Programme Notes

Airs, Waters and Floating Islands was commissioned by Susan Tomes with funding from The Holst Foundation, and was premiered by her in Kettles Yard, Cambridge in March 1996. It reflects, in its title, my recurrent concern with juxtaposition of blocks of opposing musical expressions; it was begun very much as a patchwork of these blocks, or ‘floating islands’, though later it became a more unified ‘poem’, with the coda, for example, reprising versions of the two main sections. The opening chunky (cluster) material – the ‘Airs’ – gives way to a stately ‘Waters’ flow; after a further clomping cluster section, the second idea is also reprised, as a chorale. The later part of the piece moves into a more fluid world of passagework, relying heavily on a unison texture which gives way use of parallel intervals. Finally the coda brings back, refracted, the cluster and chorale ideas, growing ever closer together. The contrast between blocks that interlock and separately evolve was characteristic of my pieces in the 90s, but it also pointed forward to multi-movement structures with segmented contrasts, such as my 2002 quartet Driftwood on Sand – or to Agricolas, with its connecting ‘Bridge’ episodes; I have often likened the smaller component pieces of these works to ‘offshore islands’.

c Piers Hellawell 2011

Agricolas, for clarinet and orchestra, was commissioned by Robert Plane with financial assistance from the Britten-Pears Foundation and Vaughan-Williams Trust, and was given its world premiere by him at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, in Llandaff Cathedral, on 11 September 2008. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales was conducted by Michal Dworzynski.

Agricolas takes its title and concept of design from the work of the American sculptor David Smith, many of whose works were grouped into sets in terms of their shared titles – for example the Agricolas. The work avoids the typical long-range structures of a concerto; instead it reflects the modular structure of many of Smith’s pieces with a mosaic sequence of shorter sections, scored for ‘chamber’ ensembles; there are two sets of these sequences, forming two overall movements that are thus akin to ‘sculptures’. Each of these presents three main pieces, linked by brief connecting sections (‘Bridges’) that concentrate on unison lines - groups of instruments playing the same melody - and simple ostinati. These Bridge sections are analogous to rods and struts that connect the objects in many of Smith’s pieces.

Another connecting level between several of the main sections is a recurring harmonic series that I call an ‘escalator’; this is unrolled in a wide range of treatments, so that several pieces become variations on this musical skeleton – chorale preludes with separate identities. The last of these is heard at the end, a brief Epilogue. In Agricolas the solo clarinet is conceived in the role of a commentator: eschewing strident display and conflict, it is free to explore a variety of chamber associations around the orchestra. However, the relation between clarinet and its fellows is a deepening one, beginning in a ‘concertante’ fashion with an athletic accompanied work-out but becoming increasingly, in movement II, a lyrical partnership - although at the end of this movement the solo clarinet explodes into action.

Movement 1:

Recitative-Ensemble – Bridge 1 – Chorale Prelude (chaconne) – Bridge 2 – Recitative-Ensemble

Movement 2:

Chorale Prelude (Blues) – Bridge 3 - Chorale Prelude (canons) – Bridge 4 – Chorale Prelude (Sancta Maria)

Chorale Prelude (Epilogue)

c Piers Hellawell 2008

This work was commissioned by the Belfast Music Society for their International Festival of Chamber Music in 2013, and was premiered by Paul Watkins (cello) and Huw Watkins (piano) on 21st February 2013.

atria is a set of five pieces lasting in total about 12 minutes. The three main pieces (i, iii, v) progressively expand in scale, growing from the one-minute opening piece to the final, five-minute scena; this dramatic curve echoes that of my first major piano work, Das Leonora Notenbuch (1988), each of whose pieces expands from the scale of the previous. This formal preoccupation is hiding within in the title atria, or 'hallways', intended to convey that each piece forms an entry-point to the next, as if the listener were moving further into a building of progressively larger chambers. The progress is, however, a zig-zag, for between the three main duo pieces are two shorter interludes (ii and iv); these are less exactly prescribed in notation, and explore an expanded cello sound-world not explored in the main pieces. Use of brief experimental interludes among main pieces was also a feature of my work, Sound Carvings From The Bell Foundry for brass quintet (2006).

These interludes include references to the three main pieces, out of context as if in a dream version; more importantly, though, they are about conjuring one or two brief but static soundscapes, while pieces i, iii and v are evolving dramas – musical journeys.

c Piers Hellawell 2011

This work was commissioned by Fenella Humphreys for her Bach to the Future project, and was premiered by her at Aldeburgh on 10th September 2014. It was commissioned with funds generously provided by the RVW Trust, the PRS Foundation For Music, the Nicholas Boas Trust, the Ida Carroll Trust and a large number of private backers through Kickstarter.

Balcony Scenes is a set of four pieces that involve two pairings: the first and the last pieces are Fantasia i and Fantasia ii, while between them come Bicinium i and Bicinium ii. While the fantasia pieces present interlocking sections of contrasted music, the Bicinium pieces concentrate in each case on one idea - the pervading split-level dialogue that gives the work its name: ‘bicinium’ denotes a two-part exercise in contrapuntal dialogue (as worked by Lassus, for example). The two bicinia interpret this very loosely, however, and show contrasted behaviours: bicinium i contrasts a slow chorale with interpolated passages of a birdsong-like material, as if the music of two separate worlds is intercut without any relation between those worlds; bicinium ii is a virtuosic interplay between competing rising- and falling-scale ideas that prove too entangled for a set of variants to unravel. The idea of dialogue between ground-level and elevated (balcony) participants is also found in the outer, fantasia pieces, which try to maximize the register contrasts within the violin and, even, sometimes, to create the idea of a ‘bass register’ for the instrument. The opening gesture of Fantasia i, which recurs to open Fantasia ii, spells out the name ‘Fenella’.

Piers Hellawell c 2014

Basho was premiered by Herbert du Plessis, Salle Cortot, Paris in December 1997. It began life as part of a call, later abandoned, for new works making only ‘amateur’ demands and linked to a repertoire piece, so that both could be played by young musicians. When I returned later to complete the fragment, its technical demands were allowed to grow with each of its paired variations, but these retained their structural debt to Haydn’s Piccolo Divertimento in F minor. Haydn’s famous major/minor duality became, here, one between a spiky unison and a richer chordal idea. Like the opposing ideas of Airs, Waters and Floating Islands these then evolve, respectively, to be unfolded here in six pairs of variations after the twin themes. I borrowed the title of a Basho, or sumo wrestling contest, with its fifteen short bouts - enjoying also the slighty percussive/pianistic overtones of the title to English ears.

c Piers Hellawell 2011

The call of the horn has always transcended its mere sound to take on a wider role, a signifier of meaning for man or beast. Later, via these associations, it became a poetic image – a symbol of farewell for Beethoven and Schubert, and of the dangers of another sort of chase for Wagner in ‘Tristan & Isolde’.

“Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse

Don’t meurt le bruit parmi le vent”

These lines from Cors de chasse, Apollinaire’s brief poem about memory, were my starting point for this score, and they appear above one passage. Another couplet,

“Passons passons puisque tout passe

Je me retournerai souvent”,

is quoted elsewhere in the score. I have used these words on our perception of time’s passing since music itself is so gifted with the power of allusion, yet at the same time so reliant on our memory to overcome its transience. The piccolo motif that opens this work, for example, later returns at various points (‘souvent’, but less and less so); yet this recurrence only has allusive meaning because we use the tool of recollection for our musical navigation. The reference only works - or ‘rings a bell’ - if we recognize it. So listening is all about memory and association – or, as Apollinaire puts it, ‘memories are hunting horns, their calls fading on the wind’.

Those hunting horns, the ‘cors de chasse’, also furnished an appropriate title for a double concerto for brass soloists. The work was conceived from the start as a tribute to Sweden’s modern brass virtuosi, not only for their skill but for their advocacy of a new repertoire largely written for them.

Cors de chasse plays for 14 minutes, in a single movement. Its guiding principle is a gradual slowing-down process, for its six main sections progressively lose pace after the brisk opening dialogues between orchestral groups with which it opens. The second section brings the solo trumpet and trombone into discussions that maintain a high level of energy, bringing to a close the ‘exposition’ of musical material. Opening a new phase, first the trombone and then the trumpet have solo passages with light accompaniment; once they are reunited, a long chaconne section unfolds a repeated harmonic progression, but this striding chord-sequence itself is gradually broadening in pace as it approaches and passes its climactic point. An accompanied cadenza for trumpet and trombone introduces the fast coda, at the work’s opening tempo, in which the ‘hunting horns’ are free to celebrate velocity.

Cors de chasse was commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Brighton Festival for the 2004 Brighton International Festival, where it was premiered by Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet), Jonas Bylund (trombone) and the Philharmonia, conducted by Thierry Fischer. It is dedicated to its tireless friends David, Barbara, Nikola and Roanna.

c Piers Hellawell 2004

This orchestral piece is the central item of a set of pieces, designed for various spaces and ensembles, that was commissioned by THE SAGE, GATESHEAD for its opening festivities in December 2004, and premiered by the Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Peter Weigold. In the context of my orchestral music of the last decade, this piece marks an exercise in restraint - a characteristic not associated, by me or maybe more generally, with the modern orchestral project. Firstly the chamber orchestra imposed upon me boundaries of instrumental colour: it demanded a concentration on direction and syntax from which it is too easy to be distracted by the coloristic possibilities of the symphony orchestra, with its extreme register possibilities and its alluring mixtures. Secondly, this piece and all the pieces of Degrees of Separation were written for highly specific venues and acoustics, of which THE SAGE is justly proud: when I was in the hall for rehearsals, the acousticians were still testing their work and asking for feedback, the resulting hall a masterpiece of clarity that encourages exposure of lines and layers. In anticipation of such a building, this piece was driven by marked forward momentum and surface line: it also exposes various sub-groups from within the full ensemble. The form of the piece follows a favourite principle of mine, the gradual slowing down from an initial shove in the back – so that the latter part of the piece, following a central riot, is a long, spacey passage that gradually yields all momentum as it moves into a coda, the orchestra finally pared down to a pair of horns and double basses playing harmonics.

c Piers Hellawell 2009

This work was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s first season in City Hall, Glasgow.

Dogs and Wolves takes its title from the great poem of that name by the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, in his majesterial English version. His poem is a headlong hurtle through the mountainous landscape of the poet’s imagination, the traditional poetic image of the hunt expressing the search for the elusive beauty and truth of poetic expression - ‘the white deer of your beloved beauty’. With such imagery the poem can also be read as a love-poem, or rather as a poem about the impossibility of holding onto ‘eternal’ love.

For all that, it was this poem’s breathless curve - from the initial chase, through the brief glimpse of the idyllic quarry to the resumption of the tormenting restlessness of the hunt -that suggested to me a single-span orchestral piece, although at the same time this shape, while clearly suggested by the poem, was already with me from my earlier Cors de chasse - its attraction being the challenge of retaining dramatic impetus while controlling the gradual slackening of pace.

There are five phases to the Dogs and Wolves narrative: it begins with a restless babble of fanfares that climb towards a plateau, before the momentum yields to soloistic challenges from smaller groups. There follows a series of several ‘Blues’, brief sections in which small ensembles – initially just a pair of trombones - unwind improvisatory lines over a moving bass. An exuberant climax to the last of these yields to a long unwinding of tensions, overlapping harmonies that unfold downwards in different orchestral groupings. The ensuing glimpse of stillness is finally supplanted by a coda, which restores rapid pace and a kaleidoscope of colour.

c Piers Hellawell 2005

This string quartet was commissioned by the Classical Music Society of Londonderry, with financial assistance from the National Lottery, and was premiered in the Nerve Centre, Derry by the Medici String Quartet in March 2001.

The design of this work shares with my earlier quartet, The Still Dancers, a concern with external structure – with whether movements are fixed in position, whether they can be displaced among other works, whether in this way a single work can tell different stories. In Driftwood On Sand this affects the actual ordering of pieces, and thus the overall structure: two main movements are fixed, while four contrasted ‘preludes’ are deployed around them in any order, at the players’ discretion. These shorter pieces occupy four slots around the two main ones. Because the preludes are of sharply contrasted moods, their order determines the dynamic shape of the whole work – it might open ethereally and close forcefully, or could open powerfully but fade away at the end; it is like a story that has various endings, chosen by the teller.

In a sense the preludes are ‘driftwood’, against the fixed background of the ‘sand’, the two main movements. These are respectively slow and faster pieces, though both go through different phases. The slow one opens with an aria for viola; later, the two violins climb higher and higher, locked into a duet. The faster movement begins by outlining six disconnected fragments, as if it, like the whole work, is telling different stories. These fragments later resume, expanded, the strangest of them ending the movement with a coda.

c Piers Hellawell 2001

Driftwood On Sand (short note)

This string quartet was commissioned by the Classical Music Society of Londonderry, with financial assistance from the National Lottery, and was premiered in the Nerve Centre, Derry by the Medici String Quartet in March 2001.

This work shares with my earlier quartet, The Still Dancers, an experimental structure: it is like a room in which we continually reorder the furniture. Driftwood On Sand’s two main movements are fixed, while four contrasted ‘preludes’ are deployed around them in any order, at the players’ discretion. These shorter pieces occupy four slots set around the two main movements. The order of the contrasted short pieces controls the work’s narrative - whether it creeps in, if it erupts in the middle and how it ends.

In a sense the preludes are ‘driftwood’ against the fixed background of the ‘sand’, the two main movements. These are respectively slow and faster pieces, though both go through different phases. The first is an ‘aria’, the second a series of garish visions.

c Piers Hellawell 2001

This work was for me the end of a musical phase, being the last of a series of works in which I have been exploring the expressive territory of simple, chorale-like materials; these have spread through my works from The Hilliard Songbook (1995), whose vocal-ensemble scoring directed me to these clearcut harmonic objects. At the same time the work is a beginning, being the first of three planned 'double concerto' works.

The Nåjd ( pronounced 'Noyd') was a shaman, a spiritual healer, among the the nomadic Sami population of the Northern Nordic countries. In a folk museum in Northern Sweden, I saw a small drum used by a shaman to assist his healing; this was achieved by the pulses that induced the trance state needed for his healing process. If the percussion here represents a route to healing, then the recorder - monodic, melodic - is more a symbol of the healing itself, a state of stillness and resolution that has to be achieved. The solo relationship between active percussion and lyrical recorder is thus one of struggle and cooperation.

There are five movements, preceded by a short 'invocation'. Then the short first movement - fast - introduces orchestral families, decorated by various solo colours. The slow (second) movement is the recorder's solo, as partner to both wind and string groups. The third section is really a scherzo, and presents recorder and marimba in opposition, almost in a duel of speed. This is followed by the main percussion solo movement. Finally, the percussive power is resolved in the final movement, in which the two solo elements sing in fusion.

The work's opening recorder song (the invocation) is based on a Swedish cattle-call, transcribed with her permission from the beautiful singing of Swedish-Estonian folksinger Sofia Joons. This melody recurs occasionally in the rest of the work. Appropriately, Sofia Joons says that in the recording on which this is based, her words - which would originally have been directed to other lonely shepherds - are: ' Here I am; if you hear me, please sing back to me.'

Drum of The Nåjd was commissioned by the Northern Sinfonia, and premiered by them with Michala Petri (recorders) and Evelyn Glennie (percussion) during the Autumn tour of their 1997-98 season.

c Piers Hellawell 1997

This piano trio was commissioned by Gerry Mattock and Beryl Calver-Jones in 2007 for the Da Vinci Trio.

Four pieces make up the work: three short movements feature, in turn, leading roles for violin, piano and cello, while a single larger movement sees all of these ideas and solos revisited in an extended version. This design, a sort of ‘games’ in the ancient sense of a competitive celebration of athletic prowess, was the gift of the work’s commissioners and dedicatees, and was one that I found creative and fertile. In fact the stowing-away of material from elsewhere in a work is a recurring aspect of my musical forms: in my first string quartet, The Still Dancers, there is at the centre of second of the three pieces a miniature version of itself and of the others - a model of the work within the work. So each of the instruments in Etruscan Games has, in its ‘solo’ piece, a territory of ideas that is expressively contrasted with the other two; in the longer movement, meanwhile, this ‘family’ is brought together into a turbulent confluence.

Unusually for me, therefore, the work’s shape has no extra-musical association. The lost Etruscan language, one of Europe’s ancient and now tantalisingly inscrutable tongues, came to mind during discussions with the commissioners about how new music speaks, or does not, to listeners (and performers) less familiar with its sound-world and syntax. I was aware of the musical content of my trio moving markedly away from the ‘known’ sound world of my recent chamber music, and hence was especially concerned with the perennial question of communication between composer and listener.

c Piers Hellawell 2007

Fictions for ensemble was written in 2014 for the Stony Brook Contemporary Music Players, and premiered by them in November 2015, at Stony Brook University and Roulette, Brooklyn, NY.

This set of three pieces is scored for Schoenberg’s classic Pierrot Lunaire ensemble, which went on to acquire a central role, perhaps one approaching that of the classical string quartet, during the later 20th Century. I have not written a work for the flute/clarinet/violin/cello/piano mix since my Aurora Borealis, written in my 20’s, so I eagerly took the opportunity to revisit this sound-world.

The three pieces are diverse in their atmosphere and means; each seeks to create a world in which that of the other two cannot be imagined. For this reason they bear a title borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges’ story collection Ficciones: Borges had a particular interest in the evocation of imagined worlds, something that seems to me to be the very task before the composer: what else is the crafting of a musical score but the expressive-expansive postulating of an imaginary world? I was reading Ficciones at the time of planning the work (and, indeed, still am reading it in a sense, since my copy suddenly disappeared in mid-reading. This might appeal to the author, whose character in another story tries to lose ‘The Book of Sand’, a book with no end, in the Buenos Aires National Library).

One piece is short and fast, exploring a dual texture of two lines (one high and one low), that dove-tail to make up in a helter-skelter for the band. A second piece alternates a series of individual solo cadenzas with elaborate sections for quintet, texturally busy but each built on a static harmony; the third piece is a quilt of separate musical ideas, each introducing the next and gradually unfolding a road-trip to a place far removed from the start. Fictions is dedicated with admiration to my friend Perry Goldstein.

Piers Hellawell c 2015

Portrait 1

Landscape

Portrait 2

This string trio was commissioned by Chamber Domaine, and premiered at the 2004 Cheltenham Festival.

The design of this piece is closely related to that of my string quartet Driftwood On Sand, whose title expresses the same idea using a different metaphor. In both works, the individual moods of a few ‘snap-shot’ miniatures are positioned around a longer ‘narrative’ piece, or pieces, that unfold contrasted events. For this string trio, I describe this duality in the contrasted printing formats of ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’ – offering as it were a tension between panoramic and specific viewings.

The two short portraits of this trio are therefore arranged around a central movement. One portrait is turbulent and active, the other more reflective. Portrait 1 presents a central melodic line, passed busily around the voices, while the remaining instruments accompany with secondary fragments; Portrait 2 uses an unusual drone effect in the outer parts to accompany, again, a central melody, this time confined to viola. In between them, meanwhile, Landscape tells a narrative that begins in stillness, moving into a swaying Barcarolle for cello before becoming more assertive; after a brief moment of stillness and concerted playing at the climax, it concludes as a frantic chase. I have a particular liking for the formal principle of progression, wherein a movement travels from a starting-point to very different territory; yet the helter-skelter conclusion of Landscape is, in a way, just its opening in disguise.

It is worth considering that chamber music is inevitably an exercise in the working of new permutations and instrumental relationships, so that the true subject matter of this trio is the endless interaction between the three voices.

c Piers Hellawell 2004

Litholatry, li-thol’a-tri, n. the worship of stones. – adj. Lithol’atrous (Chambers Twentieth-century Dictionary, 1901).

This work is a vigorous single-movement piece that is framed by a slow atmospheric introduction and coda. The main part of the piece unfolds a long melodic line, before the tutti ensemble fragments into subgroups for a succession of short, interlocking sections. The last of these is again for full forces, building to music of pulsating energy before it dissolves into the coda. The work, subtitled ‘Exhibition for Ensemble’, was conceived as an energetic showpiece for a group such as Kokoro.

The title is a reference to my own fondness (entirely artistic rather than religious) for rock surfaces, which I have extensively photographed and which helped create the identity of my Sound Carvings series of works through the last 15 years. One particular lichen pattern influenced the path of this piece: the work’s framed shape was initially charted by taking a course across that rock pattern’s concentric circles, which, seen from above, have the appearance of a microcosmic community or fortress.

Litholatry was commissioned by the Bournemouth Orchestras for Kokoro, for whom it was written in 2000-2001, with funds from the David James Trust.

c Piers Hellawell 2001

MAQUETTE was commissioned by COMA London and was premiered by them, in Christ Church, Spitalfields, in 2005. I was delighted to have a project in which to explore the revelations the COMA phenomenon has delivered about musical means and ends: richness and impact can accrue without the notational micro-exactitude and specialist levels of virtuosity characteristically demanded within the avant-garde. These revelations directed me to think in terms of broad archetypes, such as 'line', 'accompaniment' and 'ostinato', and to specify one dimension - say, the rhythm - while leaving another - (pitch) - loosely defined (or the other way around).

Like AGRICOLAS (2008), MAQUETTE reflects a particular interest of mine in parallels with modern sculpture. I was thinking of the materials and forms of Sir Anthony Caro's sculptures, whose main elements (such as chunky metal sheets) seem at once very clear but equally mysterious, abstract. This seemed a good starting point for the materials of this work: the opening section presents a slow line over a clunking accompaniment, but after some group flourishes this gives way to driving rhythmic patterns. A Maquette is a scale model made in preparation for a full-size sculpture.

c Piers Hellawell 2010

The driving force behind this work was the bass clarinet itself, an instrument whose belated coming-of-age owes much in the UK to redoubtable exponent Sarah Watts. As an orchestral composer I have long given prominence to the instrument, whose versatility, range and expressive colour strengthen its case as ‘the cello’ of the wind family, but this is my first solo – or rather duo, since, like the cello, the bass clarinet cries out for the flexibility of chamber music: it is notable, for example, that in the orchestral context an early champion of the instrument, Wagner, cleared the orchestral decks to profile the distinctive dark voice of bass clarinet in chamber orchestrations, the better to partner its lugubrious expressivity with introspective soliloquies from the singer.

My piece, meanwhile, is markedly more animated, finding bass clarinet and piano outdoing one another in exuberance and agility. The title Minnesang, though derived from the courtly love poetry of the German Middle Ages, points less to the strict song-form of that tradition than to the celebration of love in art, and can best be translated as ‘love-singing’. The medieval minnesang had two ‘A’ verses and a longer ‘B’ verse or abgesang; my piece does loosely follow this geography, though a cascading introduction of about 30” precedes the first, jazzy ‘A’ section. This, like the ensuing second section, presents a febrile, nervous duo music that builds in intensity; the abgesang after the climax is a slow aria that is predominantly reflective, after the previous energy.

c Piers Hellawell 2011

Piani, Latebre (layers, hiding-places) is a set of three diverse pieces for solo piano. Their order is chosen by the pianist; they are preceded by an introductory flourish presenting a tiny preview of their core material. The title began as a feeble pun on ‘piano’ the instrument (pianoforte) and the Italian word piano, denoting layers or storeys, since the piano offers the ultimate in ‘stacked’ or layered textures; to this was then added latebra, hiding-place, for this music is not just concerned with voicing of simultaneous layers but with the search for hidden corners - expressive places - lurking in the familiar sound-world of the piano.

The work is built upon three archetypal materials of the piano keyboard: the tremolo (rapid alternation of two notes or chords), the scalic flourish up or down the keyboard and a striding idea in melody-and-bass. Each piece combines two of these three building materials, so that each occurs in two pieces. My pianistic concern throughout is with the relative weight, or ‘voicing’, of different elements in the texture. The three pieces have clearly distinguished characters, and rely much on the expressive resource offered by the piano’s different registers. Their differences of character offer alternative dramatic sequences depending on the ordering; this dramatic choice of running order is, as in other of my works, left to the performer.

Piani, Latebre was commissioned by William Howard with funds generously provided by Landmark Chambers, and was premiered by him in Shoreditch Church, London, as part of the 2010 Spitalfields Festival. It is dedicated to Neil and Matilda King.

c Piers Hellawell 2010

My series of instrumental Sound Carvings works through the 1990s featured strings and mixed chamber media, the generic title referring to a formal relationship of short movements arranged more like sculptures than as a fixed sequence. The pieces in this series have between three and twenty-one short movements; this work in the series is in six movements. These do have sequential relationship, in that two are interludes between larger pieces, while the first piece is clearly introductory. This title also refers to the distinctive ‘bell’ feature shared by the brass instruments, and likens the creative of music for brass to the casting of a bell – for indeed the raw materials of the instruments of the group are an ever-present element in the material created for them.

Several musical ideas here evolved from my recent work for a very different medium: in spring 2006 I evolved and directed the music for a theatrical spectacle by the children of a school in the Isle of Skye, Scotland – An Dealbh Mòr (the Big Picture), a 20’ dance performance with semi-improvised score by an ensemble of musicians from among the children. A number of leading ideas from the recent collaboration is developed into this work for brass: in particular the project’s main idea, ‘Anthem’, appears in various guises through this work – most obviously in the two interludes, which treat it in the manner of chorale preludes.

Sound Carvings from the Bell Foundry is dedicated to the artist Julie Brook, who created the project An Dealbh Mòr. It was co-commissioned by the Belfast Festival at Queen’s with funds from the National Lottery of Northern Ireland, and by the Kristiansand Festival, Norway, for Stockholm Kammarbrass, who premiered it in October 2006.

c Piers Hellawell 2006

Syzygy is a set of three highly contrasted pieces for brass quintet and chamber or small orchestra. The project arose from my 2006 collaboration on Sound Carvings from the Bell Foundry with Stockholm Chamber Brass, which led to a request from them for a work combining the quintet with orchestra that could be performed in Sweden and the UK.

The work is part of a series of concertante pieces in which I have, for many years, sought to re-think the relationship between solo and massed forces; my previous works have sought ways to pursue an interactive, reflective relationship. This has in turn directed my orchestral thinking toward emphasis on chamber groupings, whose fresh acoustic mixtures have become more important to me than massed orchestral tutti. For this reason Syzygy draws upon the greater individual identities and chamber possibilities of the chamber orchestra: indeed one can chart a progression, in the work’s three pieces, from the treatment of the orchestra as a solid mass (in movement I) to its role more as a collection of individual soloists (in movement III).

The title refers to an alignment of three or so heavenly bodies in which the middle planet obscures the others’ views of one another. Here, the bodies are the pieces: the second piece, being the largest, separates two very different pieces on either side. Piece I is a stately meditation; Piece II moves from a whispered beginning to an steady building of power and climax; Piece III is energetic throughout. As in a planetary syzygy, pieces I and III remain disconnected, not only in expressive mood but in treatment of the solo brass quintet – which, like the orchestra, evolves during the work: in piece I the quintet is a separate entity, isolated from and ignorant of the orchestra (save for a solitary clarinet) – yet, when we reach piece III, the five brass soloists have become more concerned with orchestral ensembles than with one another. The central piece mediates between these, the quintet (still a unit) interacting with the orchestra in a manner closer to the traditional concerto. In all three pieces a wide variety of extended sounds is sought from almost every instrumental department; every musician on stage is a soloist.

Syzygy was commissioned by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra with Stockholm Chamber Brass, and was premiered by these forces under the baton of Paul Watkins, in Örebro Konserthus, Sweden on 28th February 2013.

c Piers Hellawell 2011

This piano quartet was commissioned by the Schubert Ensemble of London, with funding from the Schubert Ensemble Trust, and was premiered by them at the 1998 Spitalfields Festival in London.

The work is set in a two-movement form, balancing active and contemplative pieces, that concerned me throughout the 1990s. The first movement begins as a celebratory fanfare before giving way to a more reflective music, while the second movement is slow, and much darker in expression.

The title reflected two non-musical background elements: firstly, the work came into being partly as a celebration of Frank Gehry’s elaborately curved Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; in addition the shape of the work reflected Andrew Wiles’ solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was achieved by making a link between two apparently unrelated ideas.

c Piers Hellawell 1998

The Still Dancers was commissioned by the Britten String Quartet with funds from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and was premiered by them in St George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol during 1993 ...

Truth Or Consequences is a town in New Mexico. When I first heard the name, I was attracted by the philosophical opposites it implied: in musical terms it seemed to refer for me to two musical forms which concerned me. The first of these is a struggle between alternating sections of opposite character (suggestive to me of the immobility of 'truth'); the other, by contrast fluid and evolving, like the game Consequences, is a succession of new sections, each of which acts as introduction to the next. Both these are 'block' forms such as characterize almost all my work of this period.

In this way movement 1 presents a slow music that becomes more elaborate after each interruption by short, athletic passages, though these also expand on each appearance. Movement 2 unfolds a cumulative series of rhythmic phases, with the help of some unusual instrumental sounds.

All these worthy, high-minded thoughts were rudely challenged by the discovery that the town of Truth Or Consequences bought its name from a game show of that name as a publicity stunt. This mundane reality presents a suitably ludicrous contrast to the abstract ideas that gave rise to the music.

c Piers Hellawell 1992

Up By The Roots was commissioned as part of a PRS for Music Foundation ‘Beyond Borders’ award to Fidelio Trio, poet Sinéad Morrissey and composer Piers Hellawell; the collaboration was initiated by Fidelio Trio, who have been shortlisted for the prestigious 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble Award, following a long collaborative relationship with Piers Hellawell. In particular it seemed appropriate that, within the ‘Beyond Borders’ theme, the Irish musicians of Fidelio Trio based in London should collaborate with an English composer working in Belfast; the catalyst proved the involvement of Belfast poet, Sinéad Morrissey, whose words provide a meditation on migration itself.

This collaboration approaches the relation of music and text in a new way; the interaction of chamber music for trio and poetic texts respects, though it also later dissolves, the bounds between these separate territories. Three pieces for piano trio are interleaved with a sequence of three poems, delivered in performance by the author; however, such is the volatile chemistry of music and poetry that this seemly alternation later takes a more subversive turn. As music seeps into poem and poetry becomes sound, the latter stages of this spoken chamber music lie closer to an operatic scena…the three-part poetic sequence on the theme of migration and borders takes as its starting point the poetic transfiguration of a woman’s life in the metaphorical forest of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) - but re-locates it in a modern context. The migrants make landfall only to find that the forest sanctuary offers resistance -first human but then mythical, as the witch Baba Yaga, awoken from forest sleep by the tumult of social upheaval, threatens a mythological transfiguration of all the human forest-dwellers, old and new. The piece ends with their own transfigured night.

Piers Hellawell c 2016

"It was a delight for me to work on this project, liberated as I was from the constraint of having to write language which can be sung, and concentrating instead on words for the spoken voice (my own), placed in a context of music but not entirely meshed with it. However, the points at which music and poetry connected most closely quickly became the most exciting moments of the piece, as geographical, social, and generic breakdown (between the realistic and mythical modes) developed into the complex cross-contamination of language and sound. Form mirrors content as multiple borders are ruptured."

(Sinéad Morrissey)

“The process of composing music around emergent poetic text, rather than setting it for voices, is unsettling and definitely comes without a manual. As our separate compositions of music and words unfolded, it became harder to compose without first knowing the latest turn of the poetry; what began as a distant civility to the poetry, an image of beached landings in my mind as I composed the opening piece, became positively claustrophobic in the later stages as music and poetry converged. Finally I found my head full of the expletives of Baba Yaga as I feverishly furnished them with their musical surround.”

(Piers Hellawell)

Victory Boogie-Woogie for two pianos was commissioned by Riga New Music Centre in Latvia for the Riga Piano Duo for the 1993 Riga Festival of British Music, with funds from the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This work typifies my concern with ‘non-sequential narratives’ – musical forms that zig-zag between segmented contrasts (rather than the prolonged developments typical of European symphonic work). I am especially interested in the musical journey traced through sections of opposite type, and I found a clear pre-echo of this in the later coloured blocks of artist Piet Mondrian. In his writings, Mondrian pointed to the balancing of broad, plain blocks with smaller ones of much brighter colour, so that they are in balance, though not symmetrical.

This piece actually takes as a ‘map’ a vertical slice through Mondrian’s last canvas, Victory Boogie-Woogie. This sequence takes us through a procession of both plain and coloured panels, in succession; in the painting these are separated by borders of brightly beaded strips, which I interpret here as sounds from within the pianos, brief ‘cadences’ between the main sections. These main episodes are ‘coloured’ in ways that should be obvious, the bright ones being rhythmically diverse, extrovert and in some cases with even a whiff of boogie-woogie – while the plain ones (coming at the beginning, the end and here and there along the way, like a refrain) are homophonic and modal, with marked inner voicings of chords.

c Piers Hellawell 2010

This quintet for piano and strings (one of each instrument) was commissioned by the Schubert Ensemble of London to mark their 20th Anniversary, and was premiered by them at the 2003 Brighton Festival. It was funded by the Schubert Ensemble Trust, the Brighton Festival and the Steel Foundation.

This title refers to the amazing story of Angus McPhee of South Uist who, through many years of mental illness, made sense of his life by making things out of grass – not decorative items but household objects such as hats, clothes and even shoes. For me these remarkable but transient artefacts, more than anything of the avant-garde, raise questions about the purpose of art, being deeply rooted in collective memory while not actually functional (with the possible exception of the hats). They are more like cousins once-removed of art – and at the same time emblems of everyday life. Meanwhile the bending of natural materials into artificial, recognisable forms seems to me a kind of composition process.

The work forms a continuous sequence but is in fact a quilt of smaller panels - a collection of related artefacts rather like the grass weavings. Whereas my recent works tend to be written like stories, where the search for a beginning is followed by a straight narrative, this one was written as a series of fragments, finally put together in a chosen pattern, more in the spirit of my ‘sound carvings’ principle of earlier instrumental works. My first idea for an opening, for example, ended up in the middle, and it leads into a set of short variants on a kind of chant - a sequence which forms the work’s second half. The exuberant coda is in fact a transformation of the work’s mysterious opening.

c Piers Hellawell 2003