Little know fact about yours truly! At college, my major wasn't violin or conducting, (the two things with which I primarily make my living now). Actually it was composition! I studied with three different teachers-- Frank Denyer, who was big into world music, Patrick Gowers with whom I did film scoring and Maxwell Davies, who, well, drove me into the abyss of darkness! This wasn't all his doing, I also did my thesis on Adorno, so I was well on the way to expressing my own version of German angst and screaming along with Edvard Munch!
Over the years, I have used my composition skills very little, but they came in useful when I had to write inner parts for French 5 part baroque music etc. More recently I have started to dream music, a sure sign that I need to let my own music come out. As if to reinforce this, I was asked recently to provide music for the new TV series called Camelot, made by the same company who produced both the Tudors and the Borgias! (It's out in the US now and will be on the CBC next September.)
About this time too, Aradia was presenting a new music concert entitled Baroque Idol. Composers were invited to submit a 5-7 minute piece and the audience was to choose their favorite! I decided to produce a piece. Like the other works, my piece The Reeds Grew Brighter was scored for baroque instruments: oboe, bassoon, string quartet and harpsichord.
The oboist in the Baroque Idol concert (Sarah Davol) has subsequently commissioned me to rework The Reeds Grew Brighter for woodwind quintet for performances in New York. I have just finished tonight—many hours of work. I’m tired, but excited to be giving voice once again to composition.
The title of the work is a suggestion from a line of poetry by Yeats. From the collection The Wind Among the Reeds there is a poem called The Host of the Air, wherein there is a line which says "and he saw how the reeds grew dark." I liked the line but changed the "dark" to "brighter" to produce the title of this musical composition.
Watch this space, as they say, for more details about the performance dates!
