there was an affinity between poet and composer. O’Brien spoke about words, places, histories and people, all of which resonated powerfully with me. It was captivating to hear how vividly he could describe the ideas he was after, even before he had put pen to paper. My own personal history made me receptive to the world O’Brien was portraying. I am an inveterate lover of the landscape of Northumberland, where I have lived since I moved out of Newcastle in 2007. My centre of gravity is not particularly near the North Pennines, but I know the area, and am attuned to crags, hills and valleys; I do, after all, come from the Andes.

Having said that, my knowledge of Auden’s world is superficial by comparison with O’Brien’s. He, O’Brien, has been my gateway into the older poet’s world. He immersed himself in Auden - probably for a very long time - and I immersed myself in the poetry O’Brien created for Notes from Underground. 

1. And I grew sore afraid

 The first poem starts with the woeful line ‘And I was sore afraid’; a challenging one to set, not least for intelligibility. ‘Sore’ as an adverb is not the common usage of the word, so it seemed important to set it as plainly as possible to enable the listener to understand it. And yet, the mournful fear being expressed demanded a degree of intensity, best achieved with a dramatic gesture and, preferably, a high note or several for the singer; neither of these would help intelligibility. I therefore opted for repeating the phrase several times, first in a comfortable range where the singer could enunciate them clearly, then more dramatically, with the high notes required to match the intensity of the words. 

Overall, the first song is dark, as it could not fail to be, considering the text.  Double bass, contrabassoon and low piano intertwine to produce a gloomy sound fabric, with a simple pitch progression to avoid excessive muddle. In a simple, age-old device, the pitch progression goes up to suggest the mysterious letter’s direction of travel from the underworld. 

The structure is simple: the same upward-moving progression is treated in three different ways - three variations, so to speak. The only other music besides this is the ‘calling bells’ gesture from Approaching Melmoth (2000), revisited twice in this song for reasons too long to explain, and the Kobold. 

The presence of a kobold - the Kobold - in the penultimate line posed a conundrum. Of course I did not know what a kobold was; I had to look it up: it is a sprite in Germanic mythology. It was thrilling to discover that its name is believed to be connected both with the English goblin and with the element cobalt - both for perfectly good reasons the reader can glean from more authoritative sources. There are kobolds of various shapes and sizes, and one of them is known to inhabit the underground, notably mines. Hence the kobold’s presence in O’Brien’s exploration of Auden’s North Pennine world. The way O’Brien introduces it,

‘Who is the monster crouched inside the stone? 

In this great dark I dread to see his face.’

seemed to portray, on first reading at least, a sinister, frightening, possibly revolting creature. I was looking forward to the evil convolutions I was going to write to punctuate this part of the song. But, on closer inspection of the lines that follow and of some of the available literature, the kobold became less harmful in my mind, giving rise to a tamer creature that was ugly - but not awful - pitiable, grotesque and vaguely ridiculous. Such is the Kobold - with a capital K in O’Brien’s text - that makes an appearance towards the end of the first song. 

2. Down a deep well

The second poem did not reveal any hidden surprises. First perceptions survived a second, third and umpteenth reading. The direct style and the use of repetition immediately suggested a folk-oriented treatment, a suggestion reinforced by the provocative line ‘For no one is well in this country’, of traceable Audenian pedigree. 

The poem has two stanzas, and they are identical. You may feel tempted to scrutinise every line and every comma in search of differences between the stanzas, but there is none. There are two ways the composer can respond to this duplication: you treat the repetition in a totally different way for maximum contrast, or you follow the poet and restate the song verbatim. I opted for the latter, and my impending deadline was only one reason; the other was a curiosity to see what would happen to the timeflow if words and music went on a round trip yoked together.

Another structural feature of this song is the downward motion. This is a pervading theme in this short poem, where the word ‘down’ appears three times, the word ‘fell’ twice and the word ‘well’ three times - once in ‘deep well’ and the other two times in the word’s other sense, but in this context the ambiguity is plain to see.  

Music cannot convey specific meaning (discuss!), but one thing music can do particularly well is move in a specific direction, especially up or down. If in the first song the poem invites an upward direction of travel - from the deep underground to the speaker’s level - in the second song the invitation is just as clear to travel down. ‘Down a deep well’, down a mine shaft, down towards the centre of the Earth - endlessly down, it seems to me. That is what the music aims to do. It could have been done more methodically, but there were two constraints: one was the need to avoid caricature; the other was the need to make the most of the only opportunity in the whole work - and, as it happens, in the whole programme for 15 October 2015 - to be buoyant.  

3. Now I am lying low

This movement is set in an underground place. In ten lines, the poem - arguably the most beautiful in the series - sets a vivid stage that could be the bottom of a well, a subterranean river, a mine’s tunnel, a grave, or the mother’s womb. A universe of possibilities, all rich in sonic associations. The things I could have done with this if I had had more time! But, project circumstances aside, I take consolation in the thought that to explore all the latent sounds contained in this poem would have demanded a longer development, throwing the overall structure off-balance. So I had to be selective.

I focused on the key word ‘low’, on ‘gravest harmony’, on ‘the sound of water running, running down’ and on the overall subterranean atmosphere, implying some dullness of sound and sense of oppression, but implying also the space for echoes of various kinds. Quite enough for a sound palette there. At times it seemed that O’Brien was composing the music for me. 

On a less literal, more poetic level, I responded to two potent images in the poem: ‘So far below/You cannot tell the living from the dead’ populates the mind with Dantean figures moving slowly in a cavernous space. ‘O mother, mother, are you there,/And if not in my grave then where, then where?’ takes us to the naked core of all thought and existence, to where we come from, to where we are heading to. How far down this way the music can accompany the words I am not sure, but I am glad they are there together. I hope you can learn as much as I did from crossing that Styx with O’Brien as your Virgil. 

4. You have no shadow

This is some kind of trial, as presaged in the first song’s ‘There is a court where I will have to plead’. The choir are prosecution, jury and judge. The accused is mostly silent. For the ritualised gestures I kept in mind passages in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. For the ice and cruelty of the scene I could not help thinking of Tom Cruise facing his masked accusers in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.   

The choir’s pitch material originates in the second song, in one of the many interconnections that underlie the material, which are probably not interesting enough for the general readership for whom these notes are intended. Towards the end, in response to the choir’s demand ‘Admit it/Admit it/Oh, do you dare/Do you dare’, a new figuration takes shape which determines how the next song is going to unfold. 

5. They say the road that water finds

Like the second one above, this poem seemed to demand a folk-oriented treatment. Meaning what? To avoid a long digression, I hasten to say that I am not referring to a borrowed folk tune or a pastiche of an existing folk style. I mean an ease in the melodic flow through the use of some of some of the more familiar intervals and contours, a line- and verse-based phrase construction, and of course a clear form in audible stanzas. All this is latent in the poem, and I asked the poet’s agreement to repeat some lines in order to facilitate strophic symmetry. He agreed. 

The score has the instruction ‘elfin, misty, Nordic’ in the tempo marking. None of these is a musical term, but good musicians, such as those at Royal Northern Sinfonia, will probably respond to these allusions, referring to musical precedents that are familiar to them. A much-revered Nordic composer looms large - it may be distracting to name him - in some of the rhythmic configuration and in the textural scheme that governs the movement. 

‘Northness’ is an important concept in the context of this project. Auden gravitated north in more than one way, his love of the North Pennines being one example. In the early stages of the project O’Brien and I had planned an excursion to Iceland as part of our attunement to the world we were envisaging. The fact that the plan fell through only made the imagination work harder. 

This song could be said to be a return of the Kobold, but in a different incarnation: a playful, elusive, mischievous but ultimately benevolent creature. And this one is not lonely, but has plenty of company. Which probably means this is not a Kobold at all, but the arrival of the elves. There is probably nothing in O’Brien’s words to justify this association, but by this stage in the project everything was steeped in everything else and the ideas were burbling in a multidirectional stream. I am sure that the creatures inhabiting the Northumbrian landscape featured in the preliminary conversations. Even if they did not, they exist in my perception of this teeming, multivoiced land. O’Brien’s poem is full of references to land, water, ground, light, mountain. To me this was enough to conjure up hidden lives and fluttering motion. They scuttle around in the instrumental ensemble while the voices glide along in longer notes.

If the second song descends, and the third and fourth are set down below, the poem for the fifth bring us up above ground, and higher. We are now in a landscape of roads, bare moors, mountains, streams and - an urban touch? - noonday street. A crucial phrase is "carry me up to the light" which gives me licence to bring the music out of the darkness it had inhabited. 

6. Now when I was a curious boy

This is the longest text. It looks back on a history of personal experience and dreams, and beyond, a long past of lives and deaths, mining, family feuds, and, ultimately, the old primeval fear. 

Naturally this text is an invitation for the music, too, to look back on itself and to go over previous developments. They are all transformed in some way, some of them beyond recognition. As with every reminiscential exercise, it produces new findings, too, some of which are already finding their way in a new project. 

Continuity is an important need, not only within a project but also beyond, between works. The violence and the war in this poem were going to be a pretext to revisit material from one of my operas (The Wheel, 1993), but in the event there was scope only for allusions of the most generic kind: a tempo and a key signature.  A more specific allusion in the material relates to the opening violence in my Meditación No 1 of 1985. But this is all very fleeting. Too many other references from within Notes of Underground itself were vying for attention, demanding a space in the roll-call of ideas O’Brien’s final storm of evocation had unleashed.

A particular challenge was the setting of the line "love is not love that loves alone", appearing twice just before the end. It seemed to me to be something of a dictum in an otherwise flowing narrative. I asked O'Brien to explain his intention, and explain he did. I have tried to give this line the character of a serendipitous, but life-changing discovery.  

Notes from Underground

My latest project is Notes from Underground, a song cycle for baritone, chamber choir and large chamber ensemble. The words are by Sean O’Brien, an award-winning poet also based in the Northeast of England, and also a professor at Newcastle University.

The work is a commission from Durham Book Festival 2015. Earlier this year, the Festival's dynamic and forward-looking creative team approached O’Brien to propose a new commission involving words and music dealing with WH Auden, and in particular with Auden’s interest in the lead-mining areas of the North Pennines. O’Brien accepted, and he in turn proposed that I should be engaged as the composer. I accepted too, even though the timescale was daunting: these conversations were happening in March, or perhaps April, and the Festival was going to be in October; the words would have to be written first; and I had other works to complete first. But the proposal was too attractive to resist, so I agreed.

O’Brien did not take long to send me the first drafts. I found them very stimulating. It was not difficult to relate to the world he was evoking: landscape, the underworld, mines, shafts, regional histories – which are, of course, universal histories. The poems – which is what they are, and they could stand alone in their own right, without music – are pithy, contained, stark sometimes, and all the more powerful for that. They leave plenty of expressive space for the music to unfold. Which does not mean they are short; some are, but some are of a length I found challenging for the timescale of the piece. The total duration comes to about twenty-five minutes.

As soon as the academic year ended, I stepped down from my duties as head of music at Newcastle University. This enabled me to concentrate on writing music all summer. I first completed After the Gathering for Kathryn Tickell and The Side. I agreed a later time than I had been expecting for the completion of my next project with New Juilliard Ensemble. I started at length on Notes from Underground in mid-July, and after a period of concentrated work I was able to complete the piece by the agreed date, 15 September.

The team that will be in charge of the production is the best one could hope for. It includes a brilliant baritone from Germany, Benjamin Appl, the local chamber choir Voices of Hope directed by Simon Fidler, and Royal Northern Sinfonia conducted by Clark Rundell. The première will be on 15 October in the Gala Theatre, Durham.

Collier's Rant

In 2013 the Festival of the Northeast commissioned me to write a choral arrangement of a song of the Northeast of England. The specific project was Create, a multi-choral concept of Kathryn Tickell, who was the festival's driving force and at the time the Artistic Director of Folkworks.

I chose the song The Collier's Rant. The material is of the greatest simplicity: four descending pitches four times, and a brief chorus with the phrase structure ABAC. The cycle is repeated a number of times with different words. Not much to work on, some might say. But, of course, in the simplicity lies the appeal. The less there is in the original, the more space there is for a composer or arranger to be creative.

And then there are the words. Try this for an opening: As me an' me marra was gannin' to wark, we met wi' the deevil, it was i' th' dark. If you can navigate your way through the Northumbrian dialect, which I can only claim to be able to do to a limited extent, you are hit by a force of expression, a strength of imagery and a raw poetic drive that leaves you breathless.

How much of these qualities I would have appreciated if left to my own devices I am unsure. What I do know is that, when I was researching for the project, my ears and eyes were opened by the revelation of a recording by Sedayne, a remarkable artist whose rendition of The Collier's Rant came to my attention on YouTube.  On discovery I was overcome by the torrent of ideas - musical, emotional, dramatic, industrial, tragic, ironic - that lay hidden in that simple tune and those enigmatic words. Intrigued half-comprehension on reading the song in Crawhall's A Beuk o' Newcassel Sangs was replaced by mesmerised fascination, for me strongly reminiscent of the experience of watching Goya's late work.

The 2013 commission held out a very appealing prospect for textural treatment of the material: five choirs were to come together, each with its own idiosyncrasies. I wrote an ambitious arrangement, which I then had to reduce for four choirs, and eventually for three. It may be this paring down of the original ideas that left me feeling that there was more to Collier's Rant than I had been able to execute.

Thus, when The Maltings Berwick-upon-Tweed requested a companion piece for Arreglos bolivianos, preferably one with a local connection, I did not hesitate long before I decided to return to Collier's Rant and to explore it afresh, this time for a string orchestra.

The resulting piece, also titled Collier's Rant (omitting the definite article in the original song's title), is scheduled to be performed on 19 April at The Maltings by members of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland conducted by Chris George.

Meanwhile, here is a sneak preview, with the customary caveats about computer demos (see comments in previous posting).

Arreglos bolivianos

[English version below the picture on this page]

Mientras esperamos con curiosidad e impaciencia la documentación que nos prepara Bolivia Clásica, aquí pongo las versiones computarizadas de Arreglos bolivianos.

Este tipo de documento de audio tiene sus funciones específicas, que se pueden resumir en pocas palabras: sirven como sustituto a falta de de una grabación verdadera. Pero, demás está decirlo, no son una grabación verdadera, sino un remedo de lo que harían los ejecutantes humanos.

Los programas de computadora que proveen estos "demos" son cada vez más sofisticados, y si uno tuviera tiempo podría trabajar más en ellos para hacerlos más verosímiles. Pero la vida es corta, y uno escribe para músicos reales. Me parece apropiado que los demos suenen como lo que son: un sustituto provisional, parcialmente útil hasta que estén disponibles las grabaciones hechas por los músicos.

Ventajas: los tempos, los ritmos y las duraciones de las notas son exactos, tal como están escritos; la afinación es correcta; las dinámicas son consistentes.

Desventajas: no hay expresión; no hay flexibilidad, no hay carácter; no hay variedad de tono; la afinación es inflexiblemente diatónica; algunos efectos de articulación son imperfectos (como la ligadura sobre punto de separación en Viva Cochabamba o los staccati del violín en Pensando en ti); los sonidos se aproximan bien a los instrumentos que representan, pero a fin de cuentas no son los sonidos reales, sino que suenan sintéticos.

Las notas de programa están en la sección correspondiente de esta bitácora; pulsar Programe notes / notas de programa en el panel de la derecha, o pulsar aquí.



While we await with curiosity and impatience the documentation Bolivia Clásica are preparing, I am placing here computerised versions of Arreglos bolivianos.

This kind of audio file has specific functions, which one can sum up in very few words: they are useful as a substitute where there are no real recordings. But, it goes without saying, they are not real recordings, but a mimicry of what human performers would do.

The software that produces these 'demos' is ever more sophisticated, and, if one had the time, one could do more work to improve their verisimilitude. But life is short, and one writes for real musicians. I think it appropriate that computer demos should sound like what they are: a provisional substitute, partially useful until such time as the recordings made by the musicians are available.

Advantages: the tempi, the rhythms and the note durations are accurate, as notated; intonation is correct; dynamics are consistent.

Disadvantages: no expression; no flexibility; no character; no variety of tone; intonation is rigidly diatonic; some articulation effects come out imperfectly (such as the slur over a staccato dot in Viva Cochabamba or the violin's staccati in Pensando en ti); the sounds are close enough to the instruments they represent, but ultimately they are not real and sound synthetic.

Programme notes (only in Spanish for the moment) are in the relevant section of this blog; click Programme notes / notas de programa in the panel on the right, or click here.

Bolivia Clásica

Con estas palabras me uno a las celebraciones del 189 aniversario de la fundación de Bolivia. 

En pocas horas más se realizará en el Teatro Municipal de La Paz - escenario de las experiencias musicales más significativas de mi juventud - un concierto en el que se estrenarán mis Arreglos bolivianos. Los interpretará la Orquesta Juvenil de Bolivia Clásica, dirigida por Jaime Laredo. El proyecto es idea y realización de Ana-Maria Vera. Me cuesta creer que no estaré allí para presenciar este acontecimiento, pero, mal que me pese, ésa es la realidad. 

Desde hace algún tiempo que conozco por referencias la existencia de Bolivia Clásica. Y desde hace muchos años - por lo menos treinta - conozco a Ana-Maria Vera. La conocí de lejos en la década de los setenta, siendo ella solista muy precoz con la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. En aquella época hubo varias visitas de ella a La Paz, causando admiración general, pero yo nunca tuve contacto directo con ella. Con el paso de los años y décadas he seguido las noticias de su floreciente carrera con interés. 

En los últimos años, a raíz de su trabajo con Bolivia Clásica, mi interés en Vera se fue acrecentando. La noticia de que ahora residía en Londres me decidió a buscarla, y nos conocimos este año. Pude conversar con ella aquí en el Noreste inglés, cuando vino a tocar un recital con la joven violinista española Leticia Moreno en el Sage Gateshead. Fue una ejecución de altísima calidad, y la breve conversación que tuvimos después me reveló a una persona inteligente, atenta y muy segura de sus objetivos. 

En esa oportunidad Vera me invitó a asistir al lanzamiento británico de Bolivia Clásica, que iba a tener lugar en Londres a los pocos días con el apoyo de la Embajada de Bolivia y nuestro excelente Embajador, Roberto Calzadilla. Conseguí organizar el viaje y pude presenciar su carisma como anfitriona del evento y líder del proyecto. Al mismo tiempo pude constatar otra vez su refinada musicalidad, a través de varias obras de cámara que tocó con colegas suyos que habían ya visitado Bolivia como tutores invitados. En especial me impresionó el Cuarteto con piano de Schumann, del cual tocaron dos movimientos. Además del elegante fluir del piano de Ana-Maria, la participación de la violinista Katharine Gowers me pareció excepcional; me maravilló la expresividad de esta violinista, y su capacidad de prolongar y sostener las líneas melódicas largas e intensas de la obra magistral de Schumann. Ken Aiso en la viola y Guy Johnston en el cello completaron un grupo sorprendentemente sincronizado si se tiene en cuenta que sus miembros no tocan juntos regularmente.

No pasó mucho tiempo antes de que Vera me pidiera que escribiera arreglos de piezas folclóricas bolivianas para su festival de agosto. No puedo negar que me habría gustado más estar representado por una de mis obras, o más de una, pero Vera me explicó su visión para este proyecto y los distintos factores que pesaban sobre el diseño de los programas. No fue difícil entusiasmarme, primero porque el trabajo de Vera me parecía digno de apoyo, segundo porque cualquier proyecto que me mantenga presente en Bolivia es importante para mí, y tercero porque el folclore también es lo mío, mi música. Lo digo no sólo en el sentido lato en el que todo boliviano se siente vinculado a su folclore, sino además por mi relación especial con la música folclórica boliviana. Recordemos que antes de dedicarme a la composición tuve una carrera precoz de charanguista, y que mis primeros escenarios de trabajo fueron las peñas folclóricas.  

Para mayor coincidencia, Vera me pedía arreglos que representaran a La Paz, a Cochabamba y a Santa Cruz, es decir, los tres departamentos en los que se desenvolviera mi vida en Bolivia. De los tres tengo recuerdos indelebles, a los tres están atados mi pasado y, por lo tanto, mi presente, es decir, mi identidad. Los tres son, por razones distintas pero por igual importantes, mi tierra. 

Hubo cierto ir y venir entre Vera y yo, y entre Vera y sus auspiciadores, para convenir la combinación exacta de piezas folclóricas que habíamos de escoger. Hicieron falta negociaciones relativamente prolongadas antes de llegar a un acuerdo que satisficiera a todos. La combinación resultante es lo que ahora llamo Arreglos bolivianos, en el entendido de que hay distintas permutaciones posibles y que no todos los arreglos se programarán en un mismo concierto. 

También tuve que combatir en Newcastle para abrirme un espacio temporal que me permitiera dedicarme a este trabajo dentro del apretado cronograma que teníamos. Cuando por fin pude empezar, salió a relucir Armando Vera como una figura clave del proyecto. En su calidad de director titular de la orquesta, su conocimiento de primera mano de las secciones y sus integrantes me resultó muy valioso, sobre todo por el entusiasmo con que me brindó su consejo.

En Jaime Laredo y su esposa Sharon Robinson me resultaba más fácil no pensar. Me parecía increíble que fuera él el director designado para el proyecto. Cuando me permitía pensarlo, la idea resultaba tan absorbente que me distraía de la labor que tenía entre manos. 

Es difícil medir con palabras el significado de Jaime Laredo para mí, para los bolivianos de mi generación, y quizá para todos los músicos bolivianos. La magnitud de sus logros es una inspiración para todo el que ha nacido en nuestra tierra desaventajada pero ama la música demasiado para no dedicarse a ella. Laredo nos muestra que, en ciertas condiciones, lo imposible puede hacerse posible, y que un oriundo de nuestros páramos puede competir y triunfar en la reñida arena internacional de la música clásica. Para los que tuvimos la suerte de oírlo tocar, su musicalidad estratosférica es una referencia de hasta dónde se puede llegar con talento, dedicación y cultivo.

Aquí también hay una dimensión personal que me toca de cerca. Uno de los amigos y mentores más importantes de mi juventud fue Don Eduardo Laredo, padre de Jaime. A través de Don Eduardo me enteré de una infinidad de detalles de la educación, la lucha y la carrera de Jaime Laredo. En esa época - principios de los setenta - en que era muy difícil obtener cuerdas de violín, Don Eduardo organizó el envío de las cuerdas usadas de Jaime para mi violín. Don Eduardo me inspiró, me alentó y me aconsejó. A él se debe el nombre del Instituto Laredo, y cuando compuse el Himno del Instituto Laredo le dediqué a Don Eduardo frases de gratitud y homenaje. 

Otra figura para mí importantísima es Don Walter Montenegro. Lo conocí en La Paz en 1973, y no tardó en nacer una amistad. No es ésta la ocasión de expandirme sobre esta relación importantísima en mi vida, pero diré que Don Walter y Don Eduardo eran amigos entre ellos, y que Don Walter y Jaime eran amigos entre ellos. Tan amigos que años atrás, en los Estados Unidos, Laredo le había obsequiado a Don Walter su violín de juventud, una copia de Guarnieri. En un momento dado, también en prueba de amistad, y de la generosidad del aliento que Don Walter me brindaba, ese mismo instrumento, en sí no valioso pero de un significado enorme, pasó a mis manos, primero en calidad de préstamo y después, al cabo de años, Don Walter confirmó su deseo de que me quedara con él. Con este violín he recorrido el mundo, he explorado la música, me he ganado la vida en más de un periodo, y con este mismo violín compongo ahora y pruebo los efectos especiales - los armónicos, las dobles cuerdas - antes de escribirlos. 

Más de una vez quise entablar contacto directo con Jaime Laredo, pero las condiciones no se dieron. Hoy las condiciones están dadas para entablar un contacto a través de la música, profundo aunque todavía indirecto.

Al maestro Laredo, a Ana-Maria Vera, a Sharon Robinson, a Armando Vera, a todos los jóvenes de la Orquesta: no necesito desearles éxito porque sé que lo tendrán. Decir que estaré presente con el corazón será una perogrullada, pero es verdad. Por las razones explicadas, este proyecto es muy especial para mí, pero sé que lo es también para todos ustedes. Los felicito y les agradezco por la parte que desempeña cada uno de ustedes. 

After New York

The Momenta Quartet's performance was impressive indeed.

I greatly admired the commitment and the intensity of their rendition. Each of the four individuals showed command of their part and their role in this challenging piece. The succession of solos in the second movement Plegaria was an opportunity to enjoy the diversity of their personalities and the discipline with which they integrate into a cohesive whole. The finale was an opportunity to appreciate their tightness even in the most frenzied passages. They are a truly professional string quartet, and one of the most thrilling groups I have every worked with.

The audience was appreciative. It included some people I had long known and admired, such as the composer Ezequiel Viñao, and some people I was privileged to meet for the first time, such as the clarinetist Camila Barrientos Ossio. I am grateful for their interest and support.

Photo by Camila Barrientos Ossio

'Sin tiempo' in New York

The new string quartet has now been performed four times, and today we will hear its New York première.

At yesterday's rehearsal the Momenta Quartet demonstrated the extent of their achievement so far. It is impressive indeed. They play with passion, with commitment and with a determination more than worthy of the topic that gave rise to the music. It is exhilarating to witness such an impassioned display of artistry.

The concert is at HiArt! Gallery in TimeIn, 227 West 29th Street, NYC

String Quartet No. 2, 'Sin Tiempo'

The Koussevitzky commission is now completed. It took me one and a half years' work – obviously not full-time, since university work only allows a fraction of my week to be spent on composition - but intensive enough. The last few months I had to find additional hours in the day, starting in the very early hours, before the family woke up. Six hours' sleep is not a regime I thrive on, but it was the only way of achieving results.

The Momenta Quartet were very tactful in not applying pressure, even as time went by and the agreed time for a première - autumn 2013 - approached. Now, with any luck, they will be able to prepare the new piece over the summer and release it to the world as scheduled. We do not have a specific performance date as yet.

This is probably a good time to explain some of the background and the nature of the piece.

'Sin tiempo' are the first two words of a longer title: Sin tiempo para las palabras: Teoponte, la otra guerrilla guevarista en Bolivia (“No time for words: the other Guevarist guerrilla campaign in Bolivia”). That is the title of Gustavo Rodríguez Ostria's monograph on a guerrilla campaign that took place briefly in 1970 at Teoponte, a mining district northeast of La Paz.

Teoponte is also the subject of an eponymous opera of mine, premièred at the London International Opera Festival 1988. Teoponte is not a full-scale operatic display, but a shorter affair, 35 minutes, for six singers and an electroacoustic soundtrack. A digression on this older work may be useful for an understanding of the new piece.

Living as a student in London at the time (1987), I found it beyond my reach to find a suitable collaborator to write the libretto. This did not feel like a severe inconvenience, since, as I researched the topic, I was developing a clear conception of how I wanted to treat the story. Thus came about as a natural development for me to write my own libretto, based as much as was feasible on the historical facts of 1970 - remembered from childhood and more freshly gleaned from the pages of El Diario, La Paz's conservative daily. Miraculously, many of its issues of the relevant period were available on microfilm at London's Colindale Library.

Contemporary sources were scarce. I contacted Isabel Hilton, then Latin American correspondent at The Independent. She was very helpful and pointed me in the direction of James Dunkerley, the author of a well-researched book on Bolivian politics in the relevant period, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia 1952-1982. One paragraph in the book relates to the episode, but I inferred that Dunkerley knew more, so I sought him out. Dunkerley, too, was very helpful. He received me at his office in Queen Mary University of London, with a surprising treat: he opened a packet of Casino, a strong brand of dark tobacco much in favour among Bolivian students and intellectuals. I was not a smoker, but I could neither decline the hospitality nor resist a nostalgic taste of earlier times. Dunkerley explained his take on Teoponte, opening my eyes to aspects I had only been half-aware of, such as, for example, the influence of Liberation Theology on the catholic contingent among the insurrectionists. He kindly lent me his copy of Teoponte, una experiencia guerrillera, a succinct testimonial by the Brazilian priest Hugo Assmann, which I used intensively and returned to Dunkerley by post.

Memories, press, two conversations, one book. Based on these exiguous sources I formed a conception and fashioned a libretto that was simple, pithy and essentially distilled from contemporary speeches, reports and communiques.

Teoponte the opera was performed at the Bloomsbury Theatre, as part of the 1988 London International Opera Festival. The performers were Innererklang Music Theatre, directed by Séan Doran. The reception seemed enthusiastic on the night, but appeared mixed in the press. It was instructive to hear appraisals from colleagues who had attended, including one from Trevor Wishart - whose Anticredos Innererklang had performed in the same programme - who opined that Teoponte showed an excessive closeness of its composer to its subject. 

Wishart’s comment was perceptive, but I am not convinced that it was possible to form an informed opinion on the basis of that performance. I cannot fault Séan Doran or any member of his team; they worked with commitment and artistry in difficult circumstances. It is the circumstances I find fault with: a tight timescale and a breach of understanding between Innererklang and me as to the role of the tape part. They had expected occasional electroacoustic interventions, whereas I presented them with a soundtrack to which they were expected to synchronise from beginning to end.

It had not been my intention to surprise; I simply had not considered any other possibility than a fully developed tape part as a substitute for the orchestra, that is, as a continuous stream of sound, not only supporting and punctuating what the voices did, but also carrying the flow of expression whether the voices were singing or silent. And, it would be disingenuous not to mention it, I delivered the completed tape part to the performers two weeks prior to the première, that is, far too late for them to assimilate it properly.

This is tempting, but I must postpone a detailed description of Teoponte the opera. I will only say that it is set in a folk club, it is in four scenes or tableaux, and its structure – both locally and overall – is based on four chords which happen to be quite common in Bolivian folk music.

I will also say that, back in my very young days as a folk musician in Cochabamba, I knew Benjo Cruz, a charismatic solo singer who was a frequent visitor at the folk club where most of my gigs took place, Peña Ollantay. I greatly admired the intensity if his performances, charged with the energy of his political convictions. I did not fully understand these at the age of eleven, but I was aware, like any Bolivian of any age was, of an ideological struggle between the establishment, broadly associated with right-wing military dictatorships, and a younger front who opposed it and wanted change. I had seen the demos and the riots, I had smelt the tear gas, and I had heard the shots. Both my parents were journalists and news were always table conversation. I was certainly aware of Che Guevara and of the entrenched polarisation in public opinion after his death.

Benjo Cruz sang protest songs. He would first work the crowd with some lively traditional repertoire, and then he would hit them with a thinly veiled political message in the form of a song or a recitation. The folk club – Peña Ollantay – was a popular weekend entertainment, and it was well attended by a cross-section of the population, including the well-heeled. Benjo would not temper his message if there was a public official or dignitary in the audience. This added to the electricity in the atmosphere of his performances, and yet I never witnessed any unpleasantness.

What could not escape my or anybody’s notice was that a new guerrilla campaign had begun. ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) had made good a promise made on the death of Che Guevara: volveremos a las montañas (we shall return to the mountains) and had unleashed a new insurrection against the military regime. Among the fighting rebels was Benjo Cruz. Over the next few months, either in combat or in summary executions, the military killed 59 out of the 67 rebels. Benjo was one of the casualties.

The story of my attachment to this topic is long and entangled. I tell it in greater detail elsewhere, and will tell it in even greater detail when I have the chance.

For today’s purposes, I will say that Gustavo Rodríguez Ostria’s book opened my eyes to many facts and ideas I had only superficially known, or intuited, and many other facts and ideas which I had not known. If this book had been in existence in 1987, Teoponte the opera would have been very different indeed.

Hence the need to write more about Teoponte. My business is unfinished. In 2012 I completed Souvenir de Teoponte for double bass and piano, a piece where I return to some of the opera’s material and I test its potential in a new medium. As well as the harmonic and structural conception, there was the conversion of electroacoustic sounds into double bass and piano sounds to explore. James Rapport and Eduard Lanner, and then James Rapport and Linus Kohlberg, have done committed work with this piece in Vienna.

Now I present my Second String Quartet, ‘Sin tiempo’. It too revisits some structural and thematic material from the opera, even where it is only in passing evocation. It engages with the world of turmoil, commitment, strife and self-sacrifice for an ideal that characterised that moment in history. It brings the past to the present and it does so in several layers. It pays homage to some of those fighters – Benjo Cruz in particular – and to Gustavo Rodríguez Ostria for his enormous achievement. It also celebrates the artistry of the Momenta Quartet, who I know will do a superb job with the work.