Symphonies in Chains (2019)

Symphonies in Chains was commissioned by New Horizons Music with funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Lottery Unit, for the Ulster Orchestra.

This work began life with a discussion about ‘symphonism’ - the tradition of symphonic writing and what it means. I feel removed from the symphonic tradition of Brahms and Bruckner as we hear it in our programmes - a drama of large-scale contrasts, gradual progressions and the pull between forces like key and motif. My goal here, meanwhile, is a series – a chain - of disparate themes and ideas, which I then try to weld together into a story-line; it makes for a very different drama. It is not ‘a symphony’ – something I find it hard to believe in today – but a cumulative series of discussions: symphonies, to use the Stravinskian meaning of ‘soundings together’. 

The piece lasts around 13 minutes and is continuous; I release a clutch of ideas in the first half of the piece, and these are revisited in the later part (from about 7 minutes in) as if in a dream state. Three ‘cadenzas’ crop up, interrupting this action: the first is for tuba/tutti violins; a second is for trumpet/violas/bass clarinet; the third is for horns and double basses, this last leading into the fast coda. With this in mind, perhaps the work is as much a concerto for the orchestra as it is a symphony.

My aim is in fact well described by another programme note, for another work, the string quartet Hunting: Gathering in 1989 by my friend and colleague Kevin Volans. He wrote: “I decided to try and write a piece which included as many different musical fragments as possible, strung together in a pseudo-narrative.” He adds that “I wanted the different pieces to come and go in random fashion like images or events on an unplanned journey.” My own aim is more traditional, as I hope to weld the fragments into something unified; however, we share the idea of parading an exhibition of ideas rather than concentrating on developing the minimum of material.

Some of the questions faced by composers over time vary, while some remain unchanged. An artist now painting an abstract canvas faces many different issues from those George Stubbs faced when painting a horse in 1760 - but some challenges are common to the two, for truly there is not much new under the sun. The release of multiple ideas as a source of later reflection, for example, is exactly what we find in some of Mozart’s most exuberant sonata-forms.

Piers Hellawell 2019