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| With the statue of Edward Elgar in Great Malvern, Feb. 2024. My great-grandma sang in his choir in Malvern |
I wrote in my last post that, in the next one, “You’ll hear Darwin singing”- his (nearly verbatim) words sung. This post happens to fall on the first weekend in March, a significant one for me. A chap can be permitted a bit of Looking Forwards and Backwards around his birthday. I did that last year and referenced some of my favourite March 3rd-ers.
I started
this blog to coincide with the performance of my ‘Eyenigma Variations’ (based
on Darwin’s words on the Eye, Chapter 6, Origin of Species, vocal rhythms etc)
at Darwin College, Cambridge, on 29th Oct 2022. Hey, a first truly
public performance is a Big Day for a composer – especially if billed alongside
Vaughan-Williams, Fanny Mendelssohn and Cheryl Frances Hoade and even more for
someone coming to composition late. It took all my persuasional skills to create
the concept for the concert with Darwin
College, plus the guilty conscience of the thief who stole, then returned ‘HappyEaster Librarian’ the Tree of Life notebook – thereby handing us a marvellous
publicity opportunity. Hence the concert and hence this blog.
Science
music is still a tricky sell. There’s still some mutual incomprehension of how
scientific ideas can inform both the ‘warp and the weft’ of music – providing starting
points for musical phrases and gross structure, as well as a ‘meta layer’ of context
and understanding for the piece, without straight-jacketing the ability of the
composer to produce a piece which, well, makes the grade with professionals and
the public. Which is slightly crazy, since composers have been using the entirety
of Christian theology and Gospel incident imbued at every level of their compositions
for four hundred years, and still produce great – inspired – music. I will be
taking the part (only eight notes “I am not..”) of Faithless Peter, denying
that he knows Jesus, in a performance of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion this
Easter to raise money for an outdoors passion play later this summer in
Abingdon. Going through the bass parts of choruses and chorales, Bach doesn’t
miss a trick to encode ‘sin’ and ‘death’ in miserable descending chromatic
passages, rising hysteria in the crowds with ascending chromatic, and references
to salvation in leaping major intervals. And it works just fine.
I was delighted
when choral director and professional singer David Crown agreed to record some
segments of ‘Three Soliloquies’ with me last year. This is meant as a calling
card to publicise the work and - ‘calling all concert promoters’ – the honour
of a World Premier is up for grabs. It was great to work with a true professional
even for just an hour to hear the composition come to life. In the end it
should be an easy sell to get Darwin’s marvellous and uplifting words to an
audience of modern, scientifically/humanist/philosophically thinking people as
long as the music does justice to the grand themes. The excerpt I’ve chosen for
this first public posting is from Darwin’s discussions on the origins of morality
– surely an important counterweight for those who fear that science is somehow
lacking, or subtractive from, the human element which religion rightly
emphasises.
I’ll leave
it to you to decide whether the music does justice to Darwin’s wonderful prose
(as close to verbatim as I could get it, and true, I hope, to the meaning and
emotion intended). Just one composerly trick that I’m pleased with. The word ‘Desires’
is used by Darwin in a neutral, observational sense; but in our knowing and self-conscious
age it carries a bit of freight. I’d been listening to Elgar Dream of Gerontius
before writing this. There’s a marvellous and touching bass solo, ‘Go Forth Christian
Soul’. If you like Elgar, see if you can spot the leap that I use on the word ‘desire’
(which, being a long note, has to swell up/down in volume). And there’s some
discordant stuff on the bass strings of the guitar inspired by ‘Mars, Bringer
of War’. I hope that Elgar, and Bach, would say it all passes muster.
If you want
to hear more excerpts from my Darwiniana project, open the tab. If you’d like
to hear public performances of the vocal settings, the string quartet, or the
full oratorio and would like to be put on a mailing list for events or crowd-funding
opportunities then please get in touch – and feel free to comment!
Photo credit: D Gahan, Gt Malvern Feb 2024.
