2015 Program Notes, Book 2 |
47
at the University of Edinburgh and Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in
Glasgow. He has also served as Artistic Director of the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts
Trust, Affiliate Composer of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Composer/Conductor
with the BBC Philharmonic, and Visiting Composer of the Philharmonia Orchestra and
Artistic Director of its contemporary music series, Music Today; he became Principal
Guest Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic in 2010. In 1993,
MacMillan won both the Gramophone Contemporary Music Record of the Year Award
and the Classic CD Award for Contemporary Music; he was made a CBE in 2004, given
the 2008 British Composer Award for Liturgical Music, and named an Honorary Patron
of the London Chamber Orchestra in 2008. In October 2014, MacMillan inaugurated
The Cumnock Tryst, a festival of international scope that he organized in his boyhood
home in southern Scotland.
In the “repertoire note” for MacMillan’s
Quickening
provided by Boosey & Hawkes,
the work’s publisher, British conductor, composer, writer, producer and lecturer Paul
Spicer wrote, “Co-commissioned by the BBC Proms and the Philadelphia Orchestra,
Quickening
sets poetry by the composer’s frequent collaborator Michael Symmons
Roberts. The work is about birth, new life, new impulses, but, as MacMillan says, it
also has its dark side out of which hope is glimpsed. It is powerfully imaginative and is
laid out over four movements, deploying three distinct vocal layers: a small ensemble
of soloists and a symphonic chorus on the stage, plus a boys choir with chamber
organ support [representing the ‘Unborn’] ideally spatially set apart from the other
performers. The work’s three-fold vocal layers juxtapose mysticism and hyper-realism,
painting a canvas at one turn intimate and private, at the next epic and celebratory….
Quickening
is a large-scale, complex work that is fascinating in its conception.”
Quickening
addresses four aspects of birth; MacMillan said that the title refers
to “the instant of conception—‘the quickening of the seed that will become the
ripe grain’—or the moment that a woman first feels her baby kick.” The opening
Incarnadine
(a crimson or pinkish-red color; literally “flesh-colored,” a cognate of
“incarnate,” or “made flesh”) begins with free, pitch-less chanting on an intentionally
incomprehensible text, a
glossalalia
or “speaking in tongues,” that MacMillan said
uses a loose transcription of the ancient Aramaic text of the Lord’s Prayer (
Abona in
de shoo; der catta shesh mach, etc
.). The movement goes on to consider both the
concern and the miracle in the creation of a new life:
What risk to bring another pair of
hands into the world! … Yet this new life is our elixir
. The second movement suggests
the struggle of birth for both infant and
Midwife
, who “hauls these hybrid foreigners
from one world of light to another.”
Poppies
uses war-like music in its first section to
contrast the violence of the world the newborn is entering with the meditation on
the fragile condition of a premature infant that follows.
Living Water
begins and ends
with implied ritual, the ethereal hum of temple bowls at the outset, the return of the
chorus’
glossalalia
at the close. Between is a build-up of monumental proportions that
celebrates the newborn’s gift of renewed life.
N.B. Words of the Unborn are given in italics.
I. Incarnadine
This is love’s alchemy, mercurial,
what risk to bring another pair of hands
into the world! A tongue alive with sounds
of long-forgotten gardens, Babel
songs which none can recognise,
wildcat psalms in cedar trees, what risk!
Yet this new life is our elixir,
this soft dividing pearl is our great price.
