4

Composed: Durham, November-December 1987

Revised: Charterhouse, October 1989

Performed: i) Durham Music Society Concert:

flute: Caroline Stockman

piano: Clive Broadbent

ii) (Revised version)

SPNM Concert, Lauderdale House, Highgate, London

flute: Marian Erhardt

piano: Michael Dussek

4.1 Introduction

Through the Sharp Hawthorn was written following a suggestion by Dr John Casken for a piece for the excellent flautist Caroline Stockman, then present in Durham.

The full title is a line from King Lear - Lear's wits have just 'been turned' and he is talking on the heath to 'Poor Tom' , the 'mad' version of Edgar, who has been forced to flee from his father who believes him guilty of treachery. Rather than leaving the country, and therefore his misguided father to the actual treachery of his 'bastard' half-brother, Edmund, he chooses to dress in rags and act as a madman.

This title was considered appropriate for a number of reasons: the storm scene of the play during which the line occurs is one of the bleakest in all Shakespeare, and I consider this piece to be one of the most bleak in mood I have written; the scene represents a 'turning point' in the drama: this piece represents a turning point in my composing, (or at least it felt so at the time); the imagery was appropriate: the cold wind representing the flute, the sharp hawthorn, the piano; finally, the inverted nature of the line, (a more common, more modern version might be 'the cold wind blows through the sharp hawthorn'), represents at least one of the compositional features of the work.

4.2 Analysis & Compositional Methods

As with a number of pieces in this portfolio, the original structure has become much elaborated in the process of composition. Very broadly, there are two sections, the second mirroring the first. Generally, the second section is an expanded version of the first, with the material being 'inverted'; i.e. the flute ideas of the first section are imitated by the piano in the second, and vice versa. The first section is itself divided into sections. Overall, the first section represents an 'exposition', and the second a combined development and recapitulation.

Two terms find themselves repeated throughout this analysis: verse and chorus. On a number of different levels, they represent the two basic materials used in the piece. The first is represented by the first six 'melodic' notes of the theme, the second by the final sustained note. In general, verse material is melodic and moving and chorus material is sustained, static, repetitive or contemplative in nature. Of course, as the materials become more and more interconnected these distinctions become increasingly blurred.

These terms are most obviously associated in twentieth-century British music with Harrison Birtwistle, and indeed, it was a (brief) study of his Verses for clarinet and piano that provided some of the initial impetus for the piece. What I found most appealing about the Birtwistle was not its sound, or its 'intellectual' shape, but the way in which the music was organised and constructed. In his analysis of the piece Michael Hall shows to a limited extent how material is generated from a repeated clarinet note and a delicate piano figure by moving first backwards and then forwards through the material in a succession of verses. During each verse new material is generated by this process, so the music proliferates. The piece is highly restrained in expression throughout.

My interest in this process is related to interests in similar processes in mathematics, where a function, ostensibly purely logical and defined, can be used in a sequential manner to produce series or sets of numbers which, as a whole, can display a highly varied content. So, in the sequence

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10...

the structure is both logical and visible. The series

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34...

(the Fibonacci sequence) is equally logical but less obvious 'visibly', while

1 21 29 15 35 3874 5 863...

is obvious neither logically nor visibly.

In all of these cases, only the basic logical and mathematical processes are used, at first simply (x+1), and then in a more complex manner. The only real difference between each example is the ease of finding out how the results came about: the latter being rather like a question in a puzzle book. In each case, it is the most basic of units (whole numbers) that make up the 'set' of all material used. Each stage of the process can be seen as a different level, each of which works on its own, but which can also be seen as a combination of processes, again, each working on their own. Complex and multi-level structures can be constructed in this way, using basic and simple processes on a number of different levels.

There are a number of other compositional devices used in Through the Sharp Hawthorn, many of which are fairly simple versions of the transformations explored in the Sextet. More than any other piece, however, this one depended on what had gone on before in an organic and intuitive way. Of far more interest here is the basic structural detail, the symmetry of which I had not used in a piece until this one.

Below is a basic structural analysis of Through the Sharp Hawthorn. Refer to the Graphic Analysis for a proportional view.

* * * * * *

Section 1 Section 2 (reflection)

Allegro (Verse) Verse (R)

Interlude Interlude (R)

* * * * *

A good example of each of these methods can be explained by analysing and comparing the first couple of pages of each of the first and second sections.

Following this climax is a codetta and an interlude-like passage. This has a similar, although less important, function as the 'cloud' interlude in the Sextet. As there, this passage represents a 'pause' in the action, an area that is 'outside' the main drama. Here, the passage is shorter and has less significance in structural terms than the Sextet's 'clouds'. However, I felt and feel that this passage (and its reflection towards the end of the piece are successful and appropriate, not least because of the place they could be seen to represent in the drama of King Lear. The music is not programmatic, but as was mentioned above, the structure of the play had some significance; at some point in the piece, (just after the storm and just before Lear points out that "Through the Sharp Hawthorn Blows the Cold Wind"), Lear's wits "begin to turn", and following this, the whole power base of the country in inverted. This passage seems to me to be a very appropriate musical metaphor for 'turned wits'.

4.3 Meta-Global Elements

4.4 Influences

As has been mentioned above, the basic impulse for the piece, and some of the terminology used above may have been supplied by a brief study of Birtwistle's Verses for clarinet and piano, but although I think I initially meant the piece to be quite similar, it its final form it is substantially different in intention, mood and sound. Apart from a few elements of Messiaen in some of the piano writing, I can see few other direct musical influences.

4.5 Judgement

4.6 The Recording