11: Promoting an Unwritten Piece

As well as being standard concerts the Meet the Music series of concerts is part of the Sydney Symphony’s education program. An education kit is created providing analysis and historical background on all the music to be performed in the year. In turn these pieces become part of the New South Wales secondary schools music curriculum, being studied in various ways by year 9 through to year 12 students. New commissions play an important role in the program and this is an excellent way of introducing students and teachers to contemporary and Australian music. Many fine orchestral works have been commissioned over the years by the Meet the Music series.

Sydney Symphony with Vladimir Ashkenazy (photo: Keith Saunders)

By necessity the education kit is written and created in the previous year so that it is ready for the season in February. Well and good, but all I had was a few charts and some wishful thinking when I was first interviewed by the writer Carol Coomber in July 2008.

Actually we had been in the same position with my Concerto for Bass Trombone and Orchestra, which was also a Meet the Music commission. That time we decided to present it as a work in progress, something that could later be compared to the finished score giving some sense of the composition process.

Bass Trombone Concerto: CG and Christopher Harris (photo: Bridget Elliot)

This time, for some reason, the kit was being written even further ahead of the school year, than previously. We decided to, once again, present a work in progress and show the octatonic charts I was working with an discuss my ideas about free time with score and recording examples from Freefall and Baba’s Birthday, as well as giving and idea of the sort of instrumentation I was considering. Over the next couple of months I answered Carol’s additional questions and she sent me the photos that her husband had taken from their home in Sydney of Comet McNaught.

Mao's Last Dancer: Recording Session

It was as an addition to the education kit that I first thought of creating this blog about the composition of the horn concerto.

A little later in the year, while I was working on Mao’s Last Dancer, the Sydney Symphony publicity department called asking for a description of Lightfall for marketing purposes. I described the opening section with its pitched percussion and harp glistenings because that was all that was actually written and I still had hopes for its survival. I also thought that the harp might play an important role in the concerto. Later a marketing version of that went out into the world and can still be found all over the net.

So, with the piece as yet unwritten, with a deadline still of 5 January 2009 looming, and a major film score to compose and record, it seemed the world had a more certain image of the concerto than I did.

And the fire was going out…

Edvard Munch 'The Scream' (1893)