Performance

Commissioned by the Cambridge Music Festival and the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra with funds from the RVW Foundation. Conducted by Nicholas Daniel and CUCO in the West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, November.(c.15 mins.)

Movement 1sample

Movement 3 sample

A Refusal to Mourn

It was with some trepidation that I began to form ideas about a piece which was to be inspired by, or based on, the works of J.S. Bach: it seemed almost immoral for someone like me to tamper with music that could only be put to lesser effect than in its original form. It was for this reason that I decided to use the melodies of the Lutheran chorales that Bach had set as my material – it was by going back to some of Bach’s sources as opposed to his realization of them that I was somehow freeing-up my own compositional process, while at the same time retaining the connection. The chorales in A Refusal to Mourn are used as entirely non-religious entities, rather like pitch class sets, in tat I use them as the mathematical, or intellectual, basis upon with to build the more intuitive material of the work. For example, in the first section, the notes of the chorale Ich lass’ dich nicht (I shall not leave thee) were piled on top of each other and used to create a chord-sequence with an inversion/transposition process, leaving the oboe free to give a more rhapsodic interpretation of the melody. The second section is based on a motivic cell that is made up of the pitches Christus, der ist mein Leben (Christ is my life) in the order that they occur in the chorale and its inversion (each note being represented only once). Probably best described as a (deliberately!) badly-written fugue, this moto perpetuo-like section is consciously anti-affekt, with moods ranging from the mock-barbaric to the slushily lyrical: for example, the oboe, solo violin, and solo ‘cello theme, which actually is comprised of the retrograde and retrograde inversion of the motivic cell. The last section uses the melody of Christus, der is mein Leben in almost unadulterated form, and functions as a kind of reconciliatory coda, the oboe and strings being united after the first ‘Recitative’ section, where the oboe had been very much a solitary figure against the homogenous body of strings.