Output details

Fred and Ginger

First performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Harding (conductor), Barbican, London, 17 February 2011. Broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

The idea for this piece was initially an abstraction whereby two sets of similarly constructed chords travel loosely in parallel but according to different procedures; one based upon descending semitones, one according to cycles of fifths. The chords themselves would have been familiar to 1930s New York songwriters or any early Schoenbergian.

Fred (Astaire) & Ginger (Rogers) enter the frame so: having started the piece, Carpenter was watching the main pas de deux in the film ‘Top Hat’ (Irving Berlin’s music abounds in the kind of chords described above) and was struck by Astaire’s choreographic technique of gliding through phrases against Berlin’s music. Remembering a quote ("Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards... and in high heels." (Bob Thaves 1982)) he thought it an apt metaphor for the way the musical material was to progress.

‘Fred & Ginger’ stops short of portraiture: it borrows from the dance phrasing (often the music suspends ‘in mid-air’ or is punctuated by silence), whilst the device of running similar chords according to different procedural criteria means that harmonic sequences which are quite innocuous in their separate selves clash fiercely when they elide. If not programmatic in a descriptive sense, 'Fred & Ginger' does nod towards a creative paradox and is certainly a homage.