Royal Academy of Music Bicentenary Commissions: 200 Pieces
Two solo works by Gareth were featured in the 2022 collection of 200 new solo compositions, commissioned to celebrate the bicentenary of the Royal Academy of Music. This ambitious collection of new works offers a fascinating picture of the wide range of musical styles and approaches currently being explored, and an insight into the variety of ways composers might approach the unique challenges presented when creating solo repertoire. All works were premiered and recorded by performance students at the RAM; more info about the collection can be accessed here.
Programme note:
Vida is a fantasia-like work in three movements based on a selection of Medieval melodies composed by the Troubadours and Trobairitz. It was written alongside my suite Alternative views from history (the latter for a mixed ensemble of period and modern instruments). Both works are concerned with the practice of creative transcription and ‘recomposition’ of existing materials; as such, Vida felt something like a testing ground in which I set out to explore the different ways I might frame and engage with these ancient melodies in a new musical language.
During the writing process, transcriptions of the original melodies were used as the starting point for improvisations at the piano, in which I distorted the material (sometimes radically) according to different principles and aims. These improvisations were later transcribed as closely as possible and key points of interest were isolated and refined. Whilst the majority of the piece presents the ancient source materials in a heavily distorted form, the melodies appear clearly on the musical surface at several key points in the work. The resulting dialogue between the simple modal melodic materials and the often complex, layered developments becomes the key structural element in the music.
A vida is a short biography for a troubadour or trobairitz, sometimes found in the chansonniers alongside the poetry and music. These biographies are considered to be very unreliable and often draw on literal readings of the poetry.
Programme note:
This piece was loosely inspired by Fischli and Weiss’s art film The way things go, which presents a causal ‘chain reaction’ (something like a Rube Goldberg machine) featuring everyday objects and industrial materials. The starting point for the work was an exploration of similar chain reactions which connect apparently unrelated musical events into continuous lines and structures. As the piece unfolds, short motivic starting points are progressively explored and transformed, sometimes appearing in radically different, distorted forms. Chains of development are continually cut off and revisited later on, so that musical ideas never reappear in quite the same state. Much of the material was developed in a free and improvisatory way, working with approximate musical shapes and contours (see the sketch above) which could be revisited in different modal/harmonic contexts throughout the piece.