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'Frieze' for orchestra

Like Speranza, Frieze marks an exploration of larger musical structures and an attempt to invent a language that can bear the structural weight of that greater time frame. Written before Speranza, Frieze is a four movement symphony in all but name, (though I chose not to name it as such), and modeled, for the most part, directly on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (clearly evident in the opening fifths) – which followed it at its first performance. The first three movements of Frieze are in many ways direct analogues of the Beethoven – a considered re-invention of that particular musical language in terms of my own. The large-scale musical tensions in the Beethoven are in my work rendered in a harmonic and tonal language that is essentially at odds with the original and underlying harmonic and tonal structures in the Beethoven. However the fourth movement to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has always struck me as a failure – as a creative mess, rather than the merging of abstract symphonic thought with philosophical-political idealism. As my model for the fourth movement of Frieze I turned instead to the dance moves of Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies. Let’s face it – and quite aside from the musical and structural disaster of the Ninth Symphony finale - the underlying idealism of Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s text long went up in smoke - in the crematoria of Auschwitz and in the gassing of children on the ‘battlefields’ of Syria.

I must admit haven’t yet seen in the flesh the original of the Klimt Beethoven Frieze from which the title is taken. But the idea of using an early twentieth century (1902) interpretation of the composer as the springboard for my own twenty-first-century imaginative interaction with him seemed obvious – and an excellent reason not to call it a ‘symphony’.