|
|
| Home |
The title is from Kipling's
Mandalay, a poem that has haunted me for many years. The last few lines run as follows:
| Re-use of this piece in CANTATA for a BELOVED PLANET: Over the course of some 15 years, beginning when I went to China, I have been working sporadically on a large Cantata based on poetry of Earth, Sea and Sky. It suddenly occurred to me that this piece would suite that larger work as an orchestral interlude. If you click here, you will go to the Cantata's page and see it listed there as #5. In addition to the standard orchestra listed below for the original version, the Cantata version has an additional Flute, an English Horn a Bass Clarinet, a Contrabassoon, a Tuba, 2 Percussionists, a Harp, and a Piano. So there are now 2 versions: one for standard orchestra and one for expanded orchestra. CONDUCTORS, take note! |
If Kipling's poem is one source for this piece, another is the sunrise scene from the ballet, Daphnis et Chloé. Ravel's treatment is slow and majestic, evoking the gradually lightening sky and the final appearance of the day. Mine begins with a quick, birdlike and chromatic theme in the woodwinds which builds over several pages to a big crescendo as the sun finally appears. Does my sunrise rival Ravel's? You decide. Click on the strip below to hear a fairly realistic (a friend called it "evocative") computer realization of the score. One day I hope to replace that Logic Pro version with a recording made by a live orchestra - conductors, take note.
Following the sunrise, I was stuck for some way to continue. I wasn't following a narrative as Ravel had been, so I had no story to fall back on. However, in my Chinese travels I had encountered (and even written for) many unfamiliar instruments. One of the most exciting is a simple double-reed trumpet called a suona horn. It resembles a snake charmer's instrument. I had found and transcribed a recording entitled One Hundred Birds Worshipping the Phoenix, a piece treated in a wildly improvisational way by performers (yet composed in fact by Wang Jianzhong (d. 2016)), and perfectly suited to that instrument. You can hear it at 2'40" on the audio strip above. The YouTube example in the link I just gave is not the performance I used however - I can no longer find it. I gave the tune to the piccolo and the oboe in my score, and thus my poem for orchestra had sufficient thematic material at last (and I could even keep my bird idea going!) My apologies to the oboe player but I believe that nimble fingers should find it quite playable! Modern players have a way of surprising me, and I don't worry too much about writing a difficult part after this comment from a violinist when I placed a new piece in front of her asking if it was playable: "Hmf," she said, "Everything's playable!" Besides, I'm a woodwind player myself, so I have a pretty good idea of what can be done.
This is surely the most travelled of my works. It was begun in Suzhou, near Shanghai, in late 2002 as mentioned, and during the following spring my partner and I went on a backpacking tour of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, before returning to China where it was finally finished. Parts of this manuscript were thus written on tropical beaches and on the banks of the Mekong beneath coconut palms. Only later did I learn that in Vietnam, 50 people per year are killed by falling coconuts.
The orchestra is as follows:
To obtain the full score of this version, please click in the black box above (see the box, above right, for an expanded orchestra version). Parts may be obtained by sending me an email or through the Canadian Music Centre.
|
|
| Top |