Program

Railway Parade Peter Anthony Monk
Music for Solo Clarinet John Link
Warwick Light Giles Easterbrook
Water Lilies Tom Cipullo
Psalm 30 Ludger Hofmann-Engl
Ballpark Variations Ben Yarmolinsky

Program Notes

Railway Parade (Peter Anthony Monk)

Railway Parade was written for Ruth Ballard and Mark Tatlow for the Bourne School Festival, Hertfordshire (England) with funds provided by Eastern Arts.

The two movements are loosely based on the 'atmosphere' of two railway locomotives. Both are prefaced by short poems by Rudyard Kipling and Alexander Allan - a railway poet. The final movement contains a quote from 'Pictures at an Exhibition' (M. Musorgskij) and the second symphony from Brahms.


Music for Clarinet Solo (John Link)

'Music for Clarinet Solo' resembles a suite or set of character pieces played continuously and unified by recurring motives and by a slow continuous pulse that guides the rhythmic and metric development of the piece and marks the beginning or ending of most sections. The characters range from 'meccanico' to 'con adore', from 'furioso' to tranquillo' and were chosen to reflect the extraordinarily diverse expressive capabilities of the clarinet.


Warwick Light (Giles Easterbrook)

For I have read in the long poems written long ago by men and women writing of their love
that time might go like a breath blowing in the night.
and they be dead but still their love would beacon like Warwick Light.

It is not so.

(from 'Of Earthly Love' Susanna Valentine Mitchell, ca 1935)

In fairness to the author, I have to say that I decided to set only about half the poem, so giving her overall message of bleak ambiguous resignation a possibly false and rather startling sense of pessimistic irony.

I first encountered it in the early '80s and set it down then as something I would set 'one day'. I may even have made some sketches (though I couldn't find any when I looked) because when the request came for a piece for this concert, when I was heavily into another project and very short of time - normally I compose extremely slowly - I agreed without thinking and declared on the spot that it would be called 'Warwick Light', finding I had the glimmerings of a complete piece in my mind.

I know nothing of the author except this single poem which I found in an anthology called 'The Best Poems of 1935', but it seems to share many qualities found in the work of other North American women writers of the earlier part of our departing century; Millay for instance and, more, Wlinor Wylie among other poets, Willa Cather the novelist, a gentle resilient wistfulness unindulgent longing and the realization that things universal have more potency expressed in terms of the individual. Arthur Bliss called it the 'burden of vanished joy or beauty'. It was this atmosphere which first appealed to me and for which I thought I might find a musical equivalent.

As the rest of the poem (unset) tells us, Warwick Light is not a type of beer but a lighthouse, and I have drawn on ideas associated with lighthouses a lot in the score, both directly and obliquely: not just the symbolism, but their physical, functioning presence, regarding the voice as representing the purely human spirit, as it weaves in and out of the structure and the texture. The musical 'plot' is a subjective association of lighthouse images, the seemingly arbitrary but carefully patterned beams, sweeping to alternate periods of intense darkness and dazzlement, the metaphor of stability in times of threat and flux. Mitchell doesn't try to interweave images but to juxtapose them: I on the other hand try to, with the benefit of the additional dimension of music and its possibilities for cross-referring, permutating the spirit (voice) and lighthouse in self-contained, non-synchronous and irregularly overlapping patterns - of ideas and material - and a fairly rigorous bi-tonality whose centers coalesce at the 'Cortège' which comes slightly over two-thirds of the way through. For those interested in such things, there are three main sections; an epilogue/coda and a 'sting', playing continuously, and five groups of material ideas - two unique to each of the tonal areas and one acting as a go-between. One day I may set the rest of the poem - it deserves it - but that day is not this day.

Water Lillies (Tom Cipullo)

Water Lillies was comissioned by Jeanne Golan. In it, I tried to create a suitable vehicle for her virtuosity and gorgeous tone. It represents a challange for any pianist.

Psalm 30 (Ludger Hofmann-Engl)

This composition was originally set for alto (voice), clarinet and violoncello and written in order to commemorate the 3000th anniversary of Jerusalem in 1996. The piece has not yet been performed and the alto has been changed to soprano.

The decision to take Psalm 30 for the celebration of 3000 years of Jerusalem was based on various reasons. On the one hand it is the Psalm which is recited each morning and thus forms a focus comparable to Jerusalem. On the other hand, it is he Psalm dedicated to the house of King David. According to traditional commentary this might refer to the temple or to the palace, in either case essential features of Judaism and Jerusalem. Moreover, it is not by chance that this Psalm was chosen to be recited each morning. Does it not describe the struggle and the final victory, which is the very essence again of both, Judaism and Jerusalem as we have witnessed even during the last years.

The compositional basis is simple. I sang the Psalm to an improvised tune, which then I recorded and then notated in the fashion of a ethnomusicologist. I hoped to achieve a archaic quality by doing so. This improvised tune rendered the Tetragrammaton in the proper way (consisting of three syllabi). Yet, for the composition I used 'Ha Shem' (two syllabi). This meant that two syllabi are to be sung now in the form of melisma. Thus, the proper pronunciation is immanent present. In central parts I used th B-A-C-H in connection with the Tetragrammaton.

I chose the clarinet and the violoncello to come together with the voice, because of their flexibility and ability to be treated in a similar fashion to the voice. So to say, they recite the Psalm without words,an inspiration which might come from Mendellssohn's 'Lieder ohne Worte'.

The involvement of electronics aims at creating an alien element in order to symbolize a distance of 3000 years. I found the idea to use a contemporary mean to effect this alienation very persuading.

Ballpark Variations (Ben Yarmolinsky)

The tradition of making variations on popular and patriotic tunes is an old one. In America, Gottschalk, Gershwin and Ives did it, and it seems to me to be a tradition worth continuing. 'The Star-Spangled Banner' will, of course, be familiar to British listeners - it is not only the American national anthem, but also an old English song., 'Ancreon in Heaven'. I have made my own arrangement of the tune as the introduction to a set of variations on 'Take me out to the Ball Game', a song sung traditionally at baseball games during the seventh inning stretch. There are nine variations on this tune, interrupted by two more versions of the American national anthem, the second of which is played 'upside-down', in inversion.


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Chameleon Group of Composers © 2000