Compositions – Page 2

Not long before Yodit’s death I sent Martin a short piece for solo violin entitled Amhrán do Yodit (‘Song for Yodit’) and will never forget him telling me that, rather than wait for a violinist, he had immediately rung her in hospital and sung it to her over the phone. This new string piece has no musical connection with that earlier work; instead, it is constructed with wisps of melodic material from the Eleventh Symphony that I was composing at the time and which were filling my imagination. It is therefore a very personal offering to both Martin and Yodit.

The Prélude aux Chants d’amour was written after the shocking news of the death of Yodit, wife of my friend Martin Anderson. Since I was busy composing the final part of my song-cycle Chants d’amour, on love poems that the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren had written for his wife (Les heures), I thought straightaway that a purely instrumental prelude might introduce the thematic elements developed in these songs and that it could be played independently as a memorial piece. The work begins with a modal, Ravelian harmonic sweetness and grows more and more chromatic before ending in a mood of peace.

This short work is a paraphrase on the second of my two Valedictions for cello and piano (2000), which can be heard on TOCC-CD150. The cello movement was a response to John Donne’s poem of 1611–12 A Valediction: forbidding mourning, in which the poet typifies the parting of true lovers thus:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

My new work for string orchestra is an airy expansion of a single phrase from the older piece; a free polyphonic fantasia, cast in a simple A-B-A form.

I wrote these variations in two weeks after Martin had informed me of the tragic destiny of Yodit. The Norwegian folksong ‘Å, den svalande vind’ (‘Oh, the cooling wind’) is a tune I have used for many improvisations at the piano. With that experience in mind, it was easy for me to write the piece in quite a short time.

Å den svalande vind
Stryk om heiane inn,

Friskar opp i min sorgtunge hug

Å den svalar vel godt

Men det hjelper ikkje stort

Denne sorgi hev falle meg so tung.

Oh, the cooling wind
Sweeps in from the heaths
And freshens up my grief-stricken soul.
Oh, it is so very refreshing.
But it does not help much at all,
For my sorrow is so very heavy.

The melody is said to be from Telemark (In the central-south of Norway), but there are some who argue that it is from the west coast. The song was sung by the folk-singer Johan Austbø (1879–1945) from Sogn (to the north of Bergen) and recorded by the NRK (the Norwegian state broadcaster) in 1939. Austbø claimed to have written the text himself – but the melody from Telemark is quite different from the Sogn version, and so perhaps it is a song which has ‘wandered’, changing with the landscape and the temperament of the people. The Telemark version seems to me a bit more sophisticated and logical in its form, and so I adopted this one. 

The introduction, Un poco adagio, is a kind of encircling of the theme, a development that comes before the event or an ‘improvisation’ on the subject.  Originally the theme is in 4/4 and in E minor, but I have given it a looser structure than it might be given when written down in a songbook. The first variation, Più mosso ma non troppo, is in 12/8 and presents a simple figural variation in the violins. In Var. II the melodic line continues in the cellos with an augmented fragment of the theme high in the violins. Var. III is in a slow tempo (Adagio) and every phrase ends up with a dissonance. Is something going to happen? The fourth variation, Andante semplice, changes the mood: suddenly the theme appears as a plainsong in E flat major, almost like a simple and happy Salvation Army tune, which changes to an even more heavenly variant in the fifth variation in the violins and violas. With Vars. VI and VII, both Allegro moderato, comes more dramatic music, with aggressive questions answered as if from another dimension. The eighth variation, in the same tempo, is a prayer or meditation, with questions from the full body of strings answered by four solo violins. In the ninth variation, Subito allegro drammatico, the theme is broken into fragments in a kind of calm before the storm. The drama loosens its reins in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth variations, and the climax is reached in the middle of Var. XIII. The fourteenth and fifteenth variations represent the sorrow after a terrible disaster. The latter has even fragments of a funeral march. A repetition of the theme in its original form ends the piece.

Lullaby for Yodit attempts the seemingly impossible – to commemorate and portray in music the personality and soul of a person the composer never met. On the other hand, when Martin wrote to me about Yodit and their life together, the piece… well, it didn’t exactly write itself, but I sort of felt ‘guided’ by powers unknown, and ended up with a short, introverted piece in 3/4 for string orchestra, a simple ‘humming’ in C major: ‘Lullaby for Yodit – the sweetest woman I never knew’.

Maddalena Casulana
arr. Colin Matthews
Il vostro dipartir

Little is known about Maddalena Casulana (c.1544–c.1590) beyond the fact that she was the first European woman to have her music printed and published. In the dedication to Isabella de’ Medici of her first book of madrigals, published in Venice in 1568, she wrote: ‘I want to show the world, as much as I can in this profession of music, the vain error of men that they alone possess the gifts of intellect and artistry, and that such gifts are never given to women’. This is a free arrangement of one of the madrigals from her second book, published in 1570, whose text seemed to be very fitting for Martin’s wonderful project.

Il vostro dipartir, donna, mi diede noiosa vita


E con si dubbia spene di voi, caro mio bene


Ch’alti si n’pera di ciò fia cagione


Le vostr’alme virtut’ al mondo sole
E rio timor mi spinge ond’ i miei lumi
Sembran d’amare lacrime duo fiumi

Your departure, lady, leaves my life insipid
And my hope for you is so unsure, my dearest,
That I aspire to nothing less
Than your soul, the only virtue in the world.
And fear brings tears repeatedly to my eyes
As if they were two streams of bitter tears.

It is very odd to write a piece in memory of someone who is still alive. But that is exactly what Martin asked me to do. He wanted his beloved Yodit to know how she would be remembered after she was gone. I started writing my piece and by next morning I had finished it. I was about to send over the manuscript to Martin when I discovered an e-mail from him. Yodit had died that night. And so my piece became a farewell to her, a piece of music to accompany her on her journey from this world and to echo in the hearts of the people she left behind.

It doesn’t really have a structure in a conventional way. But it does have a beginning, middle (the bulk of the piece) and end. The short beginning prepares the main theme which is only three notes (D–E–E, which are letters from her name), but the entire work is developed on these three notes. A Farewell to Yodit is entirely tonal but the only times when there is a resolved tonic is when the main theme first appears and at the very end of the piece. I imagined this piece as a series of arrivals at new doubts about the answers that have just been given. Picture asking the same question all over again and again in hope of eventually getting a different answer. The end uses the same material as the beginning, but this time not as a preparation for the main theme but as a move away from it, manifesting itself in slowly rising arpeggios that finally arrive at the tonic.

Jon Lord arr. Paul Mann
(version for String Orchestra by Paul Mann, 2016)

Jon Lord prefaced the original version for string quartet with the following programme note:

In an abandoned ballroom in a small town somewhere in the heart of Spain, a lone man, far advanced in years, but still proud of bearing, walks slowly onto the dusty dance floor.
He stands for a while, gazing into his past.
Then, with only a slight hesitation, he begins to dance.
As he grows more sure, he dances in memory of long ago and far away, and of loves won and lost.
The dance ends, and with a wistful smile and a stiff bow to the ghosts,
he walks out into the night.

Jon had intended to make a version for string orchestra but, one way and another, it never materialised. With Martin Anderson’s extraordinary project to commission and record works for string orchestra in memory of his partner Yodit Tekle, who died of cancer on 24 April 2015, I feel sure that Jon, as a friend of Martin’s and proud patron of Toccata Classics, would have wanted to contribute. I have therefore tried to bring to this arrangement the spirit that Jon himself would have brought, had he still been here. —Paul Mann

Paul Mann, a long-time friend and musical collaborator of Jon Lord’s, is currently embarked upon the editing of Lord’s complete works for his publishers Schott and De Haske (Hal Leonard/EMI Music). This version of Zarabanda Solitaria appears by kind permission of the Estate of Jon Lord.

In response to Martin’s request for a modest piece for strings in memory of his lamented Yodit, I wrote this little hymn-like elegy which encloses a livelier, more dance-like middle section.

Sleep began in 2012 as a piece for three soprano voices, a setting of these words by the poet David McCooey (British-born but now based at Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria), from his book Outside (Salt Publishing, London, 2011): 

Sometimes
  sleep is

a mansion;

  sometimes

a hole
  you pull
over
yourself.

When Martin asked if I would compose something for string orchestra in memory of his beloved Yodit, I thought of making this song my starting point, partly for the cyclic nature of its harmonies (which could go round and round forever), but also because of David’s words.

The original a cappella setting presents the whole poem three times, the words coming more clearly into focus on each occasion. In turning it into a piece for string orchestra, I tried to preserve as much of the sound and sense of the missing words as possible in the articulation of the melodic lines.