Description
(album) [mp3 audio download] There is a backstory to all musical endeavour these days, but the Wallace Symphony issue, even so, is exceptional. The composition of this began in 1974, and was only completed in 2024, some fifty years later. This work is for brass band, brass quintet, double-belled solo trumpet, live electronics, organ and six natural trumpets. This issue also includes the Martin Luther King-inspired Where do we go from here? Written for the reserve band of the National Youth Brass Band of Scotland to play as the opening fanfare of the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival, it is played here by Kingdom Brass, conducted by Bede Williams. Bede also conducts the bands involved in the Symphony recordings between 2017 & 24 – Whitburn Band; the cooperation band; and, again, Kingdom Brass.
The full score is also currently available as a downloadable PDF.
TRACKLIST:
- Symphony – First Movement: Falkland Fling
- Symphony – Second Movment: Tentsmuir
- Symphony – Third Movement: Methilhill Scherzo
- Symphony – Fourth Movement: Dunsire Street Rag
- Where Do We Go From Here?
PROGRAMME NOTES:
SYMPHONY
John Wallace | The Wallace Collection | Whitburn Band | Kingdom Brass | The cooperation band | Sandy McGrattan | Royal Conservatoire of Scotland natural trumpet consort | David Hamilton (organ) | Steve Foreman (bodhrán) | Marco Blaauw (double-belled trumpet) | Alistair MacDonald (live electronics) | Anthony George (Tuba) | Bede Williams (conductor)
programme notes extracted from a conversation between composer, John Wallace and conductor Bede Williams
There are so few examples of composers taking up the challenge of writing a symphony for brass band, I can only think of a handful of similar works. Did you have any examples in mind when composing your Symphony?
I had no knowledge or reference to previous works in the genre, only a desire to show the limitless canvas that a brass band affords to stretch musical ideas across. And I wanted a piece to show the potential of the brass band with additions such as live electronics (my experience with Tim Souster – his Echoes for brass band was the first to combine live electronics with band), natural trumpets (where we came from), and orchestral brass quintet (the timbral contrast adds to the spectrum of aural possibilities).
There are quite a lot of ‘symphonies’ for brass ensemble aren’t there, you must know many of them. Did you think you were somehow adding to that lineage of work?
No influence from here, either – it really was just a desire to write a long form work for band.
What about going further back, back to the likes of Giovanni Gabrieli. I know his music has been a constant in your life.
I was never that enamoured by the 1597 Sacrae Symphoniae and only really got turned on by the Canzoni e Sonate of 1615 that was published posthumously, he never heard it played. I was obsessed with late Gabrieli from the age of around 32. I think the sequence of Canzoni e Sonate is really the first example of abstract symphonic instrumental music: it never got performed in his lifetime and the only two complete performances of it that I know are those that were staged by myself in 1995 and 1999 at the London International Brass Festival. I think this music has always been an influence because I like the way it tends to hang together despite its fragmentary and rhapsodic nature. It suits the way I write down my ideas. Very fast, frenzied, on the hoof, in pencil in a jotter during the day in-between times then put into order in the calm of sitting at the piano of an evening contemplating eternity.
At your recent keynote for the Historic Brass Society Conference in New York you said ‘the past feels like the present, and I project the past onto the future and try to create the past anew in that promised land. It all merges into a big blur, and I feel the depth of the past 175 years and the immediacy of the past 175 days simultaneously. I’m sure that’s not uncommon as you age.’ You also spoke about your connection to the Victorian age through your grandparents who were born in the 19th C. In many ways, your Symphony is connected to the 19th C tradition of symphonic music that had a denouement like a novel or a play. It’s a deeply human condition to long for the moment in which all is revealed.
I spent years in orchestras enjoying playing the Brahms and Schumann symphonies, and I especially love the classical traditions. Although Bruckner and Mahler were wonderful to play as I grew older and was into my 10th Mahler cycle (we did the first in UK with Lorin Maazel in 1977) I started to revel more in the slow music. So yes, my Symphony does somewhat follow the 19th C prototype, but I wouldn’t want to suggest it’s all about getting to the climax at the end.
I think I understand your point, a symphony is a journey to be enjoyed rather than a destination. When I first started to work on the performances and recordings of your Symphony I was so interested to know how your life and career would end up sounding in it, I’ve always thought a symphony is a way to understand how a composer thinks about music in the broadest sense.
I think I called it Symphony for Brass Band because I wanted to put my whole life into it. And my whole life is centred on where I come from – Fife. ‘And you can take a boy out of Fife, but you can’t take Fife out of a boy’. My conceptual models for the Symphony were Bedřich Smetana’s Má vlast and Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England.
You started writing in 1974 and finished in 2019, why such a long journey to completion?
Joining the LSO and becoming an orchestral trumpet player subsequently with the Philharmonia for the following 25 years interrupted my composing career. Also, as a composer, player and a person I was plagued by self-esteem and consequent depression problems from the age of about 15. I also suffered from the most awful disfiguring acne which laid on the misery with a trowel. So, this contributed to bringing me ‘finishing things problems’ but looking back, I had so much going for me, this was a chronically stupid reaction to some common problems by yours truly and I am making up for lost time now. I also got a terrible panning in the UK national press (Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Financial Times, etc for a piece I wrote for The Philharmonia in 1980 (Paul Griffiths was particularly damning and ridiculing) and this killed my ardour for composing and I thought I was no good. Again, a stupid, flaccid, reaction and I have subsequently developed the thick skin and poor opinion of critics needed to survive as a composer.
Can you remind me when we did this all? It was 45 years to write and the best part of a decade to perform and record!
Yes it was a very bifurcated performance trail! Second movement (Tentsmuir) first performed St Andrews Fringe of Gold Festival November 2016 by the Co-operative Band, Marco Blaauw (double-belled trumpet), Alistair McDonald (live electronics) and Bede Williams (conductor). First movement, Falkland Fling first performed and recorded Stevenson Hall, RCS Glasgow 2019, performed by the Whitburn Band, Dr Sandy McGrattan, his RCS natural trumpet students, conducted by Bede Williams. Third movement, Methilhill Scherzo – no live performance, recorded by Kingdom Brass conducted by Bede Williams in March 2024 at The Laidlaw Centre at St Andrews University. Fourth movement, Dunsire Street Rag, no live performance but recorded live in Govan and Linthouse Parish Church, Glasgow, by the Cooperation Band in July 2024, conducted by Bede Williams.
First Movement – Falkland Fling
Whitburn Band | Dr Sandy McGrattan and the RCS natural trumpet consort | Bede Williams (conductor)
Recorded Stevenson Hall, RCS Glasgow | 2019
The first movement is called Falkland Fling, what’s that all about?
As a boy I used to climb Falkland Hill most Sunday afternoons after Sunday School from where we lived in Woodside, Glenrothes, close to the Tullis Russell Paper Mills. I composed my first music up there. High places and limitless views have always been a source of inspiration and musical ideas. I had just been to my first NYO course in Croydon in December 1964 (NYCOS did not exist yet) and I had played in an Albert Hall concert with Øivin Fjeldstad and got to know Sibelius 1. Everything I composed resembled Sibelius in those days. Still does! I used the word Fling as a light-hearted alliteration to throw people off the scent of what the piece was really about. In fact, it’s not a nice Fling Dance at all but a phenomenally barbaric Iron Age Dance to the Death between two armies. Life is just ‘flung’ away, (this is what the ‘Fling’ in my title means). Just as it is to this day in places like Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan etcetera etcetera. Endless barbarism. The more sophisticated the technology and the political sophistry the more extensive the barbarism. Falkland Hill was an Iron Age Fort from around 600 BCE to around a thousand years later. It was in one of the most important strategic defence/offence positions in Scotland, and ongoing excavations are uncovering many new perspectives, including Roman interaction with various prominent tribes including the Venicones.
The natural trumpets have a completely different spectral profile to brass band instruments don’t they, I can’t quite believe they’re not used more often with bands.
I wanted to extend the sound spectrum of the band, and we drop right in at the deep end in movement one in the place we all came from as brass players – the mighty power of the harmonic series, the barbarism of the harmonic series, and the primitivism of the melodic matter arising from this jumble of dissonant sounds. Of course, people have tried in different periods to contain this jumble and order them into sweet and harmonious ‘Trumpet Tunes’ but I don’t do this at all. My ‘fling’ is about discarded lives denied fulfilment.
The whole movement is quite unconventional but yet functions as a first movement very well.
It is really an intrada for natural trumpets and trombones and is intended to portray the raw barbarism of an iron age battle (a ‘fling’) around 2500 years ago. It’s the most dissonant thing I have ever written. You can tell I was only 25!
It’s really a hyper-dramatised movement like the first movement of the Beethoven Eroica Symphony. What happens at the end, that is a tableau of some sort isn’t it.
All the dead souls of the soldiers and fighters disappear into thin air to reappear in my imagination and the ears of the audience as wisps of nothingness 2500 years later!
Second Movement – Tentsmuir
The cooperation band | Marco Blaauw (double-belled trumpet) | Alistair McDonald (live electronics) | Bede Williams (conductor)
Recorded University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland | 2017
The scene changes for the second movement doesn’t it. Tell me about Tentsmuir.
I began this in 1974 and sketched the main materials. At the time I was studying with David Blake in York doing a Phd in composition (never completed). He like Alan Bush at the RAM before him encouraged me to write music I could play myself. When I got my terminal kicking-in by the critics in London I felt so disfigured emotionally, and intellectually eviscerated that I abandoned it and didn’t get back to it until Jan 1, 2016, when I visited Tentsmuir, the most haunting place in Fife, with its endless beaches between the Eden and Tay estuaries and its two tribes of singing seals, which sound like mermaids tempting seamen to a watery grave. I was with my daughter, who took me there. She has an affinity for wild places, and it was because of her I broke my silence on this music. But it wasn’t until I heard the expressiveness of Marco Blaauw playing his double-belled trumpet with his other-worldly ‘split-tone’ that I gave up all thoughts of developing this piece further for me to play myself. Then the piece grew and matured very quickly through listening to what Marco could do, and I found the unbelievable other-worldly sound that I thought the brass band needed to further extend its sound spectrum into the ‘what on earth was that’ zone, when an audience is left in amazement by what it has just heard. The live electronics and natural sounds from Tentsmuir beaches and forests formed into musique concrète surround sound through the alchemy of Alistair Macdonald and Bob Whitney conjures the contrast needed from the movement one barbarism. Hopefully it also provides some respite from movement one and is part of the healing salve of the centuries to help counter humanities’ tendencies to rape, loot, and pillage its natural surroundings.
Third movement – Methilhill Scherzo
Kingdom Brass | Tony George (tuba) | The Wallace Collection | Bede Williams (conductor)
Recorded The Laidlaw Centre, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland | 2024
What about Methilhill – what is this place?
This is where I was born. A mining village. In the Buckhaven-Methil-Leven conurbation. Immediately post-war. To contrast to the subsequent decline which is how we all tend to judge this part of Fife now, my Dad used to take me to East Fife’s ground Bayview and lifted me over the turnstile to see them play. They got crowds of 25,000 at the time, won the league Cup three times in a row and beat Sunderland (best team in England at the time) in 1955 at the opening of their floodlights. A wonderful place for a kid to spend the early years. All human life was there. Very vibrant. We lived with my grandparents Wull and Annie Allan at 17 Kirke Park. And then moved to our own flat at 55 Kirke Park round the corner. Very happy memories. Halcyon days.
This movement is also quite conventional too isn’t it, as a form it almost traces a scherzo right out of a Beethoven Symphony, though not with that tuba solo.
This is how I remember Methilhill. Bustling, full of life. The tuba is the joker in the pack, it represents my Grandad, one of the strongest personalities I have ever experienced. He had a tremendous influence on my early life. He was a contractor in the pits and had a BSA motorbike and sidecar, and also a Rover car with running-boards along the side which he crashed through the closed level crossing in East Wemyss one night whilst en route home from the Gothenburg Public House in the Coaltown of Wemyss. My grandad knew 104 Scottish Ballads with all the verses (I still have many of them on magnetic tape recorded in the early 80’s). He used to regale everyone who would listen from the bowling club to those at home whenever he began his evening libations (mainly at weekends because the shifts put in during the week at the coalface were very long and punishing). He played ‘bools’, was a very good runner and then won medals for his walking. I still have some from the Perth/Dundee walk (22 miles) from 1932.
During the General strike six years earlier, my Papa Wull (William Allan) was very outspoken about how it had nothing to do with the ‘working man’. He went West to Glasgow and painted bridges over the Kelvin (he pointed them out to me one day when he came to a concert, I was playing with the BBCSSO) to keep the family from starving. He was unconventional, independent and a freethinker. He influenced me as a kid tremendously. He also kept Greyhounds and raced them at all the local tracks which were many. He kept them round the back of the house and one of them, Fawn Prince, won him a lot of money. It’s all in the tuba part. So, my Papa was my Beethoven – totally non-conformist – and that’s why the movement is so like Ludwig and full of internal hustle and bustle and continuous movement. John Miller has also happy memories of him accompanying us to solo and quartet competitions at places such as Denbeath Miner’s Institute (in Methil) and buying us tickets to get extra pies and sandwiches because “ye cannae play a bress instrument oan an empty stamick!”.
Fourth Movement – Dunsire Street Rag
The cooperation band, The Wallace Collection | Bede Williams (conductor)
Recorded at Stevenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland | 7 July 2024
Finally, what about Dunsire Street Rag, the fourth movement. It’s another location in Fife?
Dunsire Street was next to Kirke Park in Methilhill and is where James Gourlay, tuba phenomenon and currently Music Director of the River City Brass Band in Pittsburgh was born. And so, there is a solo tuba part in this as well (played of course by Tony George on the recording).
Named after Robert Dunsire, the First World War Hero who won a Victoria Cross in 1915 but was killed in battle in 1916 He worked in the Rosie Pit in Denbeath. He played soprano cornet in Dunnikeir Colliery Band and also played violin in the trenches to keep his comrades spirits up. He was a selfless and modest individual who saved so many of his colleagues without regard for his own safety. His violin has been restored by David Rattray and is currently on permanent display at the Adam Smith Museum in Kirkcaldy.
You’ve cast this movement in variation form, and I remember you telling me it was a bit like the fourth movement from Brahms’ fourth symphony. I didn’t spot it at first because the movement is quite unconventional in many other ways.
This piece begins with an ‘oblivion motif’ where the sound is just so dense it almost destroys your hearing (like I imagine a World War I gunnery bombardment would). This melts away into a ‘Rag’ which is not really a ‘Rag’ but a ‘ragged’ chorale. I just felt that although one of the popular music strands of the period was Ragtime, that any high jinks that the young soldiers should get up to in the trenches should begin from the stern Christian roots which I was still experiencing in the same area as Dunsire some 40 odd years later on. My piece is in Variation form (it’s really a passacaglia like Brahms 4, my favourite movement of all time). My piece tries to capture some of the powers of invention these young men had and their creativity and what must have been going through their minds as they inevitably would think of a better future and a time after the war when they could return to home and normality. But it was not to be for Dunsire and the ‘oblivion motif’ returns. Dunsire’s unselfishness lives through to the final chords however, and his last words were stated to be:
‘Don’t bother about me lads. Leave me here, I’m going’.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
John Wallace (composer) | The Wallace Collection | Kingdom Brass | Bede Williams (conductor)
programme notes by John Wallace
This piece was written to open the first event of the first Edinburgh International Festival with Nicola Benedetti as Director on August, 5, 2023.
It was first performed by the reserves (mainly 12s -15s) of the National Youth Brass Band of Scotland (NYBBS), The Wallace Collection, and a large group of children from various brass projects around Scotland including StAMP (St Andrew’s Music Participation), and Oi Musica (Brass Blast). It was conducted by Sandy Coffin, an instrumental teacher on the concurrent NYBBS summer course at the time. There were some 180 performers.
This extended ‘Opening Fanfare’ fronted a larger work for all of the 350 performers on stage that day, based on lyrics and songs written by young people from all over Scotland, with the words of Martin Luther King, “Where do we go from here?”, as the starting point. Jack Nissan, of the North Edinburgh-based Tinderbox Collective, travelled around the country in the months leading up to the final performance, stimulating, coordinating and collating the final performance, created by the young people themselves. Nicola herself participated in this final performance. And the whole thing kicked off with this extended brass fanfare whose purpose was to summarise the collective optimism and heightened expectation of all of the participants: an atmosphere which Nicola is so good at stimulating.
This brass piece is simple and expressive. Its tuneful, melodic snatches are accessible to all sorts of instruments. It breaks into short sections, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King, whose open and humane philosophy underpinned and overlaid Nicola’s entire three-week-long Festival. This opening event proved that starting the whole festival with an event with children and young people at its centre was a positive message that culture was alive, kicking, relevant, and here to last.
The work is short and snappy, and breaks down in to seven sections:
- Where do we go from here?: Opening Fanfare
- Community over Chaos: Pipe Tune
- Hope in the face of adversity: St Bernard’s Waltz
- Box and fiddle in the hope of adversity: Barn Dance from Nova Scotia
- A perspective that’s not ones’ own: A reflection on human frailty
- A strathspey that’s not from one’s own perspective
- A reel that’s not from one’s own perspective
A fun work on the surface, but deep in its sentiments. There are also words, collated and inspired by King’s original sentiments. Intended to be sung by a large children’s choir, it has never been performed in this way.
