Description
(Music score) [Digital Download PDF] FREE SCORE DOWNLOAD FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY
Symphony was composed by John Wallace over the course of 40 years. A contemporary work with 4 movements, embracing the sounds of brass band and brass quintet, the work also embraces live electronics and features a double-belled trumpet, organ and bodhrán. This work is the title track of a 2025 album release under The Wallace Collection label – Symphony. This complete score is currently being offered as a FREE downloadable PDF in order to share the creativity and intricacies of this major work.
PROGRAMME NOTES
Extracted from a conversation between composer, John Wallace and conductor Bede Williams
First Movement – Falkland Fling
Brass Band | Natural Trumpets | Organ | Bodhrán
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.
Second Movement – Tentsmuir
Brass Band | Double-Belled Trumpet | Live Electronics
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
Brass Band | Brass Quintet | Tuba
Methilhill 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 almost traces a scherzo right out of a Beethoven symphony though with an added 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
Brass Band | Brass Quintet
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.
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.
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’.
