Beltway Series and Bletchley Bedford Sandy from “48”
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 1923
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- 48 is a projected two-hour cycle for solo piano, of which the first two movements, Beltway Series (20’) and Bletchley Bedford Sandy (25’) have currently been written. The cycle is for Jonathan Powell, several elements of whose playing clearly influenced Harry’s composition: in particular, his exceptional technical ability, and his performance of both complex modernist music and nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russian music.
Each projected movement of 48 is a character piece, reflecting on Harry’s time as a student at Cambridge in the 1980s. Beltway Series is a portrait of Phanos Dymiotis, and Bletchley Bedford Sandy of Alexander (‘Sandy’) Goehr. In each case, Harry presents a kind of musical portrait, drawing on his memories of conversations he had with them at that time.
Beltway Series reflects the structure of a baseball game, with its nine ‘inning’ (including a ‘seventh inning stretch’ and the ‘empty’ bottom of the ninth) punctuated by a ‘three strike out’ motive throughout. Harry extends Boulez’s chord multiplication technique beyond its deployment in Le marteau sans maître, recalling Dymiotis’ interest in serialism. To some extent Harry views Beltway Series as a series of studies in arpeggiating chords. Isorhythm presents a foil to this in Beltway Series, reflecting the dominant models presented by older English composers in the 1980s (e.g. the Manchester School, of which Goehr was part).
Each movement of 48 is also connected to one of Bach’s 24 preludes and fugues. These intertextual connections, or to use Johnson’s term, ‘voices’, are particularly clear in Bletchley Bedford Sandy, where much of the music he studied with Goehr (Debussy, Schumann, and Bach) appears as quotations and allusions. Meanwhile, the harmonic material is organised by Harry’s original technique of ‘cascades’, whereby permutational techniques are used to create heterophonic voices that each gradually spell out the work’s chord multiples.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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