Best new pieces in 2016-17

I seem to have turned a corner compositionally in 2016/17 – suddenly things I write sound almost *exactly* the way I want them to once I’ve finished them, instead of mostly or kind of the way I want them to. Here’s a selection of pieces written in the last year or so – I hope you’ll agree.

My #choirsagainstracism project has been essential to this – having something that I’m passionately angry about has been a massive creative force – and all the pieces written through that are free, so why not try them with your choir?

Hear “My Father” in a beautiful new recording by KC VITAs chamber choir, Kansas:
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Voces Inauditae in Edinburgh will also be singing it (SSAATTBB version) in September.

“In Springtime” has just been recorded by the Reid Consort in Edinburgh, and will be released on CD soon. Hear it below:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/322326176″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]

“The Beach”, the final piece from the same set, will be workshopped by the BBC Singers in October – recording coming soon hopefully… would your choir like to premiere it? Available for SSSSAAAA or SSAATTBB – get the score at #choirsagainstracism.

Also unpremiered so far: Brian Bilston, the unofficial poet laureate of Twitter, has very kindly allowed me to set his poem “The Kindness of Strangers” to music. It’s written in memory of the bombings in London and Manchester (and set to music also with the tragedy at Grenfell in mind). It’s about 3 minutes long, for SATB (maximum divisi to SSAATBB, ideal if you’re a bit short on tenors), easy to medium difficulty.
Download a sample score
Download a sample score with piano reduction
Hear an audio demo

Adeste Fideles has been accepted for Project: Encore (it was originally written for Neil Ferris and Wimbledon Choral Society), which aims to get second (and further) performances for new choral works. Hear it below:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/299153799″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]

New! A New Year Carol – SATB with a few bars of soprano divisi. Would make a good closer or encore for a concert near Christmas, or (ideally!) for a concert around the start of the year. Download the score and hear an audio demo. £20 for a PDF to print unlimited copies, or £1 per printed copy (plus postage if outside the UK).

I’m also rather pleased with how “Incitement to Sailing”, the first part of “The Birlinn” to be completed, has come out – it’s available for SATB and piano or for TBarB and piano. Premiere of SATB version coming November 2017.

Janya – rescored for full orchestra – needs a fairly big orchestra (3-3-3-2 winds, 4-3-3-1 brass, perc, timp, strings).

“No Man Is An Island” is also rather good: hear the version for men’s voices below:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/310205631″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]
Versions for SABar and SSA are also available at #choirsagainstracism: ATB version on request.

“I Was Listening To A Pogrom” still needs a good recording – for singer(s), piano, and speaking voice(s), words by Michael Rosen (Children’s Poet Laureate). Again, score at #choirsagainstracism.

And finally, “Welcome Carol”, also part of #choirsagainstracism:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/297446730″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]

I hope some of these will suit your choir (there are pieces for all sorts of choirs here, from unison beginners to 8-part advanced) – please get in touch at chris@hutchingsmusic.co.uk if you’re interested in performing any of them, or commissioning a new work.

Janya – the premiere!

Thank you to everyone who was involved in the wonderful premiere of “Janya” last weekend!
The Jan Modelski chamber orchestra and their wonderful conductor, who engaged with the piece at every stage with brilliant enthusiasm and produced a wonderful performance;
BBC Radio 3, who recorded the piece and will broadcast it later (date tbc), and Andy who recorded the piece and the interview;
Sally, Richard, and all the teams at Making Music, Sound and Music and the PRS Foundation;
Roanne and all the JMCO committee, who signed up for #AdoptAComposer and got the project started;
Chester Zoo, for all their help promoting the concert;
the audience, who packed out Caldy Valley Church;
my family, for letting me get down there for the performance and providing a large chunk of the inspiration for the piece;
Annette Yarrow, who sculpted the little elephant “Janya” who started the whole thing;
and many many more.

Here are a few comments:
“It was fantastic and the group seemed to love performing it, it suited them so well and pushed them into new areas (loved the sound effects)”
“The piece by the young composer was absolutely brilliant and the orchestra played it beautifully! It seemed as if he composed it using the orchestra’s constellation eg strong brass section as a strength. I loved it”

We had a packed audience at Caldy Valley, who seemed to really enjoy the piece, and hopefully I’ll have some word about future performances soon…

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Programme notes for Janya

A general update on #AdoptAComposer, and the programme notes that I’ve given to JMCO for “Janya” – these may not be exactly what appears in the programme, but hopefully you’ll all find them interesting. The performance is on 9th July, at 7.30pm in Caldy Valley Church, Chester – if you’re coming along please get in touch! Tickets are reasonably priced, but I can probably arrange a couple of comps if necessary.

“Janya” was written for JMCO through Making Music’s Adopt A Composer
scheme. It’s been great to get to know the orchestra personally, and have
time to try out several drafts and sections of the piece before finalising
them; everyone in the orchestra has been really enthusiastic about having
a new piece written for them, and I couldn’t have done it without them.

The genesis of the piece came from my first visit to Chester, back in
December; after meeting with the orchestra and hearing them play, we went
for lunch in Chester Cathedral, and outside the cathedral I encountered
the statue of Janya by Annette Yarrow (who sadly died in November 2015).
This little elephant made a big impact on me! The celebratory opening
fanfare of the piece came to me a few days later, and everything launched
from there…

Working with this orchestra has been a great experience too. The makeup of
the orchestra is unusual – with 5 or 6 flutes and clarinets, a saxophone
section, and rather fewer strings than usual, but that has also driven the
development of the piece; you’ll hear the flutes and clarinets playing
multi-part chords and imitating flocks of birds, which I couldn’t do with
only two of each, and the saxophones add an unusual tone colour.

The piece is essentially programmatic, or a tone poem. Our little elephant
Janya is born, finds her feet and learns to walk, finds her own voice and
learns to sing with her herd – and then there’s a forest fire and the herd
has to flee! Finally, after swimming a river to escape, the family are
reunited, and a new life begins – maybe Janya’s own child?

(Janya is an Asian elephant – they often live in forests, so fleeing a
forest fire is sometimes part of their lives.)

The piece is also more personal than it might appear. I have two young
children (born in 2012 and 2015) and the process of raising them has been
wonderful but hectic. “Janya” is partly about a little elephant and her
journey – but it’s also about my children, everyone’s children, and the
journey of life, whether you’re a human or an elephant.

Adopt A Composer – February update

Last week I met with the orchestra again! My mentor David Horne was able to come to this rehearsal, which was very useful.

I now have the first 2 or 3 minutes of the piece pretty much completed the way I want them, and a plan for the rest. The piece is developing into a tone poem based on a baby elephant growing up – she’s born, finds her feet, finds her voice, flees a forest fire, and finds her family again afterwards. I might be a little biased here as I’ve got two young daughters – as I said to the orchestra, you work with what you know…

At first I hadn’t mentioned the programme of the piece to them, and the first few minutes of the rehearsal were a bit stop-start. But as soon as I started talking about that, there was suddenly a “click” in the sound of the orchestra as they knew what they were portraying, and the reasons I’d written what I had.

There have been a few changes in lineup for the concert – we now have 2 trumpets and 1 trombone instead of vice versa, rather more French horns than I thought, and more percussion instruments available. The number of clarinets and flutes has meant I’ve ended up using each section as a homophonic block quite frequently, and the brass also form a block. This has meant a lot of five-note chords emerging as I’m estimating we have 5-6 of each (maybe 7 brass), which I’ve built on quartal harmony. A four-note quartal chord sounds a bit empty (A-D-G-C) but add an E to that and suddenly you’ve got a C major with a couple of notes added, or an A minor chord with a couple of notes added, depending on how the listener wants to hear it. We have three saxophones to contrast with that, as well.

I met with David afterwards (for info, the Stamford Bridge pub in Barrow does a lovely lunch) and we were able to talk about how the piece is going.

Journeys were a little chaotic again, still due to the same floods! There’s a bridge washed out between Edinburgh and Lockerbie, so trains are replaced by buses – ugh. Fortunately I’d travelled over the night before, so the unexpected 2-hour delay on the way didn’t matter.

I have a lot of work to do over the next few weeks, so I’d better get back to it!

Adopt A Composer – December

On December 5th I was able to meet with the Jan Modelski Community Orchestra again. Despite a distinct lack of sleep the night before, things went very well! I was able to try out several different passages of music and ideas with the orchestra, getting a lot of sound effects and actual music (yes, there are real tunes in this piece already, they’ve got key signatures and everything).

Working with an orchestra with a slightly unconventional layout has enabled a lot of possibilities. The number of flutes and clarinets that we’ve got (on the 5th we had 5 flutes and 5 clarinets, plus a bass clarinet, S A and T saxes, and an oboe) means that several things are possible that wouldn’t be approachable with a usual woodwind-by-twos setup (or even woodwind-by-threes).

One example is the volume that we can get using key clicks. Normally, with only a maximum of 8 wind players and at least 25 string players, these don’t carry enough to be useful in an orchestra context, but with 15 wind players (and several brass and horns) the effect of everyone doing key clicks at once is kind of like a rainstorm, or rattling branches in a forest. And I was able to add gentle body taps (with the wood of the bow) from string players – again, in a normal sized orchestra this wouldn’t work the same way, as the string players would drown out the key clicks from the winds, but here they balance very nicely. The tuba’s valve rattle is rather more predominating, but I think there’s a place for that elsewhere.

I was also able to do a lot of varied textures with the upper winds, letting them play independently (e.g. everyone choose notes of the C major scale and play them staccato, quietly, to get a background that sounds a bit like loads of birds chirping – and then I could add a unison melody in the lower instruments for contrast).

We’re a little shorter on bass instruments than usual (no bassoons for example, and only one double bass) but I was able to get some interesting sounds from the lower instruments playing their lowest notes. The piece is going to be partly about wildlife, with a fair bit of inspiration from Chester Zoo (I was able to spend an hour there on Friday, and saw real elephants for, I think, the first time ever), and elephants are quite a big thing (as it were) for Chester. Elephants in the wild use calls at 4-5Hz (two octaves lower than the lowest sound human beings can hear). Of course no orchestral instrument can play that low, but that note is about the F or E two-and-a-bit octaves below the lowest A on the piano. Taking its upper harmonics and mashing them all together should, theoretically, produce a difference tone of 4-5Hz. I have no way of checking if it did, but a cluster of white notes from the low F of the double bass upwards definitely sounded interesting – quite intimidating, but a very useful effect! (The full set of notes – double bass low F, tuba low G, bass trombone low A, French horn low B – it’s just possible!, cello low C on their bottom string, and a bass clarinet on the D just above that – and then moving to E-F#-G#-B-C#-D# on the next chord).

I got a recording of the session, and hopefully I’ll be able to share bits of it here.

Not everything quite worked the way I thought it would – but that’s what’s great about this project, I have the freedom to try things without worrying about whether they’ll be exactly right first time.

(The rest of the weekend was fairly awful. My baby daughter threw up all over our hotel bed at 5am on Saturday morning, our train back was cancelled due to flooding, and we had to spend an unexpected and expensive extra night in York as the alternative was rail replacement bus which we weren’t even sure was running and would probably not have got us home until well after midnight. But the meeting with the orchestra was great!)

Adopt A Composer – November 2015

My first Adopt A Composer blog entry! I’m really looking forward to working on this project. Last weekend, I was able to meet the Jan Modelski Community Orchestra, who I’m working with, and get to know them – I think I chatted to about half the members of the orchestra, and they’re all really interested and keen to get to work. Today was just about getting ideas – up until now I’ve deliberately left my mind as a blank canvas where writing for JMCO is concerned, as I wanted to wait until I’d heard them play.

At the rehearsal, the group played through selections from The Sound Of Music, film music from E.T., and Sibelius’ “Finlandia” (where the sudden discovery of a trumpet part in F rather than Bb meant I had to do some speedy transposition for a trumpet player!) All sounded excellent.

Here I am with Jan Modelski and the orchestra:

The unusual thing about the JMCO is the balance of the orchestra. It’s not a conventional line-up, because anyone is welcome; while the full set of players is streamed into three sub-orchestras (beginners, intermediate, and the top group which I’m working with), there are no restrictions on how many players can be in each section, and it’s not entirely restricted to conventional instruments. As a result, there were (as I recall) 6 flutes, 4 clarinets, 3 oboes, no bassoons, a bass clarinet, a soprano sax, a tenor sax (and an alto sax who wasn’t there this weekend), two trombones, two horns, a trumpet and a tuba. Strings were rather fewer in comparison – 7-6-2-3-1 – and for the music this weekend, often had to play up quite a lot to balance the wind and brass. We also have timpani and drumkit, and hopefully soon a glockenspiel.

One of the oboe players also doubles on baritone – not a singing baritone, but the brass band instrument, which is basically to a euphonium as a cornet is to a trumpet (i.e. much straighter bore, and a different sound as a result). Unusually among composers, this is actually an instrument I’ve written for before (two friends at Hull asked me to write a duet for baritone and clarinet). For this rehearsal, she was playing a French horn part. (And the second trumpet part was being played on tenor sax.)

After the rehearsal, we drove back to Chester (with a brief excursion for a look at the venue for the concert – unfortunately it wasn’t open at the time, but it was handy to get an idea) and had a very late lunch at the cathedral, with Jan Modelski himself, and Roanne, Becky and Tony from the orchestra, to discuss plans and possibilities.

Many composers find constraints on their work to be a source of inspiration, and this sometimes works for me as well. As we don’t know exactly how many players will be available for the concert (there could be anything from 4 to 10 flutes, 3 to 7 clarinets, etc.) I’ll probably use something that I often do with choirs – give a section a short modal phrase (or possibly something more chromatic) and ask them to play it repeatedly, independently of each other. This creates a shifting modal background, or a kind of shimmery cluster chord, if done quietly, or something more cacophonous, like a crowd shouting chaotically, if played loudly and prominently.

We also established that the orchestra like melodies and recognisable harmonies – one reason why film music is so popular with them. I think I can do some of that :)

I had a feeling that the actual inspiration for the piece might come from the Roman history of the area. However, I think that my vague plans for a suite called “Ecce Romani” may end up waiting for another time – because the thing that I found most inspiring for a new piece was this little statue of an elephant, outside Chester Cathedral:

She’s called “Janya”, which is Hindi for “life”, and I think that’ll be an excellent working title. The sculptor, Annette Barrow, is still alive as far as I can tell, so if this ends up being the title of the piece I’ll invite her along.

Next steps: we’re meeting again on December 5th, and at that point I want to have some ideas to present to the orchestra and try out. I’ll probably have 4-6 passages of music (maybe up to 30 seconds long) orchestrated in a few different ways so I can find out how things blend.

This weekend, I’m off for a short residency in Crear with a string trio from Red Note Ensemble and a few other composers (with Enterprise Music Scotland) and that will hopefully help me put together some ideas for this piece.

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