I’m a keen birder. By sheer good fortune, when we moved down to Pembrokeshire nearly 30 years ago, we happened to live 3 miles down the road from one of the biggest starling roosts in Britain – at its height upwards of 2 million birds. I’ve been watching starling murmurations for the last 25 years – how can anyone tire of the awesome sight of a flock of 300,000 birds running the gauntlet of birds of prey waiting like fighter aces 10 o’clock high, having gained height and wind direction on their targets (my personal record is 8 buzzards, 3 peregrine falcons, a goshawk [they’re deadly!] and 5 sparrow hawks!)? You don’t have to go to the Serengeti to see some of the most extraordinary sights in nature!         
Everyone will be familiar with tv and YouTube images showing the breath-taking gyrations of a murmuration, but few will have actually heard the sounds associated with these displays. There’s an entire repertoire of calls, noises and sounds associated with starling flocks – I’ll describe just two. For a huge flock of starlings, roosting is the most life-threatening moment of their daily cycle (facing that gauntlet I’ve already described). When the flock comes in in the twilight they’re understandably nervous and so are continuously chatting and communicating with one another; imagine a pantomime audience of hundreds of thousands of children screaming ‘it’s BEHIND you!’ The other unforgettable sound happens only at dawn. Wingbeats are surprisingly percussive! When, say, half a million birds suddenly take to the air in a split second, the sound is deafening, a veritable explosion of wings.
That’s about all you need to know about my piece. A glance at my score will tell you that there’s plenty of acrobatic gyrations to listen out for – arpeggios rule, ok! – but what excited me most in trying to write this piece was to capture some of those sounds.

Murmurations

Monsieur Croche is Debussy’s argumentative alter ego in his loose collection of writings published posthumously in 1921. Like all good writing on aesthetics, Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante is full of irony, ambiguity and contradiction, where meaning and intention are always elusive and just beyond our reach. 
Irony and contradiction are equally at play in his Etude No. 9 (Pour Les Notes Répétées). The Etudes were written at a time (1915) when the composer was fighting a Kultur war as bitter and protracted as the war in the trenches.
“I won’t get on the subject of German barbarity… I think we are going to pay dearly for the right not to love the art of Richard Wagner and Schoenberg.”
The Etudes are as much studies in composition as they are exercises in keyboard technique. So why did Debussy choose a light and playful ragtime to explore Schoenberg’s atonality? The opening eight bars of No. 9 are strikingly similar to a serial ‘tone row.’ Germanic rigour meets black American spontaneity amidst a hail of repeated notes fired off as if from a machine gun? I fear we are back in the world of irony and contradiction, this time in spades, and I’m not sure whether Monsieur Croche would approve of fugues!  

Michael Parkin

Monsieur Croches Fugue

Written for and dedicated to the 'Women of Srebrenica' Association. The piece is both a memorial for the victims of 1995, and a testament to the remarkable courage, tenacity and fortitude of the survivors in their long struggle for truth and justice. 

Srebrenica

The Courting Rites of Cranes was commissioned by my dear friends Antony and Dot Griew to celebrate their Silver Wedding anniversary. Cranes mate for life, and in Japan they are a symbol of longevity. 

The piece was premiered at the Griew's joyous anniversary party by members of the London Symphony Orchestra. This is a 'live'  recording from a La Mer Trio concert. 

The Courting Rites Of Cranes

Where the Waves Rise - for solo flute                                        Michael Parkin 
The starting point for Where the Waves Rise is the opening melody of the Cantigas de Amigo, a Galician juglar cycle of 7 songs dating from the 13th century and possibly connected with the court of Don Dinis of Portugal. The songs tell of a young woman yearning for the return of her lover as she waits by the sea at Vigo in Spain:

             Come to where the waves rise,
             my love will come to me there:
             we will bathe in the ocean waves.
                                      
By turns desolate or rapturous, as the song progresses she comes to represent the universal longing for love, our own waiting and awakening at the edge of an ocean:

               All you who would be lovers
               come to the sea at Vigo:
               we will bathe in the ocean waves.

Like the Cantigas, my work is divided into seven continuous sections. Each cycle grows in duration, range and intensity to form not a narrative, but variations on a common theme.

The work was commissioned by Edwina Smith with funds from Yorkshire Arts.


Where the Waves Rise for solo flute

The starting point for the sonata was paintings by the German 19th. century romantic artist,  Caspar David Friedrich.  His sombre landscapes, infused with a dark symbolism and peopled by faceless characters staring straight ahead into the void, provide a perfect visual backdrop to the music of his contemporaries, Schubert and Schumann.  

The work is in one continuous sonata movement, with a central development section, an extended recapitulation that builds to form the climax of the work, and a coda characterised by an uneasy calm.

The Sonata for Cello and Piano was commissioned by the York Late Music with funds made available by Yorkshire Arts. It was written over a two year period between 2000-2002.  


Sonata for Cello and Piano

Prelude & Fugue No. 3 for piano (2012)
The prelude is slow and elegiac in character, opening with simple chords that feature in several transformations throughout the piece. The melodic material is always in the left hand. The fugue has a complex structure based on the Fibonacci Series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc.). The notes of the ‘subject’ unfold gradually using this series. When the ‘subject’ is 34 notes long, the process is reversed, gradually losing all the earlier notes. Throughout the fugue the ‘subject’ material also appears into shorter note values, so that in the last 3 bars it simply disappears off the page!


Prelude and Fugue No. 3 (fugue)

Prelude and Fugue No. 3 (prelude)

Violin & Piano. The Bridge Duo; Matthew Jones, violin & Michael Hampton, piano. Composers of Wales 01 Recording.

Inevitable Inventions

Elegy for alto flute. Nancy Ruffer - Multiplicities album for Metier

Elegy for alto flute

Waulking for soprano and string orchestra. Settings of Gaelic 'waulking' songs and 'O Aple Tree'. Opera North Strings with Margaret Mcdonald, soprano.

Waulking

Piano Sonata - world premiere performed by Raymond Clarke

Piano Sonata

Performance by the Bingham String Quartet.

String Quartet No. 1

Live performance of the second of my Preludes and Fugues for piano. Six have been written so far. 

Prelude and Fugue No. 2

BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Conductor Jac van Steen. Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff.

A piece inspired by the images from the Power of 10 project.

Still Life

His work has been broadcast and widely performed in Britain, Europe and the U.S. Prizes include the Yorkshire Arts Young Composers' Competition (1978), the MidNAG award (1979) and his work 'Elegy' for solo alto flute was one of only two UK works selected for Gaudeamus International Musikweek in the Netherlands. 'Inevitable Inventions' was awarded first prize in the 1996 Match TM Composition Award. In 1994 he was one of the featured composers at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and he has since been regularly programmed at the festival. 

In 2006 he received the prestigious Creative Wales Award to enable him to write two large scale orchestral works.

His work ranges from a chamber opera, 'Cheap Tricks' (1984), to a large number of solos and duos written for individual performers; notably 'Inevitable Inventions' (1994) for the violinist Madeleine Mitchell, 'Music for the Cyber Cafe' for the clarinettist David Campbell, and the solo trombone piece 'Sinfonia', premiered by Barrie Webb at the 1987 Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music.

In contrast to the reflective, internalised nature of these pieces, recent work over the last ten years, such as the 4 string quartets, and the orchestral works 'Still Life', 'Srebrenica' and  'On the Banks of the Nile' mark a return to a much more dramatic and public language, using large scale forms and forces.

michael parkin

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