August 2023 has been an incredibly productive month for me. I completed my new cantata The Year’s Midnight, for strings and choir, which we will perform in the Menuhin Hall on 13th December 2023 with the massed voices of the Yehudi Menuhin School and their wonderful strings. This has been a fascinating project as I originally wrote to Gillian Clarke (former National Poet of Wales), with whom I had collaborated years ago, to ask whether a potential collaboration might be of interest. Gillian wrote back enthusiastically, and within a matter of months I received six brand new poems on the theme of winter emerging into spring. I have included Gillian’s wonderful poems at the bottom of this post.
One particular part of the text:
We step out to see the sky,
dusk and the dying day
on fire before it fades.
The west is a rose-gold page,
an illuminated story
in the book of winter,
Really captured my imagination, and when this text begins the fourth movement I wanted a sense of movement through space, and the use of an ostinato helped me to navigate this.
My current project is a new Piano Concerto entitled Symmetry for Matthew Schellhorn, and leading on from the creative energy from The Year’s Midnight, I am now well into the second movement of this piece, but more on that another time!
II. December
The earth glitters with frost,
Flagstones are pearled with cold.
Frost flares its jewellery
till dusk rubs out the world
and the long night begins.
Short days stir with wings
as hunger brings the birds
to feed on what we throw them,
before the dark descends,
and the silent night.
Green dissolves in grey.
In windows, street by street,
the tree-lights shine. Above
a million stars out-glow
the darkness in the heart.
IV. Christmas Sunset
We step out to see the sky,
dusk and the dying day
on fire before it fades.
The west is a rose-gold page,
an illuminated story
in the book of winter,
the journey to Bethlehem,
no more the plod of a camel,
but flight over seas
and plane-trails burning.
We have lit the fuse.
Earth holds its breath.
VI. Blackbird
The blackbird is silent. In a month
he’ll sing his Latin aria from the spire
of a chestnut tree, leafless
in winter sleep, its buds tight closed.
In lengthening days,
each with a few more minutes of light,
he’ll repossess his ground
with his first song of the year,
Let’s dream a hymn to joy,
a new year and a baby born,
and the blackbird singing in a tree,
veni, vidi, vici, veni, vidi, vici.
Over this month, work progressed very quickly on this piece. I found the energy that Gillian brought to the project inspiring, and as a result, the ideas for the piece crystallised in my mind very quickly. I knew that in between each pair of songs I wanted the strings to represent murmurations of starlings, which are mentioned in the first song. Here’s a sample of the score from the first murmuration:
The setting of the text was so enjoyable for this project, as Gillian’s words really flow naturally. Her talent for selecting such evocative imagery pushed me to find a harmonic language that inhabited a dark landscape, which emerges into the F major mixolydian mode joy at the end of the sixth movement.
Composing on the go
I am very grateful to Birdsong Publishing for producing the full score, vocal score, and parts, which we will begin rehearsing from at YMS from the second week of September. It would be great to see you at the first performance!
I. The Dark Month
Month of the dying, the dead.
Trees groan in the winter wind,
green dissolves into grey,
city pavements pearl with ice.
Nature sleeps. All life is still
but for the stir of wings,
starved birds flock to the feeders,
murmurations of starlings.
Deep winter, world is singing.
Light the dark with candles.
Sing away silence for a child,
born two thousand years ago.
III. The Year’s Midnight
the shortest day, 21st December
The flown, the fallen,
the golden ones,
the deciduous dead all gone
to ground, to dust, to sand,
borne on the shoulders of the wind.
Listen! They are whispering
now while the world talks,
and the ice melts.
and the seas rise.
Look at the trees!
Every leaf scar is a bud
expecting a future.
The earth speaks in parables.
The burning bush. The rainbow.
Promises. Promises.
V. Full Cold Moon
26th December 2023
Midnight, late December,
and the Full Cold Moon is rising
over the city streets, the suburbs,
the villages, the lonely farm.
Luminous old stone,
it draws the tide over our shores,
turns all to silver, park and garden,
pavement, pool and puddle.
It pulls the sea, the heart, the blood,
decides the fertile hour when a seed
is woken in the secret dark
to slow unfolding, and a life begins.