Fretwork

The Garden of Cyrus, Fantasia for five viols (tr, t, t, b, b)

Commissioned by Fretwork, with funds generously provided by the PRS Foundation, it was first performed in The Reading Concert Hall, 9th March 2002.

The Garden of Cyrus is the title of a 1658 essay by Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century medical practitioner, naturalist, philosopher and author; Cyrus was the Persian Emperor who reputedly created the celebrated hanging gardens of Babylon. In his essay, Browne, in the words of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, created

“…a fantastical elaboration of mathematics in nature, as seen in the quinary arrangements found in various plants. Browne claimed that the ancients had imitated the system in planting their trees by fives, thus making the ‘quincunx’ or network formation, in their plantations”

from his forward to: Sir Thomas Browne, Selected Writings (Faber & Faber, 1968)

In my Fantasia I explore the possibilities of mean-tone tuning, commonly used in the seventeenth-century, other than traditional triadic harmony. I based it upon five five-part chords: in each of these, the intervals are symmetrically arranged around a central pitch (like the trees in Browne’s quincunx). With inversions, and making use of the possible transpositions within the mean-tone system, these chords make up an extensive harmonic vocabulary. There are two episodes, slow and tranquil, which abandon the symmetrical chords in favour of triads, but these are generally the most remote ones available within the mean-tone confines. Before, between and after these episodes, the different sections of the Fantasia are intended to be like different parts of a garden, the earlier ones wilder and less “cultivated”, whilst the later ones have a more palpable formal organisation.

The viols should be tuned so that the sixth fret produces an augmented fourth above the open string (not a diminished fifth). The first fret should be split, so that the large (diatonic) and small (chromatic) semitones above the open string are both available.

Three poems of Henry Vaughan for Mezzo Soprano and five viols tr, tr, t, b, b

Henry Vaughan (1621-95) attended Oxford University, then studied law in London: afterwards he led a secluded life in the Welsh Borders near Brecon, close to his birthplace. Religious themes predominate in his poetry, the bulk of which dates from around 1650, following a personal crisis and spiritual awakening. These were years of political crisis, too, with the Civil War and then the establishment under Oliver Cromwell of the Commonwealth. Vaughan may have taken part in the war, (though he was later to express his horror of bloodshed) and as a firm royalist he would have been dismayed at its outcome. His most important collection of poems, Silex scintillans (Sparks from the flintstone) was published in 1650-1, a second part following in 1655. The three poems I’ve set are found in the first part.

I’m attracted to Vaughan by his striking imagery, the beauty of his language, and the way in which, behind the orthodox Anglican beliefs that form the background to his sacred verses, he gives voice to personal experience – to some moment of spiritual perception or enlightenment. In composing these settings it was pleasant to think of Vaughan writing at the same time as the last generation of great composers for viol consort, including his fellow Welshman (and royalist) Thomas Tomkins, not so far away, in Worcester.

Each of the poems provided me with a formal idea for the music of the song: in “Bereavement”, an elegy for his younger brother, William (d.1648), the image is of a long, desolate journey, in “The Morning-Watch” and “Midnight” the ideas are of contrast and alternation. The two elements of “The Morning-Watch”, the life-affirming brightness of the morning light as opposed to the “hours of night and rest”, seen as a foretaste of death, remain distinct, but in “Midnight” the opposition between the splendour and spiritual inspiration of the night sky and the meanness of humdrum human existence gradually breaks down, with the possibility of the heavens’ divine radiance influencing life on earth.

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