When we all arrived at 5pm for the run through, the BBC had already set up their equipment and were all ready to go.  Nina arrived and we went through the piece and she heard it in its entirety for the first time.  Now normally when you get comments on playing they are about making sure that you all play in time with each other.  How refreshing then for Nina to ask that the clarinets please try and not play together.  My fellow viola and I have had great difficulty with this concept, but it is great to get to decide where in the ‘bar’ you get to play. 

Very soon it seemed we had got to 7.10pm and we had rehearsed as much as we could.  The audience was starting to arrive and we had our visitors as well.  David was having a very busy weekend with the concert in Glasgow due the night after us.  Becca Laurence came from Sound and Music and Richard Shaw the Making Music Development Officer Scotland managed along too.  Unfortunately Evan Dawson from Making Music in London (who so kindly kept our original application and resubmitted it for this time) couldn’t be with us on the night. 

Before we knew it the concert was started.  We had Jupiter from the Planets and the Saint-Saens romance for violin (beautifully played by Ali Croal a pupil at Watson’s) and then it was THE piece.  We had the slides of our walks on the screen behind us as we played, quite a few of us had taken photos of the walks that Nina had asked us about and it gave us an extra feeling of connecting with the whole experience to have our own walks displayed behind us – that was the only drawback, we couldn’t see them. 

All too soon it was over, we had premiered our Book of walks (and enjoyed the experience), the audience applauded, Nina was presented with flowers and we were on to the next piece… 

In the interval we had a chance to get feedback from the audience and it was lovely to hear how well the piece had been received.  And to hear different views on the music; at rehearsals some had thought that it lacked emotion, but some in the audience hearing it found it very emotional and dark, especially in Industrial ghosts. 

 And what did the orchestra think in the end?  Well we are all really looking forward to hearing it on the radio; you certainly don’t get to hear what it sounds like as a whole when you are sitting in the middle of the orchestra concentrating hard on not playing with your partner.  Once we got over the initial shock of not playing conventional bars and techniques the whole experience was a positive one for the orchestra.  It made us think about our ideas of what ‘music’ is and what it means to us and it gave us a chance to use our instruments in ways that we would not normally encounter when playing.  It’s not every day that you get to work with a composer and have them write something especially for you and it’s an experience I certainly won’t forget. 

Thoughts from other members?

‘Well I enjoyed the challenge and I think we did Nina’s piece justice.  It will be very interesting to listen to the recorded concert and hear the piece as a whole – it’s hard to tell from within the orchestra what the overall sound is like. I particularly liked the Expanding Sky chapter – very atmospheric, especially near the end.’

  ’I thought it was really wonderful to work on Nina’s piece.  I particularly appreciated the fact that she took our favourite local walks as her starting point which gave the piece a very personal, immediate feel and a relevance to us all.  This, her enthusiastic commitment to the project and the end result made it a great experience.  I really enjoyed the challenge of following such unfamiliar-looking pages of music!  As a fairly new member of the orchestra, I was thrilled to be part of something so refreshingly modern – not my image of an amateur orchestra at all! (Not to dismiss all the other great composers whose work I have been enjoying playing too!)’

 ‘Although I was a bit unsure about the piece, to say the least, I came to view it with greater sympathy as the rehearsals continued.  I believe the composition came together at the performance and that the hard work of both Hector and the orchestra, required for such an unusual challenge, paid off.  I do hope that it will be broadcast and look forward to hearing it from the point of view of the audience, either on air or as a CD.’

 ‘I really enjoyed the challenge of playing Nina’s piece.’

When we initially applied for Adopt a composer we did it in order to celebrate the orchestra’s 80^th birthday and unfortunately we weren’t successful that time.  We still managed to celebrate a birthday at the concert though!  After the interval a big banner mysteriously appeared at the back of the auditorium (I thought I knew everything that was happening that evening but I didn’t know about that).  It said ‘Happy 50^th Lynda’ and I certainly wasn’t expecting that, or the singing of Happy Birthday that followed, but it was a lovely way to celebrate my birthday.  A world premiere and the audience singing me Happy Birthday, that’s a night I will always remember.

If you’re a composer and would be interested in taking part, take a look at Sound and Music’s Opportunites page for information on how to apply. If you’re part of an ensemble that would like to apply, click here for more.

Below are extracts from my programme note:

My idea for the piece from quite early on in the process was to focus on something that both the orchestra and I have in common, and to create a piece of music that somehow related to the local area, or was site-specific. I decided that walks (taken by the players in the orchestra) were a good starting point. A questionnaire asked the players to describe a walk they enjoyed in the surrounding area, and one of the questions asked them to draw the line of the walk from memory. The questionnaire responses provided me with the raw materials for the piece: I used the maps they’d drawn to create melodic shapes, and the players’ thoughts on walking gave me ideas for the characterisation of the music and for the titles of each ‘chapter’ (or movement) in the piece.

Chapter One, entitled Woven footsteps is mainly concerned with texture – a texture inspired by the sound of footsteps in a busy street (unsynchronised, percussive, varied in timbre). Some of the players wrote about city walks (or walks that began in a busy city and led to a rural location), so this was my starting point for the first movement. I wanted to reflect the idea of people taking their own independent walks in the way that I wrote the music. It is scored in five-second ‘bars’ and the players play their note(s) where they judge them to be within that timeframe. This way of writing the music means that all the players play at different times, and in effect take their own path or walk through the movement. The texture is continually shifting: instruments enter and drop out, different techniques are used, and there are gradual changes e.g. from very short, dry percussive notes, to longer, more resonant ones. One way of thinking about this is that the orchestra is moving through changing terrain.

Chapter Two – Industrial Ghosts. This movement was influenced by one of the orchestra questionnaires that described a walk along the Union canal in Colinton and drew attention to the remnants of an industrial past. I liked the idea of creating sounds that were somehow suggestive of rusting metal. To achieve this, I ask some of the players (particularly the strings) to play their instruments in quite unconventional ways. I spent some time introducing lots of new playing techniques to the orchestra, which I did by describing the sounds and by demonstrating on a violin. The texture from the first chapter recurs sporadically as a reminder of the activity that once took place in the area.

Chapter Three – Expanding sky - is inhabited by a slowly-rotating chord that I created from a map of a hill walk taken by one of the players. The chord is passed between strings and wind and orchestrated differently each time. I wanted to create a feeling of opening outwards and this movement is a response to several comments in the questionnaires about the striking views of the Scottish countryside that may be encountered when walking.

Chapter Four – A quick scramble is a short, fast reference to the material from the first movement and keeps the players on their toes!

Chapter Five – Air. Many of the sounds in this final movement are breath-like and other sounds emerge from and recede to an airy backdrop.
A point of repose      Altitude                      Solitude

From A Railway Carriage – Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle,

All through the meadows the horses and cattle;

All of the sights of the hill and the plain,

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

All by himself and gathering brambles;

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

And there is the green for stringing the daisies!

Here is a cart run away in the road

Lumping along with man and load;

And here is a mill and there is a river;

Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

From A Railway Carriage for SATB chorus (with divisions) and piano

The piece is a setting of the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘From A Railway Carriage’. The single movement work describes a series of fleeting moments as witnessed from a railway carriage speeding through the countryside. The whimsical nature of Stevenson’s poem conveys a sense of fun, perhaps a child’s first train journey, taking in views of rolling countryside, village life or stations whistling by. With the lilting rhythmic backdrop of the motion of the train, fast busy music alternates with slower reflective sections evoking scenes that are merely glimpsed then gone forever.

The work was developed for Glasgow Lyric Choir as part of the Adopt-a-Composer scheme, funded by the PRSF and run by Sound and Music in association with Making Music. The collaborative nature of the project meant I worked closely with the choir at all stages of the development.

The text, a real favourite amongst the members of the choir, was agreed upon early on and from there a series of short sketches were created and tried out in workshops. I then developed these initial ideas further taking on board the observations and suggestions of the choir. Over a period of 3 months the work was developed and sent for rehearsal at regular intervals with members of the choir giving their feedback at rehearsals or via the forum on the choir’s website.

Although essentially a children’s poem, the text is full of interesting and dynamic imagery that lends itself well to musical setting. The melodic writing is quite lyrical, my intention being to create a piece of linked song-like sections each describing a scene as the train whistles by. The tempo and meter changes provide rhythmic excitement conveying the changing rhythms of the train speeding through the countryside. I make widespread use of canons and combine these with spoken word rhythms and vocal glissandi (train whistles) to create the texture of the piece. The homophonic sections are intended to offset the whimsical nature of the faster, more song-like material with moments of tranquility and reflection.

The piece is essentially modal in character and the use of the Lydian mode throughout the piece gives the music an airy or dreamy quality. I thought this quality also suited the idea of speed especially those moments when a train crosses over a high bridge when it can almost feel like flying, the distant scenery going past in slow motion; the Golden Age of Steam extending from Stephenson’s Rocket to The Flying Scotsman are brought to mind!

The months have flown by and it’s strange to be approaching the end of the project. I am always uplifted by the commitment of the choir and I’m hoping that the piece will fit in well with the other pieces in the program…always tricky when one is up against the likes of Bernstein and Elgar!

Will report back on Monday!

The choir’s enthusiasm for the project really is greatly appreciated and it is wonderful for me to hear sections of the piece sung so well. I hope I have not written anything too hard to sing; unnecessary complexity should always be avoided and I do strive to do this. I appreciate that 12/8 compound time looks complex to the eye but I hope that the tunes and thematic ideas are quite intuitive, at least after a while!

Under Steve’s expert direction and Julian’s wonderfully sensitive piano playing I have no doubt the choir will bring the best out of the piece and I really hope it will be enjoyable and rewarding to sing. I do appreciate however one cannot please everyone!

The CD backing tracks I hope will assist with the learning of the piece and I am endeavouring to produce better sounding recordings for the coming weeks. Also I want to improve the layout of the scores so they are easy to read.

The musical material of the piece has changed from the initial ideas. The piece is essentially modal in nature using the Lydian mode which is essentially a C major scale with a raised 4^th (F sharp). This gives the music an airy or dreamy quality (to my ear at least), a sound world that is often exploited in film music. It is sometimes called the “flying mode” as it has been used in the Superman films amongst many others. Jazz and progressive rock musicians have also incorporated it into their music.

On Saturday 8th May, Colinton Amatuer Orchestral Society will be performing at George Watson’s College, Edinburgh. Along with Holst’s Jupiter and Haydn’s Symphony No.104, the concert will feature the première performance of Nina’s piece for the group, A Book of Walks. It starts at 7.30 and ticklets are £5.00, or £3.00 for students.

And on Sunday 9th May, Glasgow Lyric Choir RSAMD Concert Hall, Glasgow. As well as works by Elgar, Schubert. Goodall, Dvorak, Copland and Bernstein, the group will première Nick’s piece for the group, From a Railway Carriage. It starts at 7.30 and tickets are £12.00.

We can’t wait to hear the pieces that have come out of two really interesting collaborations – come along!

Many of these composers exploit the full sonic potential of instruments, including some unorthodox playing techniques. I’ve also included some pieces that employ found sounds, or objects that we wouldn’t normally consider to be musical instruments that make sounds. Feel free to respond to anything you hear by adding comments. I can also try to answer any questions you may have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BHzFggEGS4

Lachenmann – Mouvement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD64xY24U_s&feature=related

Lachenmann – Gran Torso

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhXNIrQJR80&feature=related

Sciarrino – Quintet no. 1

String harmonics. Harmonic glissandi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhhAtRBlH0I&feature=related

Sciarrino – Opera per flauto

Breath sounds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPGlj9vlLQ

Takemitsu – Voice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z5Vz-QPUcU

Berio – Sequenza V

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j68N2_1EJB8

Lachenmann – Guero

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjUXF3_zJC4

Saariaho – Sept Papillons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5OsuzSXU-k

Crumb – Black Angels

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

Cage – Water Walk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E

Cage – 4’33’’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71hNl_skTZQ

Ligeti – Artikulation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ea0sBrw6M&feature=related

Part of a BBC documentary about Muisque Concrète