Music

Music has always held a Cinderella existence in my world, as this list of works might suggest.


1955 - 'A Modern Opera'
1959 - 'The Orphan's Song' (Dobell)
1960 - 'Go and Catch a Falling Star (Donne)
          'The Dong' (Lear)
1961 - 'Funeral March of the Winds'
1962 - Various piano pieces

     GAP

1970-72 - Four Songs of John Clare
               Music for film "Judgement of Albion"

     GAP

1978 - Violin Sonata (incomplete)
           Piano quartet (incomplete)
          'The Islanders' for wind band

     (and a long trail of incompleted work)

1997-8 - 'The Vagrant Muse' (orchestral song cycle)
1999 on - 'Symphony of Changes' (work in progress)
2002-3 - 'The Gothic Game Musical'
2004 - 'The Pearl Cantata' Part One
2005 - 'The World Tree'


Featured here is the orchestral song cycle to poems by John Clare

THE VAGRANT MUSE (1997-8)

This songcycle was first performed in a voice and piano reduction at the Blackheath Concert Halls in 1998. It consists of thirteen songs, and incorporates the four songs of 1970-72. It runs for approximately 75 minutes.

1840-41 was, for some reason, an extraordinary year for song. In France, Hector Berlioz lamented the breakdown of his marriage in the first ever orchestral song cycle "Les Nuits d'Été". In Germany, Robert Schumann was celebrating the consummation of his marriage with over a hundred songs, including almost all his greatest work in the medium. In England, John Clare escaped from a lunatic asylum in search of his lost love, and this caused him to write almost as many song lyrics as Schumann wrote songs, as well as longer poems, in by far the most creative year of his life. No music exists for the Clare songs, although he may have intended some to be sung to existing folk tunes, being himself a folk musician.

Ever since he was a child and disguised his poems as folksong lyrics to fool his father, John Clare had written his poems to be sung, but by 1970, when I began this cycle, very few had been set to music. I set out to write a cycle of songs which incorporated elements of English folk song, and which would be close to Clare's own intentions, but which would also match up to the French and German competion noted above. Whether or not I succeeded, you will be able to hear when the song cycle receives an orchestral performance. Meanwhile a ghost of it can be heard in a performance by Alastair Thompson and Jaap Heringa, extracts of which are available on the right of this page.