'Remembering: In Memoriam Evan Scofield' for orchestra, duration c.30 minutes.
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 46
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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https://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Mark-Anthony-Turnage-Remembering/101171
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- 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
- This was a hard piece to write. The death of a family friend (son of the jazz guitarist John Scofield) was marked in a work that significantly re-focussed my language towards a more personal emotional expression within an evident tonal morphology. Recent large-scale pieces (e.g., Speranza) had, at least in terms of tonal thinking, already moved in this direction. But in Remembering I sought to intensify that process and to build a new and distinctly emotional grammar. Tonal method today requires re-invention if it is not to sound clichéd and un-thought. Jazz harmony (which is of course rooted in functional tonal harmony) has always been one of my tools, though employed with caution, evolved to veil intentionally its origin, enabling it to enrich my basic harmonic means, inherited from my teacher, Oliver Knussen and in particular, his use of chord rotation and other related transformative processes. Instrumentation also defines harmonic procedure. Removing the violins changes overall voicing and significantly inflects harmonic palate. I complete pieces far ahead of any deadline to give time for reflection. The symphonic breadth of Remembering, not just its size but its emotional ambition, presented a level of complexity that needed space outside of the compositional process to fully assimilate. After some months (and other pieces) I returned to the score, trimming the third movement which had become too extended for the whole. Smaller scale revisions continued into workshop sessions with the LSO. These workshops are key to the process and permit a more forensic engagement with musical and structural details in direct consultation with players and others. I intended at that stage to cut the final movement; (it was already a substantial amplification of a much smaller piano piece). This was resisted by Simon Rattle. It took time to realise he was right.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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