07: Bending Time

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.
[...extract from the Sydney Symphony’s 2009 – Australian Composition Kit (written October 2008)]

A recording and score of Night Is What Remains can be found here.
A recording of excerpts from Baba’s Birthday can be found here.

To be factual, after composing Baba’s Birthday in late 2006 I could see the potential for a cello concerto, based on the same material, that would explore this compositional approach fully. When the horn concerto looked like becoming a reality I stole the idea from myself. More on the catastrophe caused by that decision in a future blog.

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Since I have mentioned John Corigliano a couple of times already it is worth pointing out his Clarinet Concerto which contains many passages where the soloist is free and the orchestra and conductor follow. Also places where the orchestra is metered but the soloist is not.