RETURN OF THE NIGHTINGALES for solo piano and nightingale (2013)
LIVE RECORDING by IAN PACE at Late Music Festival York 3 August 2013.

Along with the rose, the nightingale is one of the principal images used in classical Afghan poetry and song. It is the bird of hazar dastan, ‘a thousand stories’, singing rad ba rad, varying its song ‘turn by turn’. The combination of live birdsong and music is considered to give Afghans the greatest musical enjoyment. The score is prefaced by the following Persian Sufi text:
'Ajab tarana e sar karda am darin golshan, Khoda konad ke na sazad falak khamush mara'
I have started to sing a wonderful song in this flower-garden like a nightingale
I hope the movement of the stars (destiny) does not make me silent again.

It is used as a direct reference to the devastation of Afghan culture during the period of the Taliban when musicians were silenced, many exiled or fleeing, and to their re-emergence following the Taliban’s expulsion from 2001. The text also suggested a simple musical narrative: 
-  a lone nightingale’s song is accompanied by an Afghan tarana (classical song)
-  its obliteration by a violent and mechanistic depiction of warfare
-  the gradual reassertion of the tarana and the nightingale with an accumulation of birdsong and trills interlaced with fragments of an Afghan rag, increasingly ecstatic and resonant. This eventually dies away to reveal the nightingale’s song.

The musical material has been derived from three sources. The opening melody is a transcription of a classical Afghan tarana sung by Ustad Amir Mohammad, recorded by ethnomusicologist John Baily during a Herati wedding party on 12 September 1974.  Many of the rhythmic patterns are taken from Afghan musicians’ improvisations made in response to hearing Messiaen’s Le Loriod, recorded by John in Herat in 1994. The trill-saturated conclusion was inspired in part by Ian’s tremendous performance of Scriabin’s Tenth Sonata which I heard in 2004, and contains fragments from this work. 

Return of the Nightingales is a purposely uneasy work. It combines ‘natural’ music with constructed music, and contemporary Western and traditional Afghan musical sources on an instrument that is only designed to convey the former with any subtlety or authenticity. The ecstatic climax is ‘my’ resolution expressed in European terms...an outsider’s response.

The piece is dedicated to John Baily, who together with his wife Veronica Doubleday, has worked tirelessly to preserve Afghan music. His video documentary, Return of the Nightingales (2012) celebrates the fabulous work undertaken by the Afghanistan National Institute for Music. Its mottos are:
BUILD LIVES THROUGH MUSIC REVIVE AND PRESERVE AFGHAN MUSIC TRAIN FUTURE MUSIC EDUCATORS ESTABLISH INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE ASSURE MUSICAL RIGHTS


Return Of The Nightingales for solo piano (2013)

Composed for The 24 (York) for a tour of China in 2008. The choir is divided in two.
There are eleven verses describing the journey of the soul after death. Each verse includes the refrain:

Every night and all, And Christ receive thy soul

The song describes the soul’s journey through a harsh landscape like the Yorkshire Moors, mentioning places like ‘Thorny Moor’ (Whinnie Muir) and ‘Bridge of Dread’ (Brig o’Dread), and explains that if the deceased has led a good life the passage will be easy, but if not, the passage will be very difficult:

‘If ever thou gavest silver and gold, At Brig o’Dread thou’lt find foothold.

 But if silver and gold thou gavest none, Down thou tumblest to Hell flame’

A Lyke Wake Dirge

As part of our opening weekend of the 2023/24 season, the Delta Saxophone Quartet (DSQ) brought a programme of music by composers who have been important in their development over the past 40 years. To celebrate our joint 40th anniversary with the DSQ, they premiered Paul Honey's 'Salting Black Ice' (WP) and a number of other pieces written for saxophone quartet and mezzo-soprano Frances Gregory.

Programme Note:
A man sees a young girl skipping along the street, sprinkling salt to melt the snow and ice underfoot. She has the surefootedness of the young, and as he watches her he feels a pang of nostalgia for that time in his life when he too could have danced on ice. This, in turn, melts something frozen within his heart.

Salting Black Ice (WP)

Commissioned for the Late Music Festival, York for the Albany Trio and premiered on Saturday 6th June 2015.  

The work, entitled Gwyneth, tells the story of an eleven year old girl who was sent to Australia for safety at the outbreak of the Second World War.  The piece takes direct influence from a diary entry which was written by a young girl which recounts the day she is taken to Liverpool by her mother to the dock to get the boat to Australia uncheperoned along with other children of similar ages.  The carefully handwritten pages capture a unique insight into a life-changing journey through the eyes of a young child.  

Gwyneth

These songs set five poems by David Vogel, a Russian-born poet and novelist who died at Auschwitz in 1944.  The title is derived from Vogel's only published collection of poems (1923).  The Dark Gate was first performed in August 2017, and sheet music is published by UYMP.

The Dark Gate

I Breathe
II Writing
III Fragrance 
IV Drunk 
V Chaos 

Fragments consists of five miniatures and sets five very short poems by American poet Christopher Poindexter.  Christopher describes himself as an ‘observer’ and his book Naked Human is an exploration of humanity at its finest and at its worst. When reading his work, I found the succinctness of his words, the informal structures he uses and the thinking spaces they create very musical. Therefore, the five disconnected untitled poems have been arranged as such to link to Poindexter’s text to discover what makes us human.

Each fragment works to mirror the poems structure and tone, sometimes leaving enough space for ‘thoughts’ on each subject being presented and sometimes moving swiftly on- as fleetingly as written. The role of the vocalist is to be the voice of these ‘thoughts’ adding colour, emotion and movement in the intensity of each brief fragment.

Fragments

‘Long After Tonight is All Over’ is a short piece for solo flute.  In it I wanted to explore the dark, fragile quality of the instrument’s lowest register as the player explores a series of short fragments which move in and out of silence.  A lyrical melody does briefly emerge but quickly subsides back into darkness.

The title is borrowed from the ‘Northern Soul’ classic by Jimmy Radcliffe, a favourite at Wigan Casino and one of the last songs played before the building was destroyed by fire in 1982.

This performance was given by Jennifer Cohen at Late Music, York on 7th October 2017.

Long After Tonight Is All Over

From my office and from my home I can see York Minster and hear its bells; it dominates the skyline and is usually the first thing I see when I return to York from a trip.  The ‘grotesques’ are hundreds of carvings on the inside and outside of the building, representing distorted human faces, demons, fantastical creatures and other horrors intended to scare away evil spirits. Some of them are intriguing, others are very rude! Are they modelled on the faces of the craftsmen who built the Minster, or their families, or their masters?  

My intention was to compose a series of grotesques: short pieces with distinctive musical identities, sometimes employing musical distortions (of my own material, or pre-existing pieces associated with the Minster, or the change ringing patterns used by bell ringers) to convey the notion of the grotesque.

There are five Grotesques here, all blended together in one continuous span, allowing the musical characters to form relationships and to explore the possibilities of combination and juxtaposition.

The five grotesques are: 
1)	a squirming melody played in the low register of the flute, 
2)	a quick, spiky and abrasive ‘fanfare’, 
3)	a flurry of descending scales which interrupts the continuity, 
4)	a plaintive melody passed between oboe and clarinet, and 
5)	a sequence of sombre minor chords.

Grotesques was composed in York and Paris during the winter of 2017-18, and it is published by UYMP.

Grotesques

A Musical setting of “As I Walked Out One Evening” written by Natalie King. This was first premiered on 7th April 2018 at The Late Music Concert series by Amanda Crawley and Josephine Peach of the Fairfax Ensemble.

“As I Walked Out One Evening” by WH Auden Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Copyright © 1937
All Rights reserved.

04 As I Walked Out One Evening – Natalie King

Let The Spring Breeze Enter

Spring rounds from the Rite of Spring arranged for 9 bass clarinets. Recorded by over-dubbing myself on my Zoom.

MORE INFO AND SHEET MUSIC HERE: http://jonrussellmusic.com/product/spring-rounds-arranged-for-bass-clarinet-ensemble/

NOTE: Sheet music only available for sale in the United States.

Spring Rounds from the Rite of Spring, arranged for Bass Clarinets

Contemporary composers, performed live.

Concerts of new music on the first Saturday of each month, March to October.

Salting Black Ice (WP)

Late Music York

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