Sunday 21 June 2009

Francis Poulenc Goes To Osaka
(for flute and 2 guitars)








To the very best of my knowledge, Mr Francis Poulenc never actually went to Osaka ...however, I wrote some music in case someone ever discovers that he did.

Connect your device to a decent sound source or enclosed headphones, and click on the orange PLAY button:
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/francis-poulenc-goes-to-osaka
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If you wish, you can read the score (in pdf format) here.
This will open in its own window so you can scroll through while listening. Both the score and the mp3 recording are free and downloadable.
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My music was inspired by Poulenc's sublime "Sonata for Flute and Piano". It still transports me after all these years. Hey dude, re-spect, hi-fives, [etc]. A master of the augmented triad.
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Poulenc was a member of "Les Six", a radical group of young revolutionary "Up-the-Establishment" French composers loosely centered around "bad boy" Erik Satie in Paris early in the 20th century. Gee wiz, I was born too late - they ought to have been "Les Sept". Mon dieu! Zut alors! [etc]
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Poulenc's Sonata, however, is not to be found in my trio Francis Poulenc Goes To Osaka, but its impact can surely be sensed in the flippant playfulness, free contrapuntal lyricism, and evolving interaction and exchange between parts. The flexibility of the hemiola facilitates the Japanese cultural penchant for 'separateness': the flavour of each element, as in a Japanese meal, can only be savoured fully when tasted individually. Likewise, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu indulges in contrasts - he likens his compositional process to that of "placing objects in a garden" in order to showcase each one to best advantage.
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Strong elements of quartal harmony in my piece do not deny Poulenc's unapologetic sense of tonal centricity and formal conventions: this music is anchored firmly around the note C from start to finish, and adopts traditional ternary form.
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So, why didn't I just use a single guitar? Because with two guitars it is possible to create extremely dense, close secondal or quartal harmonies that are mostly impractical on a single guitar - without resorting to the clever idiosyncratic (but harmonically restricted) open-string trickery of which Heitor Villa-Lobos was typically so fond.

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And why Japan in particular, I hear you ask? As part of the Creative Process, I often like to put irreconcilable opposites together into a conceptual mixing bowl, then stand back and watch what happens. The music of Poulenc is about as far from Japanese music as you can imagine, so - ideal. Impossible is Nothing. Hey, it works OK for me. But admittedly, for a long time I had to confront the blank score marked boldly with "flute-guitar-guitar". LITTLE ME vs BIG SCARY BLANK MANUSCRIPT PAGE. We defiantly stare each other down like wrestlers before a match.
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Finally, here's a photo of some typical 1920s Parisian concert-goers reacting critically to Poulenc's music...
 "Imbecile!! Vous devriez mieux continuer le style de Beethoven, alors!"

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