Output details

Concerto for Bassoon, Seven Solo Strings and Small Orchestra : 3 movements, 25 minutes

This work represents my first attempt to write microtonally for chamber orchestra, using techniques developed in the composition of my second and third string quartets and several other chamber works – notably that of retuning a proportion of the musical forces quartertonally, thus using conventional notation to achieve quartertonally altered sound, and then combining or contrasting that sound with normally tuned musical forces. In this bassoon concerto, orchestral strings are tuned down a semitone, orchestral wind and solo strings are not altered, and the bassoon soloist plays within the context of both.

It is perhaps not surprising that preoccupations with quartertonal music should have coincided with a series of visits to the Middle East. Indeed the magical effects, as I perceive them, of the melodic nuance and resonance of Arabic music, and even calls-to-prayer, are striven for and imitated or represented in this work; particularly in the middle section of the second movement and the first part of the third. At another level, the visual impact of the Middle East brought me to attempt corresponding, and related, aural beauty. At a third level, events -both contemporary and historical- in the region “became” music; particularly with regard to the interplay between consonance and dissonance, conflict and resolution, which characterise both Middle Eastern history and the music within this work.

Within the portfolio Analytical Observations are provided. A “guide” to the harmonic structure of Beit Hanoun, where in 2006 swarming women and children in the town prevented a confrontation between Islamic and Israeli fighters, illustrates how quartertonal harmonies are used in the first movement to resolve semitonal dissonance (pp 3-6); pp 7-11 illustrate the transformation of petroglyphs in Oman to parts of the second movement; finally the mode used for the bassoon melody in the second movement appears as p12.