A Time to Dance was first performed in Sherborne Abbey on 9 June
2012 by Ex Cathedra, conducted by Jeffrey Skidmore. The work was
commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer Music
Society of Dorset, founded by its President and Artistic Director, Dione
Digby, in 1963. The brief was to provide a large-scale, celebratory
work, reflecting the passage of time and fifty years of music-making.
The seed that set my creative juices flowing was the text which Lady
Digby suggested as a possible starting point—the well-known passage from
Ecclesiastes which I have used for the opening Processional. This
lovely, profoundly human text provided the four key themes which
permeate the whole work: times; seasons; love; dance.
The
diurnal cycle of the hours and the annual cycle of the seasons are firm
favourites with poets, offering as they do rich possibilities for
metaphor. I decided to conflate the two cycles to make a four-part
structure: Spring Morning; Summer Noon; Autumn Evening; Winter Night,
and to characterize each with a different solo voice: soprano; tenor;
alto; bass. The overall design is completed by a Prologue and an
Epilogue, with different texts but in which the underlying depiction of
sunrise by the orchestra and largely wordless choir is identical, so
bringing us musically full circle. There are also two
additional/optional ‘movements’—‘Times and Seasons’ which the choir
sings at the start while entering in procession through the audience,
and an After-dance, ‘Proper Exercise’ (more of which below).
I
spent a considerable time researching and assembling the text, whittling
down over one hundred poems to the final choice of twenty-nine, drawn
from a wide variety of sources ranging from Ovid to Aphra Behn. The
choice was made not just by the suitability of the texts, but also by
how they speak to each other. I followed my usual practice of taking the
poems for a walk, listening to their melodies and rhythms, and learning
how they might dance. Apart from the text, however, the main influences
on the
music of A Time to Dance were Shakespeare, Bach and Skidmore.
This
work is a culmination of seven years close association with Jeffrey
Skidmore and his choir Ex Cathedra, during which they have given many
premieres and recorded a double-album of my music (‘Shared Ground’). But
just as valuable to me has been the time I have spent sitting in on
rehearsals. Their wonderful sound is now deeply ingrained in my mind, so
that the music I compose for the choir and for the vocal soloists drawn
from its ranks is very much of them and for them. I have learned a
great deal from Jeffrey’s inspired and brilliantly accomplished
music-making. For example, it was his use of spatial effects in a
concert of Vivaldi that gave me the idea for similar deployment of my
trumpeters in A Time to Dance—left and right for the cock-crow
fanfares cued by Edward Thomas’s words in No 2; distantly spaced for the
echo effects of No 5; and all three together offstage in No 19 to
represent the radiance of the Evening Star.
The influence of Bach
arose from the simple fact that the new work was to be premiered
alongside a performance of Bach’s Magnificat, and so it was a given that
I would compose for the same forces: soloists, choir, and an orchestra
of two flutes, two oboes (each doubling on oboe d’amore), bassoon, three
trumpets, timpani, strings and a small ‘continuo’ organ. The only
change I made was for the percussionist to put aside Bach’s timpani in
favour of a pair of handbells to toll the passing hours, and an array of
unpitched instruments to add a dash of colour where appropriate (such
as the obbligato parts for desk bell, washboard and dinner gong in No
16). Composing for ‘period instruments’ was a fascinating challenge
(most noticeable in the valveless trumpets with their limited range of
notes), and I am most grateful to the members of the Ex Cathedra Baroque
Ensemble for their advice.
The music of A Time to Dance
is designed so that it can be played either on modern instruments or (as
in this recording) on period instruments. But apart from the
instrumentation I have not made any borrowings from Bach, although I
have done something to which he himself was partial—borrowing from
Vivaldi, as you may hear on four pertinent (not to say seasonable)
occasions, some more obvious than others. I love how Bach’s music dances
and I hope that mine does too, although where Bach might move to the
rhythms of the gavotte, minuet or bourée, mine are more likely to be
milonga, kuda lumping or disco.
One of the things I most enjoy
about performances at Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s Bankside is that
when the play is over, the actors and musicians cap it with a
celebratory after-dance or ‘jig’ in the Shakespearean tradition—a
wonderful way of bringing performers and audience together in a communal
letting-down-of-the-hair. After spending fifty minutes singing about
dance, I thought it would be fun to have my singers lay down their music
scores (I ensure they have to do this by giving them some hand-clapping
to do), and actually dance. My After-dance sets words by Shakespeare’s
contemporary John Davies, in which the very creation of the world itself
is accomplished through dance (and, of course music). (Alec Roth)