Pentecost Music (1977)

Abstract

Giles Swayne first attracted wide public acclaim with Cry (1979), his wordless evocation of the book of Genesis for twenty-eight solo voices premiered in 1980. On either side of this remarkable work came the two orchestral pieces listed here: Music (1977) was first performed by the Manchester-based BBC Northern Orchestra in 1981; it was this same orchestra, by then renamed the BBC Philharmonic, for which the BBC in turn commissioned Naaotwa Lala (1984). Both works are nicely presented as study scores with individually chosen cover designs; if Music (a facsimile reproduction of the composer's elegant manuscript) may be judged just fractionally too small for comfort, no such complaint attaches to the beautifully produced Naaotwa Lala. Although Music plays without a break, it comprises nine interlinked sections whose titular headings serve to illustrate the character content. They also describe the form of a work whose clear-cut harmonic pacing was not only to inspire the timeless harmonic reflections of Cry but also eventually to inaugurate a whole group of vocal and choral pieces (mainly for SATB, with or without organ) setting, or setting out from, biblical or religious texts and written during the decade beginning in the late 1970s. It is certainly of more than coincidental interest to discover that Music was the first work to be written following a number of visits Swayne paid to Olivier Messiaen's composition class at the Paris Conservatoire during 1976-77; these postgraduate encounters were evidently to prove deeply thought-provoking for a composer who, as a previously reluctant Catholic, had until then shown himself determinedly secular and often aggressively modernist in musical outlook. It was at any rate in Music that he suddenly found himself free to explore a whole new/old vein of quasi-modal inspiration. While in no sense a narrative one, the biblical scenario suggested by its title seems nonetheless to have encouraged a focus on harmonic procedures of a positively form-defining kind. In one large movement subdivided into nine smaller ones, and with song and dance elements strongly to the fore throughout, ostinato is used both to measure structural paragraphs and to create and sustain the kind of long-term contrasts heard to such impressive effect in the double exposition comprised by the first three sections: Tongues of Fire I, The Arch, and Darkness. Here, the whole-tone scale rubs shoulders with a twelve-note pileup of superimposed fourths and with a six-note motive that serves both as reference and as the source of an endlessly proliferating series of modal cells that center around and intermittently return to the note D - as when the long climactic build to the top of The Arch sinks quickly on to the low pedal D that underpins the first half of Darkness, before emerging into the harmonically neutral light of a harp arpeggio built from fourths and that again spans all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. It is upon such broadly based harmonic purpose that the first chapter of the piece closes. Almost at its halfway point, three shorter sections open out to form a central scherzo. Settling for a uniform speed, and for the new tonic focus of E[flat], the layer-upon-layer awakening of a Messiaenic Dawn Chorus leads to the brief and lightly scored Pentecost - Dance I and then, pausing only to reflect on the whole-tone harmony of At the still point . …