Three Choirs and TaikOz Premieres
The next two weeks are exciting ones for me as they will see the premieres of two major works that I have been working on from as long ago as 2018.
The first up will be Voices of Power an oratorio that started life as a conversation with Hilary Summers in Euston station in 2018 and has grown to become a 45min major work for the Philharmonia Orchestra, Choir, soloist (Hilary), complete with a new text from Jessica Walker. The performance is being conducted by the wonderful Samuel Hudson who is giving the work detailed care and attention.
The work is an exploration of power with a message of hope for our future leaders. At the end of this blog you can read the full programme note written by myself and Jessica Walker.
The rehearsals are currently underway, with the first orchestral rehearsal having fallen on the hottest day EVER in the UK last Tuesday. I thought it could be a sign that the work might herald an oven like dystopia, but I’m assured all went well, there were just a few sweaty musicians.
The premiere takes place on the 28th of July in Hereford Cathedral at 7:45pm as part of the Three Choirs Festival.
Also next week will be the premiere of my work Songs and Grooves, a very different piece, for taiko drum ensemble, two synthesizers, bass clarinet and saxophones.
This is another piece that has had a long gestation, from about 2019, and as with other musicians this work was delayed in its performance by the pandemic. I’m thrilled that we have now made it to performance and that there will be 3 chances to catch the piece in Australia over the next few weeks. Starting with the Blue Mountains on the 30th, Sydney on the 6th and Canberra on the 12th. I will be in Australia for these performances and can’t wait to hear how these brilliant musicians have bought my work to life.
Songs and Grooves is a new step for me in using synthesizers. I have focused on some very deep bass tones, with influences from the Cure’s album Disintegration, Herbie Hancock’s Thrust and more recently the soundtrack for Stranger Things.
Inspiration for Songs and Grooves
The use of the synths is not only for tone colour, but one synth player has scope to improvise in large swathes of the piece. I am working with the synth player as a jazz musician, interpreting chords symbols and responding to the other musicians in the work. The other synth player is playing fully notated material and moving both within and outside of the harmony of their synth partner.
The Taiko ensemble are at the centre of the work and drive its rhythm and feel, shifting between establishing groove patterns, atmospheric soundscapes and in the “songs” they mark phrases and propel the internal motion of the song. The two melody instruments are given the roles of “voices” in the songs, weaving contrapuntal melodies and tense progressions to a musical/melodic peak.
This work sits within a series of somewhat jazz related works, starting with Chasing The Nose and more recently my Saxophone Concerto Tracks in the Orbit, which audiences in Australia will have a chance to hear in October and audiences in France in 2023.
It’s going to be an intense few weeks but I can’t wait to hear all this new music and to work with all these wonderful and dedicated musicians. I can’t thank TaikOz enough for commissioning this work and for collaborating with me so generously on it’s development. Check out their fab video for the tour.
Voices of Power - Programme Note
Voices of Power is an oratorio for our times exploring the notion of what power is, who holds it, and how it might need to change. This urgent musical and narrative trajectory is plotted through seven central powerful women, from history through to the present day. Each of them represents a key aspect of power, evoked and imagined through distinct musical characterizations.
The work is a bold, broad canvas in which voices and instruments combine over the course of 45 minutes. They introduce and build new musical ideas for soloist, choir and orchestra.
At the centre of the work is the voice and personality of the soloist, Hilary Summers:
Luke – ‘I have always loved the sound of Hilary Summer’s contralto voice. Since first hearing her sing, when I was a student, working as an usher at Wigmore Hall, I had a passion to compose for her. Fast forward many years and Hilary and I were sharing new ideas for a piece together. We discussed things she liked to sing and things that interested us both. What kept recurring for me was a love of her voice, it’s power, beauty, and range. All of these aspects are on full display in this new work’.
Jess – ‘As well as being a writer, I’m also a singer, and I have worked with Hilary several times, in a range of pieces from Gerald Barry to Leonard Bernstein. When Luke suggested the idea for this collaboration, I was delighted to be able to work on an idea encapsulating Hilary’s extraordinary theatrical and emotional range, together with her fantastic sense of humour’.
The Piece
Hilary embodies each voice of power through a different musical character and power trait.
The journey begins with a violent expression of force in the figure of Boudica, with accompanying angular music, tempered at times with the love for her despoiled daughters and her murdered husband - the motivation for her rage. With Elizabeth I we explore her determination not to fall, despite knowing the end is near. Catherine the Great shows us her strength of will and personality through the medium of a letter, of which she famously wrote thousands. Eleanor Roosevelt reminds us that she was the woman who read out the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Margaret Thatcher’s commanding image and voice play out via an elocution lesson, through the course of which she gradually lowers her voice in order to embody the traditional notion of power. The singer’s voice lowers and when we arrive at the desired register, the Thatcher we know is with us, and her music takes flight. Another steely woman given a hearing is Hillary Clinton, who delivers the speech she never got to make.
As the work progresses into the present day and women who are in power today, including Jacinda Ardern, the music becomes increasingly lyrical and welcoming. The aspects of power on display in this final third of the work shift towards compassion and collaboration –with a plea for rethinking what kind of power might help tackle major global crises such as climate change and social inequality. The warm textures and lyricism suggest the necessary inclusiveness of new leadership styles, and render obsolete historic ideas of brute force, greed and short-termism as the panacea for humanity’s ills.
To arrive at this sense of collective embrace, the chorus undergoes a change throughout the work. They begin as a group of contemporary outsiders, passing judgement on each figure, praising them, or spurring them on to the next example of power, learning from the one before. When we reach the modern day, the chorus, with five soloists, join Hilary in singing the voices of The People/Society. These people, who eventually come to include the whole chorus, echo new maxims of collaborative power, drawn from inspirational contemporary figures such as Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. Phrases are taken up by the chorus, driving the work to its final climax. The chorus and soloist have become one in the delivery of these new, hopeful ideals.
The work ends with a reflective coda, briefly referencing the beginning of the piece, before rising slightly in hope of a better future, and of continuing collaborative expressions of power.
Luke Styles/Jessica Walker
PR