Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth

My choral setting of Ruth Padel's powerful poem Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth will receive its premiere on 3 July 2015 in a rather special one-off performance to celebrate our 60th birthdays.

Alistair Dixon - Chappelle du Roi

Robert Hugill: Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (World Premiere)
William Mundy: Vox Patris Caelestis
Philippe De Monte: Super Flumina Babylonis
William Byrd: Quomodo Cantabimus
Motets by Tallis & Mundy

Plus Middle-Eastern Music from
Kalia (Nay, Voice) & Nikos Ziarkas (oud)

Friday 3 July 2015 7.30pm

St Vedast alias Foster, Foster Lane, London EC2V 6HH

Ruth Padel's poem, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth in a new choral setting by Robert Hugill, alongside renaissance choral music, and Middle-Eastern melodies for voice, nay and oud.
Tickets price £10 available on-line from EventBrite

Nearly there - motet for the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time

The Lord saith: I think thoughts of peace,
and not of affliction: you shall call upon Me, and I will hear you;
and I will bring back your captivity from all places.
Lord, thou hast blessed Thy land; Thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob.
 (Jer 29:11,12,14)

Hot off the press! I have just finished the setting of Dixit Dominus, my setting of the Latin Introit for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. This is the last Sunday in Ordinary Time, and I have only got the Introits for the Feast of Christ the King, and the Feast of All Saints to set and then my collection Tempus per Annum of motets for the church's year will be complete, 72 motets in all.

Resurrexi, the Introit for Easter Day, was premiered on Easter Saturday by Ben Woodward and the Choir of St John's Church in Fulham, and there have been a number of other performances and premieres, and Peter Leech and Harmonia Sacra will be recording one this year. The completed motets are now available for free download from CPDL where you can find the motets for Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ascension and much of Ordinary Time. I am hoping that the collection will be complete in a few months time. A nice 60th birthday present to myself.

Who are we writing for? My article in the journal of the Institute of Composing

My article Who are we writing for? has just been published in Issue 3 of the journal of the Institute of Composing. The article examines the contemporary composer's relationship with the audience and whether composers should be more aware of a potential audience when writing their music. 

The current issue includes not only my article, but Tansy Davies on creating her new opera Between Two Worlds, Susanna Eastburn on giving creative artists a chance, folk music as a contemporary art form and a thoughtful article by Alwynne Pritchard which encompasses the writings of Foucault and the marketplace. Head over to Issue 3 of the journal of the Institute of Composing for an intriguing read.

Hot off the press - Miserere mihi

My recently completed motet, Miserere mihi, sets text from Psalm 85 (Have mercy on me, O Lord) which is the Introit for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time which occurs between 28 August - 3 September. 

 The motet is set for six part unaccompanied choir (SSATTB) and is part of my sequence Tempus per Annum setting the Latin introits for Sundays and major feasts. 

Miserere mihi, Domine, quoniam ad te clamavi tota die: quia tu, Domine, suavis ac mitis es, et copiosus in misericordia omnibus invocantibus te.
Inclina Domine, aurem tuam mihi, et exaudi me: quoniam inops., et pauper sum ego.

Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I have cried to Thee all the day; for Thou, O Lord, art sweet and  mild, and plenteous in mercy to all that call upon Thee.
Bow down Thin ear to me, O Lord, and hear me: for I am needy and poor.

The full motet can be downloaded from my website (PDF version)

New Sounds

I've posted a couple of synthesized versions of recent pieces to SoundCloud. Duino Angel is a concertino for bassoon (or cor anglais) and string orchestra based on my setting of Rilke's Second Duino Elegy. And Orpheus's Journey is a tone poem for large orchestra inspired by the opening stanzas of Rilke's Orpheus, Euridice, Hermes.

http://soundcloud.com/roberthugill/orpheuss-journey

http://soundcloud.com/roberthugill/duino-angel-concertino-for

Notation Notation Notation

One of the areas that I often struggle with when writing music is exactly how to write it out. You can be quite clear as to what you want, but still be uncertain as to how best to notate it. Western notation evolved to cope with music written according to the accepted rules of melody and harmony. If you want to veer away from these or stretch things somewhat, then you have to push the notation. There are conventions for some of these, for example if you want to write quarter tones. But if you use too much extra notation you run the danger of having to prefix the piece with a long essay explaining what the signs mean. And if it is an ensemble piece, then you also risk having to prefix each rehearsal with a long discussion as to how to approach the extra notation. This has happened to me a few times and has left me with a desire to keep things simple and straightforward where possible. Also, getting too exotic with notation or too complex might mean that a piece which shouldn't need a conductor will need one, so that there is a single person controlling the complex web of events.

Even when there isn’t anything particularly exotic in your piece, you can find that the way it is notated has a big effect. For instance, if you write using a variety of chromatic harmonies or modes, then it won’t always be obvious whether the notes are sharps or flats and you can end up with a flurry of accidentals which renders and essentially straightforward line as something complex. Poulenc does quite a lot of this in his choral writing, using enharmonic changes so that quite straightforward chords are notated in exotic ways.  Of course there are correct ways of writing things out, but if this involves, say, extensive use of G double flat, it might make more sense to the performer if you use F natural rather than the harmonically correct G double flat.

There is a similar inflexibility in rhythmical notations. Or rather, to get some effects you have to use such complex notation that there is very little possibility of getting the music played accurately. Hence the recourse, to either computers or to using freedom and uncertainty. I must confess that writing most of my music on computer, I sometimes get seduced into rhythmical constructs which are extremely tricky to bring off. Part of the reason why this arises is that we have little concept of stretching rhythm, or at least no satisfactory notation for it.

One piece I am working on at the moment has a triplet crotchet figure over a semiquaver figure. At one point I wanted to speed up the semi-quaver figure whilst keeping the crotchet triplet the same. My first attempt kept the semiquavers, but speeded up the basic tempo and then re-notated the triplet crotchet figure using dotted quavers. I sounded perfect, but looking at the vocal and instrumental lines I realised that there was little chance of it ever being performed with accuracy, the notation was just too fiddly. So I accepted the inevitable and chose a simpler solution which, whilst not perfect, has a far better chance of being performed without stressing the performers out.

For much of his later life Percy Grainger experimented with a series of machines which would enable him to have complete control of pitch, rhythm and duration. In fact his experiments were overtaken by the use of computers to do this. I remain wedded to the notion of using human performers and so must try and find solutions within the notations which are in common use.

Jigsaws

Following the performances of my opera this summer, I've ended up with a score covered in pencil marks, reflecting the ideas/changes/corrections which cropped up during the rehearsal period, plus musical clarifications from conductor David Roblou. Also Ian Caddy, the director of the staging (which premieres 31st March 2011), was present at the August performance and has come up with a number of ideas. These are designed to keep the drama flowing and correct the problems where tension sags. The trick is now to apply these cuts and changes to the score without losing the original structure. There are two sections based on a ground bass, which rather leaves little room for manoeuvre if you want to cut bars. Similarly there are other places where the accompaniment has musical and thematic reminiscences, so changes have to be clever. The other thing is, of course, that any change should feel like an improvement (or a movement in a particular direction) rather than change for changes sake. As we are staging the work for the first time, having just done it in concert, the revised version will be slightly less oratorio like in places, giving more scope for a fast paced, realistic drama. The revised score is still a work in progress but by the end of this month we should have something on which to base our staging.

Syllabicity

Now, some years ago I submitted a piece to a competition and the comment came back that my word setting was too syllabic; i.e. 1 note per syllable, rather than setting a syllable across a number of notes. I must confess that at the time I didn't really think about it, but last year a writer I was working with commented on the same thing. They suggested that, my having set their text, they would go back and remove some words/syllables so that the setting was had more than one note per syllable. I experimented with this in some songs and made a determined effort to write in a rather more melismatic manner. The result was successful, in that one of the songs won a competition. But the mechanism for doing this feels wrong, I have to struggle against my instincts each time I'm setting a text.

Currently I'm working on a short opera/oratorio which has long sections of recitative. Again the syllable thing came up and I have made a conscious effort to increase the number of notes. Often I've being doing this by repeating so that the words get the setting I want and are then repeated more melodically. This is something I'm going to have to continue to experiment with. Its obvious that people don't see/hear the relation between text and music in the same way that I do. I could, of course, ignore this but each time I set a line of text I start worrying that it comes over as too syllabic. In some ways, maybe, this is a good thing as it makes me thing again about the relationship between text and music.

Next Premiere

Tomorrow, my new verse anthem God be merciful unto us, will be premièred tomorrow. The anthem is a commission for the wedding of a friend and will be performed at the wedding in the church of St. Botolph without Bishopsgate tomorrow. The anthem is written for choir, organ and two soprano soloists and is slightly closer to a strict verse anthem form than my previous anthem. I hope to arrange a public performance of the anthem at a later date.

There are all sorts of things I ought to be doing - sorting out the music for next year's concerts, finishing the current scene of my new opera, adding to the motets in my sequence Tempus per Annum. I do have excuses, my toner is running low and so printing music will have to wait until I've ordered a new one. The new opera requires me to sit at the piano and bash away at it, digging into the accompaniment of the scene, which currently exists in skeleton form. This is something I tend to put off then do in a rush, usually making me late for work or whatever engagement I have.

But I am not doing any of the things I ought to be, instead I am writing songs. Now it could be argued that this is a GOOD THING as 1) I don't write songs very often, always meaning to do more and 2) my recent settings of Ivor Gurney came 2nd and 4th in the English Poetry and Song Society's Ivor Gurney competition.

So I am writing a few more, even though I have constant trouble finding poems which appeal. Of course, when I do find them they are usually in copyright which creates additional problems. Having done a setting of a poem which perfectly appealed to me I am now working on something else setting a poem which is less appealing. The theory being that it is good for me to occasionally write settings of tricky poems.

Which brings me to another conundrum which I have never really solved. When setting modern verse, where the sense goes counter to the metre, which do you follow. With stanzas or lines ending mid-sense and the sense continuing into the following line, do you let the structure of the poem guide you or the sense of the prosody. Usually I follow the sense of the words but I then feel guilty that I am not making more of the structural feel of the poet's work.

Though I have always had a tendency to pull text apart. When setting prose I can usually be relied upon to edit the text, missing out, adding and repeating words to create a satisfying whole, satisfying to me that is! I have a similar habit in poetry, though I try not to miss bits out. Usually the results ignore the structural form of the piece. My setting of Lord Alfred Douglas's sonnet on the death of Oscar Wilde rather ignored the piece's sonnet form and set it like a piece of poetic prose.

This of course reflects my uneasy relationship with words. I work best setting poetic prose, like the Bible or Thomas Cranmer. When setting a poem which has metre and rhyme I feel constrained and, I think, rather worried that the result will simply turn into a te-tum te-tum te-tum te-tum type of song, familiar from my cabaret years.

Progress so far

On Wednesday we (the librettist and I) met to discuss the progress so far on the new opera. Its the first time that I've worked so interactively with someone. My previous opera was based on a play by a writer living in America, so we corresponded by email - not quite the same. We picked at details in the 2 scenes written, and the revised results are a lot stronger. We have also decided what sort of shape the remainder of the piece could take. Since then I have been working on the revisions, progress indeed.

The next thing to think about will be a workshop/run through!

I've stopped being a great one for competitions, partly because I dislike working on something simply because its for a competition. But if I have something around, an idea or a finished work, which seems to fit then I can often think why not.

The other issue is about the way my music looks on the page compared to how it sounds. Last year a conductor commented that my music sounded different to how you'd expect it to on the page, was more complex. I don't know if this is a general perception but it makes me mistrust sending scores off into the blue.

But that's what I'm planning at the moment. There are 2 or 3 projects which fit in with competition entries, so I think, why not?

Also I've been busy exchanging emails with the librettist of the new opera. I send her PDF's and midi-files and we discuss how things are developing. Its early days yet, but it is proving to be enormously useful having someone to bounce ideas off and to keep their eye on me. Consistency is important when mapping out different characters in a dramatic context and consistency is not always my strong point!

Gurney Poetry again

I've finally gotten around to digging out the text of the Ivor Gurney poem that I'm setting. It is one of four in fact, but this one seems to have the most profound homo-erotic context.

TO HIS LOVE

He's gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We'll walk no more on Cotswolds
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.
His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn River
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
You would not know him now…
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers-
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.


The poem was evidently written in 1917 but it deals with the death of a comrade in a remarkably lover like way

More Gurney

I thought I'd print the Ivor Gurney poem that I'm currently setting. I've no idea what it's background, but it strikes me as being homo-erotic at least.

To His Love

He's gone, and all our plans
are useless indeed.
We'll walk no more on Cotswold
where the sheep feed
quietlsy and take no heed.

His body that was so quick
is not as you
knew it, on Severn river
under the blue
driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now...
but still he died
nobly, so cover him over
with violets of pride
purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!
and with thick-set
masses of memoried flowers -
hide that red wet
thing I must forget.

Gurney songs

I have now finished the first of the Ivor Gurney songs which I am planning. The first one sets a poem called Requiem and I am rather pleased with it. Though, as usual, I'm worried about the music as I feel it all sounds like sub-Vaughan Williams. (We were listening to Pilgrims Progress in the car the other day - D. had never heard it before - and some of it has rather stuck). I've now started on the next song, which seems to have a remarkably homo-erotic text. More on this as the song progresses.

The entire group of songs is going to be gloomy I'm afraid as they are all about loss. But Gurney's poetry is never too navel gazingly angst ridden, so I find it rather comforting and very moving.

Plans (What I'm up to)

As a result of a couple of comments during the recording sessions, I am fiddling around with more music for strings (well, actually strings and bassoon). The comments sort of swirled around in my head and coalesced with the idea I'd been having of taking some of the best bits from my Duino Elegy setting for baritone and orchestra (premiered at St. James's Piccadilly last year). There were parts of the piece which I felt were hampered by the sheer number of words I had to set. Obviously, in the long term, a new version of the full baritone and orchestra version is needed.

But in the mean time, I'm rather pleased at the way my new piece for bassoon and strings is shaping up. I'm able to dip in and out of the vocal line when I like and add extra bits without worrying about words, underlay or sense.

I have also had the first couple of pages of a proposed new opera libretto - yes, I seem to have managed to hitch myself up with a real librettist, which is a boon. I hope to spend some time in the next week fiddling around with trial settings of the text. I only seem to be able to think about words when attempting to set them. Simply reading a proposed text through will not reveal the full repercussions of setting it. I just need to do the thing properly and see how I find the words. I'll report back later.

Finally, I've been thinking about entering this year's English Poetry and Song society competition, which is to set and Ivor Gurney poem. To that end, I have acquired a book of his collected poems and must leaf through until I find something which calls out to me. One problem is that I sometimes rather pull the text around, which is not good when setting an English poet for a competition run by a poetry society! One good thing is that Gurney did not set many of his own poems, so competitors will not face competition from the poet/composer himself.

Boring or what

I've just been doing a new arrangement of a piece of string orchestra, based on one of my solo motets. I'm very happy with it, though I expect there will be a little tinkering over the next few days. The problem is that the viola part is truly boring; I have this weakness for static harmony in the middle with a vocal line on top and a moving (generally descending) bass. That's the way it is with this piece; the result is exactly what I want but leaves the violas with acres of the same note.

I've had this problem before and each time I come to the same conclusion, the music as written is exactly what I want. Sometimes I worry that its sheer laziness, that just sticking the same few chords under the melody is the easiest way out. But no amount of tinkering every really comes up with a replacement, too often the more interesting versions simply sound contrived.

So for the moment, my new string piece is sitting on the piano waiting for tinkering. In a few days I'll return to it and see whether I can tweak the viola part to be more fun. But I suspect that I will stay as it is.

Meltdown, again

The computer I've been using, since my own turned flaky, has hit melt-down and lost its hard drive. My backup habits are a bit intermittent, but I am usually pretty good at printing out music in all the relevant stages of composition. Unfortunately, in the last week I have had a spurt of energy on a tone poem that I'd been writing, based on a Sylvia Townsend-Warner story. I'd not yet got around to printing it out so that the conclusion to the first movement and the entire opening of the second have disappeared into the aether (or wherever the bits and bytes from our hard drives go when they die). Very frustrating. As and when I get my new computer (current e.t.a. 10 days) I'm not sure whether I am going to have the stomach to re-construct the missing bits. We'll have to see.

And of course, until then I have to resort to my old, flaky PC. The one which turns itself off without any notice, thus corrupting whatever you were working on at the time. Ho-Hum.

Its better with a Horn

I forget now why I wrote my cantata, Memorare for the combination of choir and solo French Horn. My previous cantata, Vocibus Mulierum - Womens Voices was written (in the early 1990's) for unaccompanied choir and mezzo-soprano solo and premiered by FifteenB in 1994. That piece dealt with women and the church and for the follow up (Memorare) I decided to cover AIDS and the church. I was nervous at writing for too big an instrumental group - too difficult to fix up a performance. Also a friend of mine played the instrument and I knew that there would be no balance problems.

I showed the score of Memorare to Malcolm Cottle of London Concord Singers, who had already premièred another of my choral works (Three Prayers) and he came up with the idea of doing a concert for World Aids Day. We did Memorare, for choir and French Horn, Malcolm Williamson's Requiem for a Tribe Brother and Richard Rodney Bennett's And Death Shall Have No Dominion in 1995 in the presence of Malcolm Williamson (who said nice things about my piece and quizzed me about my opinions on the Pope, all while messily eating a large piece of chocolate cake). The concert took place at the very end of November amidst a positive storm of colds and flu; a number of ringers had to be brought in to make up numbers in the choir and the soloist in the Williamson had had to learn her part in under a week, singing along to a tape as she commuted to work daily (she lived in London and was working in Birmingham I think).

The Bennett piece was a setting of Dylan Thomas's poem for male voice choir and french horn. It is a wonderful 8-minute long piece which was written for New York City Gay Men's Chorus. It is quite tough in style, certainly not the user friendly/easy listening type of music that they typically do. Certainly NYCGMC has a commissioning policy but Bennett's piece is not run of the mill. It was written in 1986 and his publishers were never able to tell me whether NYCGMC actually did première the piece. Chester Novello's website says that the work was written for NYCGMC but the list of commissions on the NYCGMC website fails to mention Bennett. If so, it must have sounded wonderful as they number far, far more than the 8 to 10 men that we mustered.

London Concord Singers have performed Bennett's piece a couple of times and it has remained in the back of my mind, even though I don't actually possess a recording of it. So when I came across Dylan Thomas's poem Do not go gentle into that good night and started to have ideas for a setting of it, it was almost inevitable that these would involve a French Horn. As ever, with me, my ideas arose from hearing the melodic/harmonic outline of the opening phrase and sort of developed from there; the initial thought giving me my melody and the general feeling of the work. I am now well through with the first draft and simply need to set the closing line of the piece. There's no particular première arranged, but its written for SATB choir and French Horn, very, very manageable if someone's looking for Dylan Thomas settings!

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First Night nerves

Well, I've sent of the contracts (duly signed) so that the recording is almost signed and sealed - it won't be delivered, of course, until the recording sessions in April.

Usually I obsess about minor details rather than the big picture - in this case, the pitch of the organ (a bit higher than concert pitch), how much rehearsal the strings will need, logistics of getting the singers together.

But sending off the contract rather gave me some pangs. Primarily of course, whether anyone was going to buy the recording. I go through a similar crisis of confidence when writing longer works, I get part of the way through and start to feel that its all rubbish and why bother to continue. When dealing with writing music, the only way is forward and the solution is to press on and eventually I rediscover my bounce. If and when a piece is finished it gets put in the draw before being brought out again and I'm usually pleasantly surprised and rather like the piece.

Its going to have to be the same with the recording, onwards and upwards ignoring worries. Its not that I don't feel my music is worth recording, just that I tend to go through crises of confidence and am not the best promoter of my own work. Also, of course, its rather a long process from conception to delivery of the final recorded item. At the moment we are in the middle of the waiting period, looking forward to the actual sessions and hoping that arrangements work. More in due course!

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