Vindicated After 45 Years

Steph Power's review in Wales Arts Review today of Grace Williams's Missa Cambrensis at St David's Hall, Cardiff on 1 March (read it here) reminded me to go back and listen again to the broadcast (courtesy of Radio 3's website): a vindication of a work that had all but disappeared after its first performance in June 1971. Commissioned for the Llandaff Festival in 1966, it was to have been Grace Williams's most ambitious score - a setting of the mass with interpolations for choir, boys' choir, four soloists and a large orchestra. The premiere itself was a disaster (as can be heard on a recording of that night) with the choir and the orchestra struggling with the work's tough and demanding writing. You can hear a very moving account here of that first performance as part of a link in Ty Cerdd's recent newsletter here which also gives some fascinating background to the work. The composer, by all accounts, wept all the way home to Barry in her taxi.

Grace Williams with Sir Charles Groves and the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra

The performance by the BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales under Tecwyn Evans (the chorus trained by Adrian Partington) finally proved that the work was both fully viable but also established it beyond doubt as possibly the greatest and most ambitious large-scale choral work to have yet emerged from Wales. It was an act of faith on behalf of the BBC, but would not have happened had not Keith Griffin commissioned a new edition of the work several years ago whilst still at Ty Cerdd, brought to fruition by Chris Painter at Oriana Press and Graeme Cotterill who edited the work for his PhD at Bangor University. Here is a page from the manuscript vocal score.



The piece itself is far from being a 'comfortable' listen. It sustains a highly wrought, intense and unremitting musical language for over an hour and is far from perfect (the structural purpose of the solo vocal writing remains difficult to see) - yet in this respect, it is quite unlike much else in Welsh music and this gives it its unique power. It is still available until the end of the month on the BBC website here - do listen now.

Peter Maxwell Davies

There had been so many reports of Peter Maxwell Davies’s illnesses in recent years that the news of his death yesterday should not have come as a surprise. Yet somehow he always seemed immutable; a figure one thought would always be there. 

Photo: Ros Drinkwater

From the age of fifteen or so his music provided many landmarks in my life. Hearing a broadcast of St Thomas Wake in 1973 was my first real experience (that I could relate to) of contemporary music. Eight Songs for a Mad King from the 1976 Proms provided a frisson of teenage rebellion against more established musical norms and the first broadcast of his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus from the 1977 St Magnus Festival was a revelation. The money I received for my twenty-first birthday was spent on the newly published score of his First Symphony, which then felt at the very cutting edge of contemporary music. Early performances of The Lighthouse and the Second and Third Symphonies were red letter days and I devoted a large part of my MA studies to the music of his early years. I travelled to the National Sound Archive to hear a tape of the notorious 1969 premiere of Worldes Blis at a time when it was the only way to hear it and was thrilled when the Royal Opera revived Taverner in 1983. 

Broadcasts and recordings were important ways of keeping up with Max's work, but some of the deepest musical experiences came with hearing his own performing group, The Fires of London, live. Concerts they gave at Cardiff University in March 1978 and at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival later that year were opportunities to experience the almost physical impact of new pieces inspired by the land and seascapes of the Orkneys where he set up home in the mid-1970s, The Hymn to St Magnus and Ave Maris Stella made a particular impression as did the presence of Max's conducting. Orkney became a place of pilgrimage resulting in a visit in 1981.

In 1983 and 84 I sat in on his classes at Dartington and encountered an analytical and compositional rigour that was revelatory. Students turned up at 9am for four hours of analysis and were then sent away for the afternoon to write a small piece based on structural ideas that emerged during the morning classes – score and parts to be ready for performance by 4pm! A lot of the music I wrote at that time was based on the techniques I picked up by studying his music and the structural principles he taught in his own classes. The floor of my work room was covered in magic squares and many of my scores tried hard to imitate the atmosphere of Worldes Blis, the Second Taverner Fantasia or great slow third movement of the First Symphony.

There were later performances that recaptured something of that early excitement: WNO’s premiere of the Doctor of Mydfai in 1996 was one such occasion, especially when Simon Rees asked me to interview Max for the programme book at Judy Arnold’s home in London. Inevitably, I suffered a reaction against the music and still feel that there was a dropping off in intensity and quality of the later music after the Violin Concerto of 1986. But it is also possible, once that initial love affair was broken, that I was incapable of finding my way into that world again. I hope I might change my mind in the future. But there is much to be grateful for: the music certainly, but also the man himself who was endlessly fascinating and a real beacon to young composers in terms of support, applying rigour to one’s craft and celebrating the sheer adventure of composing. Many thanks Max. 

Winter isn't forever

On Saturday 27 February York's Late Music Series put on a day of events devoted to British Song in collaboration with York's Literature Festival. The events at St Saviourgate Unitarian Chapel near to the Shambles included a talk by myself on British song over the last hundred years or so and in the evening concert soprano Ana Beard Fernández and pianist Kate Ledger (see below) gave a fabulous premiere of my Three Winter Haiku, which set words by poet Francesca Kay. You can find more details of the day here and read a review of the concert here. Many thanks to Steve Crowther for arranging things.

The three haiku settings also have a short postlude for piano alone and make up a kind of micro-song cycle lasting about five minutes or so. They were inspired by Francesca's precise and very evocative words, taken from her collection of poems Garden Seasons. They are collected together, not in a book, but very strikingly in a seed packet with, in her words, "poetry seeds for the imagination inside". You can buy them by going to Francesca's website 

I have recently revised and produced a new copy of the score which can be obtained by contacting me through my website. 

Hoar frost at Norwegian Church

The closing days of 2008 witnessed a remarkable frost alongside days of very bright intense sunshine across South Wales and England. At the same time I wrote a short piece for guitar, Sometimes there is hoar frost … , which captures something of the still atmosphere of those days. 

The piece is a short set of double variations, for solo guitar, written  for Michael McCartney, who gave its first performance in the following year. Although little more than five minutes long, its an important piece for me, written at the end of a long barren period and setting up a template for the scale of a lots of pieces that have followed since. 

Its title is taken from Heather and Robin Tanner’s classic record of rural life, Wiltshire Village (1939): “Sometimes there is hoar frost, when trees are transformed to coral and cobwebs to lace”. You can hear a recording made by Michael Hughes of the piece here.

Robin Tanner (1904-88) was a visionary etcher and print maker and I've tried to convey something of the small-scale intensity of his vision in this piece. When I first saw his work, just after his death at the end of the 1980s, his etchings were relatively cheap. Alas, I didn't invest then and can no longer afford them these days. Here is one of his earliest etchings, dating from 1927, just after he had attended the first major retrospective of Samuel Palmer's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum the previous year. 

On Friday 26 February guitarist William Brown gave a wonderful performance of the piece at Cardiff Bay's Norwegian Church (more details here) as part of a concert given with flautist Vicky Guise (they performed my Serenata I in London in December 2014 - more details here). I recently had a rehearsal with Will and was bowled over by the stillness and intensity that he brought to the piece. 

The concert was made up of a fascinating variety of unusual British music and included the premiere of a fabulous new work by Gareth Churchill. 

Adieu to all alluring toys

Next Monday night (7 December), the music department of Cardiff University are giving a very enterprising concert of music by Welsh composers. It takes place at the University Music Department at 7pm  (details here). There is music by Andrew Wilson-Dickson, Gareth Churchill, Christopher Painter, Sarah Lianne Lewis, Max Charles Davies, John Metcalf and others, including a performance of my short cantata Adieu to All Alluring Toys. 

Some of the most fascinating discoveries in old churches and chapels are often hidden away amongst the memorial stones on the walls or lying benearth our feet. I particularly like those from the later seventeenth or eighteenth century with their lettering and designs by artisan stone-cutters, often with verses that have perhaps been written by someone local. I've often jotted down some of the more striking of these in my notebooks and when, in 2011, I was asked to write a song for a CD of contemporary British songs on the Meridian label, I raided by notebooks to find some texts that might be used. 

Adieu to all Alluring Toys is the name of a short cantata for baritone and piano that I completed in 2011, recorded by Paul Carey Jones and Ian Ryan. it consists of two songs (or arias) framing a small central recitative.The project was masterminded by composer David Power, whose wife Linda Ingham contributed the very striking cover. 

The piece takes words from three eighteenth and early nineteenth century memorial plaques found in churches in South-East Wales and Lincolnshire (those around Brecon and the Black Mountains seem to be particularly rich in such treasures). Two of the epitaphs are written to the memory of small children whilst another warns of the inevitability of our mortality. Innocent, naïve and sentimental, the words nonetheless are full of light, optimism and even humour, far removed from our more recent view of mortality. It is these qualities that the music tries to capture.

Here is the first of the texts and the one from which the piece's title comes. I found it in St Beilo, Llanfilo in Breconshire. It's in memory of Elizabeth the Daughter of Walter Vaughan, of Tredomen, Gent. She died the 31^st March 1774 Aged 10 years.

There is a brief central recitative which I took from Rhulen Church, Breconshire. Inscription: James Probert who departed this transitory life, September 17^th 1756, aged 66. Here is the church, hidden in the hills.

I found the final text in Grimsby Minster, Lincolnshire: Inscription: Under this Stone was Buried the Body of GEORGE, Infant son of Captain PETER RYE, Royal Navy, who died Dec’r 6^th 1808.

Because this is a commercial CD, the music hasn't been posted up on a website, but you can hear extracts if you go to Meridian's site, buy it online or, better still, come along next Monday. 

Looking to the West

Ferryside is a little estuary village in West Wales, facing Llanstephan and about eight miles from Carmarthen.

For centuries it was on the main coastal route to West Wales, but the estuary needed to be crossed by ferry - hence its name.

These days it is still on the London to Carmarthen line - the original line was built in 1852 and quickly washed away by the ferocious storms that can blow up on the estuary.

The walk along the estuary is spectacular at all times of year, but particularly evocative during November and December. Here are a few more pictures taken there ...

In the distance here you can see Llanstephan Castle just across the estuary.

And looking back up across the railway line, the gables of some of the houses.

Cyppin - The Video

Readers of this blog might remember between October last year and last March I reported on a the process of planning a video with a musical soundtrack. During the summer the final edits were finished and I have just uploaded the result to You Tube. Click here to see it.

The video features and is built around the small non-conformist chapel of Bryn Salem Chapel in Cyppin, Pembrokeshire, founded around 1847 and built in 1852. It now lies unused and derelict, about half a mile off the main road on the edge of a field. You won't find an entry for it in the Buildings of Wales architectural guides. 

The project was part of a the Creative Wales project from the Arts Council of Wales which I am currently completing. It is concerned with musical performances of my music in unusual and remote spaces; particularly small Welsh churches and chapels. Whilst the idea of a performance at the chapel was attractive, in this instance I wished to creating a short video around the chapel, for solo double bass and an electronically generated soundscape made of manipulated natural sounds (wind, birdsong and so forth) captured at the church. 

The video is concerned with the idea of the decay of the chapel and, perhaps, other elements, places, ways of life and so forth in the area and community. But this is not necessarily seen in a negative context: nature gradually and gently reclaims the chapel and its structure,re-absorbing it back into the landscape. A similar process is also applied to the musical structure.

This short film of the chapel and its location was made by Aaron J Cooper and directed by Heledd Wyn Hardy (seen below working on the film on a very cold January day earlier this year). 

The music is played here by Ashley John Long and the recording engineer was Odilon Marcenaro.The last sentence however doesn't begin to reveal how much Odilon helped me through the process last winter, mentoring me through the use of electronics and then showing me the process of transferring these to film. Without him it would not have happened.

This is very much a first stab at this way of working and therefore a student effort - it's presented here as a curiosity and more as work in progress than a finished item. I am very much aware of its defects and crudities (at a musical level) but was fortunate to work with several fabulous people - particularly Aaron and Heledd (who constantly pushed me forward and encouraged the project) not to mention the wonder double bass playing of Ashley John Long.