CHOIR (for SATB Choir)

"The more we sing, the wider ground we make to play in...'

This is a pivotal theme in "Choir", but the big punchline comes only at the very end.

In 2014, at the Jaipur Literary Festival in the Indian state of Rajasthan, there was an interview and poetry reading with the impressive Scottish poet John Burnside. John read a short poem (‘Choir’).  I liked it, have requested John’s permission to use his words, and set it to music for conducted SATB divisi choir.

 As you listen to the music (3' 42"), I highly recommend following the words on the printed music score (below) because my computer-realized choir can only sing in ‘vocalize’ (text-to-voice recognition isn’t yet an option in Sibelius music software). You can scroll through as the music proceeds (I recommend the 'fullscreen' option offered at the bottom... it will open in its own separate new window).

   Choir by Peter Gore-Symes

 Next, connect to a decent sound system or enclosed headphones, and click the orange PLAY button...



Some musings about the setting of words to music...
As a composer, my inner ear is normally full of purely musical ideas. I float around in a faraway bubble-world full of instruments, bird-song, and electronic/found-sounds. But when words get involved, whoa – everything suddenly changes. The audience’s attention is instinctively drawn to the words, the human element, because their meaning is more familiar, graspable, measurable. By contrast, instrumental music means, well, itself.  Unless it is an instrumental arrangement of a well-known song – in which case everyone sings along, mentally imbuing the music with a secondary layer of meaning, an emotional/associative layer.

Mountain Landscape with Rocks'  (John Martin, painted 1851).
What was the first thing that caught your eye?

The presence of words in music parallels the presence of those tiny heroic figures at the epicentre of colossal Romantic landscape paintings – irresistible eye magnets.  Human ears are hard-wired to home in to the lyrics of a song far more readily than to its purely musical elements. Who on earth is likely to maintain attention all the way through instrumental cover versions of Bob Dylan's "Ballad in Plain D"?  Brian Eno in fact recorded several songs with nonsense lyrics specifically to make this point, and jazz/scat singers exploit it with no apparent shame.

David Byrne quipped that "Singing is a trick for getting people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily."  Indeed, the music in most popular songs serves as a mere vehicle for their lyrics - which are often crass, unpoetic, and cringingly second-rate. Voltaire commented that "anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung", and Rossini appeared to concur when he joked "Give me a laundry list and I’ll set it to music".

But here, on the other hand, with John Burnside’s succinct poem ‘Choir’, we have a fine piece of literature framing the loftiest of sentiments. All my previous disdainful comments about song lyrics can henceforth be confidently ignored. If I can project John’s poem to the world’s attention by using music as a vehicle, so be it. Burnside’s choral metaphor, if pursued, could save the human race from itself.

Wow. Faced with such a literal Herculean challenge, I decided to unhitch myself from the conventional rigidities and expectations of formal ‘musical structure’ and allow the flow of words and mood to determine what happened from moment to moment during the composition process. Spontaneity, meh! As John Burnside himself put it during his JLF interview – “composing from the lip” – a neat way of encapsulating a non-structuralist worldview.

 As a result my music mostly demonstrates a healthy disrespect for the usual circle-of-fifths musical grammar, conventional functional root progressions and predictable tonal goals.  Mood really does = mode here. It’s a wild ride through some unrelated keys. Heinrich Schenker would doubtlessly blow me a raspberry, but I care not a fig. Chord structures vary from conventional to quartal and crunchy, with shades of dissonance made slave to word intensity and changing mood. And shock horror, Mr Schenker, the piece actually ends on a higher tonal plane than where it started (C-centric lifting to D)... but that neatly parallels the poem’s spiritually uplifting philosophical agenda.

Some house-keeping details:
1. At the mention of polyphony (bar 22), you may detect the stolen opening of J.S. Bach’s Sinfonia No.11 (Three-part Invention, BWV797).  Bach’s dissonances are utterly delicious - my hero. 

2. At bar 20 the canon sequence isn’t a real canon, but hey, I just wanted the yummy colour of those chromatic mediant harmonies – so there, suck that.

3. The recitative fragment (bar 30) should preferably be sung by a suitably extroverted Alto soloist rather than the whole alto section. If there is no suitable Alto volunteer, a heroic Tenor could ride to the rescue with one or two Altos perhaps helping to re-balance the Tenors’ part, if needed.  Find the best solution in your circumstances. A little understated humorous bombast might be entertaining in live performance, perhaps framed by a chorus of bobbed heads at the super-corny cadences of the intro and outro. This solo is perhaps the only spot in the piece where some operatically expressive vibrato could prove a bonus. Otherwise, the wobbles are generally counter-productive to harmonic transparency.

...and speaking of live performance, there is a choice of two endings for the impossible-to-sing word ‘breath’.  Both deliberately make the ‘-th’ audible. See the last page of the score. Neither ending is possible on the recording because the music software can’t deal with a pure ‘th’ sound (as it has no pitch).

PS: This piece isn’t as easy to sing as your average barbershop quartet, so I have prepared four mp3 files (Soprano, Alto, Tenor Bass) as tools for individual ‘note-bashing’ practice prior to group rehearsal. On the Alto track, for example, the other three parts are ghosted into the background a little in order to project the Alto line for learning purposes. By comparison to the proper recording, these tracks are relatively bland, being bereft of most of the nice hairpin dynamic shadings and agogics of the original, but they are, after all, only intended as workhorses to privately assist individual singers. Each mp3 begins with an incipit of a rising arpeggio of the stating pitch cues as usually given by a conductor. If you would like copies of these four mp3s, contact me at fruittbatt@hotmail.com and I can email them to you (no cost, as with all my stuff). Just acknowledge me as usual in any programs or announcements as the composer, and focus due attention on Mr Burnside's fine poetry.

Fibonacci's Private Fantasy in C major

Oh no, I've dabbled again with those addictive Fibonacci numbers. Get yourself some good wraparound headphones or connect to a decent sound system, crank up the volume, and click the orange play button:


Like my earlier piece Fibonacci's Rabbits, its form and content are based on a musical expression of the number series, in terms of pitch (where the unit is the semitone) and also in terms of time. In the first example below, the unit of time is the 32nd note, and the pitches each rise by the corresponding number of semitones:

Technically, the Fibonacci series can be understood to begin with zero  (viz, 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, etc), so by rights I ought to have started my music with a very brief silence. But as silence theoretically precedes the beginning of every piece of music (except in supermarkets, of course), I decided that this was just an academic w*nk and no-one except me would notice its shocking absence.

As with 'Fibonacci's Rabbits', the climax of the piece comes at the golden mean - as you'd expect - and I'm sure you'll detect the sudden aggressive change in mood just after the half-way mark at 1' 15". It effectively cleaves the piece into two unequal sections (AB) the B being shorter than the A in the proportion of the golden mean (0.618). To account for this shorter time-span, the underlying bass figure is consequently slightly speeded up in the B section, but still retains its Fibonacci ratios, of course. This B section, besides being announced by the aggressively louder instrumentation, is tempered and made somehow more familiar and 'gentle' by use of the diatonic C-major scale in the upper instruments (the numerical 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 13th, and 21st notes of the scale, ie, c d e g c' a'' g'''. This generates an entirely different harmonic feel by comparison with the A section, even though the original Fibonacci-derived bass continues to the end, complete with its naughty G-sharp, and finds itself at odds with the major scale environment. Parallel universes, multiple existences.

Overall, the music is clearly C-centric, ie pivoting around the pitch-class C as the epicentre of its sound universe. Given the pitches in the Natural Overtone Series (closely related to the Fibonacci series), the triad of C-major therefore cannot help but be prominent. But there is that unrepentant G-sharp to spice things up a little and introduce some delightful (and badly-needed) irrationality. Several bars before the climax, there is a somewhat 'brittle and quiet' sounding region where the harmony swings vaguely towards G, the V chord, although it is deliberately ambiguous with that  G-sharp lurking in the bass. This is reminiscent of the old classical 'Development' section, and is even introduced by a subtle V/V applied dominant.  So in fact, the piece is extremely traditional in its overall tripartite XYX form, redolent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nothing new to see here, Mr Mozart, move along now. But hey, what the hell... listen anyway. You might even like the noise it makes.

Confused? You should be. The form of the piece is deliberately ambiguous, with a 2-section format superimposed over a 3-section format (Note that 2 and 3 themselves are Fibonacci numbers). The 2-part AB aspect derives from the golden mean of Nature, as revealed by the great mathemagician Fibonacci,  and the 3-part XYX aspect derives from Nurture, the artifice of human creation. (Some might argue that the 3-part form should be labelled XYZ, given that the last part is so considerably less chromatic than the first. Whatever, my thesis is still valid:- whatever you want to call them, there are still 3 sections. Making art ambiguous is not yet illegal in Australia - (well, at least not until Snot Morrison's inevitable coup dumping Malcolm Turnbull).

Instrumentation: a variety of synthesizers and handbells, as per Sibelius 7.2 software. This time there is no score - maybe until someone asks for one.

Mrs Fibonacci Baked a Pie.

'Questa Fanciulla Amor.'.. Francesco Landini's magnificent mediaeval masterpiece

Francesco Landini, composer, musician, and instrument maker.

My latest offering is not my creation at all, but that of superstar Francesco Landini (1325-1397). I've been a flag-waving Landini fan for decades, and in particular of this piece, so I wanted to share it. It's a pity that my computerized rendition uses vocalise instead of real words, but the lyrics are in Italian anyway. The music is disarmingly simple, but the haunting melancholic melody lingers with you after the show. In fact, historical anecdote has it that the original 13th century audiences were so emotionally overcome by this song that 'their hearts burst out of their chests'.

Get some good wrap-around headphones or a decent sound system, and click the orange Play button:



If you would like to follow the 3 pages of the score, here it is, along with the lyrics. Scroll through as the music plays:

   Questa Fanciulla Amor (3-part Ballata by Francesco Landini) by Peter Gore-Symes

The music is categorized as a Ballata, derived from the Italian verb 'ballare', to dance, and is also a form of Italian poetry in the form AbbaAbbaA (my version is but an abbreviated sample). But even though it has its ancestry in dance music, I feel it should not be performed too fast, as many on Youtube like to do. True, many dances have evolved over the centuries - the stately Sarabande, for example, used to be a rollickingly fast folk dance in its early incarnations, as did the Waltz before it became so sylized. In Landini's work, however, the delicious little passing notes in the accompaniment can offer moments of yearning dissonance, yet most performers gallop recklessly over them without giving one's ear the time to savour. Sure, any music can be sped up to become dance music, but in this case that would be to mask the essential melancholy and brooding at the heart of the lyrics. Imagine the Beatles performing their song 'Yesterday' in a fast country rock style.

Instrumentation was not specified in Landini's score, as was often the case in those times. I have chosen viols to accompany the voice, as well as a lute. There was no lute indicated in Landini's score, but it was common practice for a lutenist (or a harpist) to join in, mostly doubling the lines of the viols. It helped the ear to pick out the viols' lines, much in the same way that an artist might etch the edges of objects with a line of black or white. Given the relaxed attitude to instrumentation in Landini's day, it would even be ok to perform the music with lute alone to accompany the voice, but a piano?  Nope - that would cross the red line. Violin/cello can replace the viols in modern performance, but tend to be much brighter and have a stronger 'attack' due to the greater bow-hair tension. Maybe bring out the mute?

I have added musica ficta in the manner of the day. These are accidentals which were not written in Landini's score, but which he knew the performers would insert according to commonly understood practices of the time. Why bother writing them in if you know your performers will do it anyway?  However, those once-common understandings have long since disappeared down the black sinkhole of Time, so in this day and age we the un-tutored are in danger of believing literally in what we see on the music page before us. Oh, the deadly traps for trusting young players of early music.