When a musician plays alone there is a great deal of freedom in tempo and expression. The more players that are added the more this freedom is sacrificed. By necessity an orchestrated piece by Chopin is much “straighter” than a rubato performance of the original piano work. Orchestras are incredibly flexible but never so much as a single performer who can respond instinctively and spontaneously to the music. It is much easier for a yacht to flit around that it is for a ocean liner.
Is it possible to create a piece for eighty musicians with that sort of freedom? That is the question I posed myself as I began conceiving the concerto. By carrying on the soloistic technique I had developed in Night Is What Remains and Baba’s Birthday I thought it would be interesting to write a piece that is essentially a single melodic line played by the horn. A long, flowing improvised song that is free of the tyranny of the barline, where the horn player can fluctuate the tempo with expressive freedom. The musicians take their cues from listening to the horn and then play the given notes in their own tempo. The orchestral material floats around the soloist like debris caught in its momentum. Harmony and rhythm result from orchestral echoes of the soloist’s phrases. Read More…
When Robert Johnson and I began discussing the concerto again in late 2005 we talked about a piece that would present the horn as an instrument of many colours and that would juxtapose it against (within) many different orchestral textures.
Comet McNaught 18 Jan 2007 Sydney
Sitting in a Rozelle cafe on 11 May 2006 I mapped out a journey for the horn that took it through the various regions of the orchestra, then a week later on 19 May I changed the internal order to make a smoother arc.
If you have read the previous post you might have noticed the similarity in the titles of these octatonic pieces:
(You Dead Kings Rising) Free Dance Freefall Nightfall Lightfall
Freefall was so named because I imagined waking up suddenly to find myself falling…forever. It moves gradually from bright, shrieking panic to muted, numb resignation.
Hubble photo: A glimpse of infinity...
In the film, Mao’s Last Dancer, there is a scene where the script calls for the dancers to be very stiff in their movements and for the choreographer to put on a jazzy piece of music to free them up. Read More…
Initial Octatonic Sketch. In November 2006 I wrote a sketch as a submission to a film I didn’t get. They always seem to want these submissions “yesterday” so, with only an afternoon available, I wrote and recorded it on synths in three or four hours, along with a couple of other pieces. It was very much a “stream of consciousness” form of composing with no second goes. This demo worked its way up and down the octatonic scale in ever growing pyramids. By putting this thematic line into various augmented canons an eerie world was created.
I then became quite fascinated by the octatonic scale. I was attracted to its pseudo-tonality, that a tonal centre can be found by persistence, gravity and avoidance, rather than the usual hierarchy of notes in the major/minor system. But that this tonic can be subverted simply by persisting with other notes of the same pitch collection, no modulation being required. Then there is the “straight-jacket free dissonance” and the eerie, drug-like haze I mention below. It makes me think of walking on the inside of a ball, always moving forward but never getting out. Apparently the universe is like that. I began to think that this sketch would be the basic material of the hoped-for Horn Concerto. Read More…
Each of the commonly used major and minor scales and their modal relatives is comprised of seven notes. An octatonic scale has, as its name suggests, eight notes. There are many possible eight note scales ( I read somewhere that there are 42) but there is one in particular that is most commonly used and in fact is often referred to as “the” octatonic scale.
Messiaen refers to it as the ’second mode of limited transposition’.
It is also known in jazz and guitar circles as the ‘diminished scale’.
In January 1998 I contacted Robert Johnson to see if he would like me to write him a horn concerto. It was really rather cheeky of me as I was entirely unknown in the concert world and virtually unknown in the film world.
I had made a bit of a name for myself in Sydney and Melbourne as an orchestrator of other composer’s music for film and advertising. My aim was always to do my own projects but until a break came my way I felt I was at least practising my craft and working with the best musicians in Sydney. I had composed for a number of shorter films, the low-budget feature, Sanctuary, and the telemovie, This Time, Next Time, almost all of which were directed by my wife, but it wasn’t until 1997 that my break came in the form of Moby Dick, a US mini-series that was shot in Australia.
This dark, obsessive adventure on the high seas called for a virile score that made full use of all instruments of the orchestra and it was hearing Robert playing the horn solos so beautifully that put the idea of a concerto into my mind.
Here’s a solo from near the end of the picture:
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and Rob leading the section horns on these high concert D trills:
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So, taking a deep breath, I contacted Robert Johnson, principal horn of the Sydney Symphony. He had played on a lot of my orchestrations prior to Moby Dick, so I guess he had some sort of idea of what he was in for. To my great excitement he agreed to take it on. Read More…
Hello, I’m Christopher Gordon and I’m composing a Concerto for Horn and Orchestra for the Sydney Symphony and their principal horn player, Robert Johnson.
They are going to premiere it at the Sydney Opera House in September 2009, with Richard Gill conducting.
I am often asked how a composer comes up with his or her ideas. Questions like:
“Do you get an overall concept first or does that become apparent after a process of trial and error?”
“How do you write for all those different instruments?”
