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Alan talks about three melodies, and the musical journeys that they make from start to finish. Follow this link: Musical Journeys Episode 2

Musical Journeys Episode 1

 

A very belated Happy New Year to all who read this! Some readers may have noticed that not only have I not written a newsletter for some time, I’ve also paused posting a ‘Piece of the Week’ on my website and on Facebook.

So I just wanted to reassure you that I am well, and busy with several projects for different publishers – but because publishers like secrets, and I’m not always very good at keeping them, I’ll just button my lips and say now that ‘plans are afoot’ and I will tell you more later.

A Christmas highlight for me was the performance of my carol Sweet babe, sang she by The Sixteen, director Harry Christophers. It was a lovely performance: they did it in two concerts at London’s Cadogan Hall, and then repeated it in Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge. The concert was also recorded and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 just before Christmas.

The Sixteen have performed several of my Christmas carols now, and it is always a delight to hear their eloquent and colourful singing, both live and on recordings.

The same piece, (Sweet babe, sang she) was also recorded on CD by St. Martin’s Voices, director Andrew Earis, and I was delighted to go to the launch party and hear them sing it live as well.

Some sad news was the recent death of two people who were associated with my music in different ways – John Wallace and Zélie Jopling.

Zélie, who lived in a lovely farmhouse on the marshes near Colchester, was a keen musician, active promoter of musical events for young and old, and was the founder and director of the Roman River Festival (now part of Wild Arts) which is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary and continues to bring many world-class performers to venues around North East Essex, and latterly further afield, as well as initiating many educational projects.

John Wallace needs no introduction, principal trumpet of the Philharmonia Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta, founder of the ‘Wallace Collection’ brass ensemble, and later returning to his Scottish roots as the director of The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

I was able to remember these two musicians in quite a personal way this February, as my suite for wind band Heritage, whose first performance in Leeds in 1993 was conducted by John Wallace, was recently performed by the London Youth Wind Band, conducted by my son Sam Bullard – and it was lovely to hear the vibrant playing of a group of enthusiastic young people.  And, a week earlier, my String Quartet no. 2, which was originally commissioned by Zélie Jopling for the Roman River Festival in 2006, was performed by a Scottish string quartet, Afton Strings, in a concert promoted by Colchester New Music to a large and enthusiastic audience in a church in Chelmsford. So it was fitting that both these pieces were resurrected, re-igniting memories of musicians who inspired them.

For various reasons I have been occupied recently with rather more non-musical issues than usual – so there is rather less news than sometimes – but my desk is stacked with manuscript paper, both full and empty, (yes, I still write by hand before transferring it to the computer!) and I plan to have more to report in a few months time.

And although ‘Piece of the Week’ may not appear regularly for the time being, I do plan to write the occasional blog on some musical developments in the last century and how they affected and influenced me (and others). These will appear on my website, in spoken form on YouTube, and with links from here: https://www.facebook.com/ComposerBullard

Thank you for reading!

Alan

Advent and Christmas greetings!

Choral
Over the years I’ve written a great deal of music for Christmas, so it’s not surprising that this time is the busiest for performances of my pieces, and it is really gratifying to know of so many singers learning my music and hopefully enjoying the process and the performance.  I’ve been combing the internet for details of performances this month and I’ve found each of my three Christmas cantatas, and also many individual carols: here’s the cantatas:

A Feast for Christmas – performances in Weybridge (Walton Voices) and Buxton (Buxton Musical Society)

O Come, Emmanuel – performances in Virginia Beach, USA, Stockholm, Sweden, and Hitchin, UK

A Light in the Stable – performances in Andover (Andover Choral Society), Wakefield (Yorkshire Philharmonic Choir), and Faringdon (Faringdon Singers)

And in terms of individual carols, my Sweet babe, sang she is getting some good outings this year, including a recording and performance by St Martin’s Voices (director Andrew Earis) and performances by The Sixteen (director Harry Christophers) at London’s Cadogan Hall and Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge – also to be broadcast on BBC R3 on 23^rd December.

Piano
Jan and I have been working together on a series of short piano pieces for relaxation and meditation – more about that next year.

As well, we are continuing to add pieces to the Janet and Alan Bullard Piano Series, and also I’ve been adding pieces to the Piano Prayer and Praise series – the newest one is Eventide (Abide with me), and Noel Nouvelet, which I did last year, is particularly appropriate for the Christmas season.

Organ
Editing The Oxford Hymn Settings volumes 8 and 9 (see Newsletter 17) gave me the taste for writing more organ preludes; and newly released are

Hyfrydol (Church Organ World) in Sortie Sorted vol. 2
Two Preludes on Veni Creator Spiritus (first performed at Chelmsford Cathedral) YouTube here
Pavane and Galliard for chamber organ (for Carson Cooman) details here

Just a reminder, too, about my two sets of organ preludes published by Banks Music Publications, for Christmas, and Lent/Easter. There are recordings of all of these (as well as of those published by Church Organ World and a few published by OUP) on YouTube, performed by the indefatigable Steven Maxson.

Six Dances
I was delighted to give a recital with my saxophonist son, Sam, at Lion Walk Church in the centre of Colchester in the autumn.  It included the first performance of my Six Dances for alto saxophone and piano – a reworking of my Six Dances for Four Hands (piano duet). This version, together with separate ones for tenor sax and for clarinet, are all on sale from Colne Edition.  Here’s a recording of the performance.

Details of all the pieces mentioned here are on my website.

We all have our own ways of celebrating Christmas, of course, and for me, church services help to remind me what it’s all about – I’m taking part in two Lessons and Carols Services – singing in in a city centre church, and directing a ‘once-a-year’ choir in a small village church. Two very different services in different environments – but the same Christmas message, of joy and peace.

Very best wishes to you all from me and my family to all readers: may Christmas bring you joy, and the New Year peace and happiness!

A few years ago I wrote a set of piano duets for a publisher who has now gone out of business – so I reclaimed the copyright and published them myself as Six Dances for Four Hands: and they proved quite popular both in the piano duet version and also in an orchestral arrangement, Six Dances for Small Orchestra, that I also made.

Earlier in the year I got the opportunity to play the piano duet version myself for the first time, at a lunchtime concert in Aldeburgh with Nadia Lasserson, which was a lot of fun.

They are short, light-hearted, accessible pieces and I thought that other players might enjoy them, so when my son Sam, a professional saxophonist, asked me to accompany him for a recital he was giving at our church in Colchester, I decided to arrange them for saxophone (and for clarinet as well, while I was at it). These versions are all now published in Colne Edition.

The six movements of Six Dances for Saxophone and Piano cover a range of moods and styles. The first movement ‘Three-quarter time’ is a fast waltz with a sense of interplay between soloist and accompanist, and this contrasts with the second movement, ‘Serenade’: also in three-four time, this movement is otherwise very different, with a sensitive and expressive flowing melody which is later presented as a canon between the two players. The mood wakes up for the third movement, ‘Energy’, which is in a kind of upbeat mambo style. From there, the next movement takes us, perhaps, to France – ‘Valse melancolique’ suggests the piano-accordion and Parisian street scenes. Then in the fifth movement, ‘Smooth and Silky’, we move a little bit further south, the music suggesting the Spanish habanera dance – and finally, ‘Celebration’ brings the set to a joyful close.

Here are videos of two movements from the concert:  Three-Quarter Time, and Energy, and here’s the complete performance with a scrolling score.

As well as the Alto Sax version, there’s also a version for Tenor Sax – details of both are here.
For the Clarinet and Piano version, please go here.
Orchestral version here
Piano Duet version here

Hope you enjoy them! All versions are published by Colne Edition and are available as digital downloads from Sheet Music Direct or Sheet Music Plus (printed copies are available to special order from me)

When I was a teenager I was given a lovely book – a Christmas present I think – and I have treasured it all my life. Beautifully bound, with a lute and a flute embossed on the cover, and a sumptuously designed dust-jacket – well worn now – this book, ‘An Elizabethan Song Book’ is a treasure trove of songs for voice and lute from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The lute parts are arranged for piano – but instead of filling them out and making them ‘pianistic’, as many such editions did, these piano parts seem to be a straightforward transcription of the lute parts, with their characteristic use of counterpoint and imitation, but only as far as the technique of the lute would allow.

Published by Faber and Faber in 1957 – before the days of ‘Faber Music’, but foreshadowing some of the same excellent design features, the music was edited by Noah Greenberg (1919-66) an influential musician in the early music movement and the founder of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua – and the words were edited by Chester Kallman (1921-75) – poet and librettist for Stravinsky’s ‘Rake’s Progress’ and Henze’s ‘Elegy for Young Lovers’ – and his one-time partner, W. H. Auden (1907-73), who needs no introduction.

So it was these renowned creatives who brought to my attention (and to many others) the wonderful flowering of creative work in Britain at the turn of the seventeenth century – songs by Campian, Dowland, Morley, and many more – which have lived with me for many years.  And the very first piece in the book has stuck in my mind – ‘Sweet was the Song’ by John Attey, published in 1622, and I’ve twice found myself setting these words to my own music, using the slightly different version to be found in William Ballet’s Lute Book of the same period:
Sweet was the song the Virgin sang, When she to Bethlem Judah came;
And was delivered of a son That blessed Jesus had to name.

I first set them as a round, in The Oxford Book of Flexible Carols, and then, more recently, as a carol for mixed voice choir, with the title ‘Sweet babe, sang she’ to avoid confusion.

‘Sweet babe, sang she’ came about during the Covid lockdown, and, as often at that time, with no particular performance in mind. But I made a recording of it with some friends, each recording their own part individually, and this then came to the attention of The Houston Chamber Choir (director Robert Simpson), who sung it and recorded it at one of their Christmas concerts. It was then subsequently performed, last Christmas, by the Phoenix Consort (director Adam Whitmore), and this Christmas performances are scheduled with St. Martin’s Voices (director Andrew Earis – St Martins-in-the-Fields, 11 December, lunchtime) and with The Sixteen (director Harry Christophers – Cadogan Hall, 17 and 18 December).  St. Martin’s Voices have also recorded it on their new CD, ‘A babe is born’. It’s always lovely when a piece gets performances by different groups and it’s fascinating to compare the different approaches and angles taken by each choir.

My approach to the music is to imagine Mary singing as she rocks the baby Jesus to sleep, and a soprano solo is supported by a background of lullabies from the choir. In between the verses the choir sings gentle ‘alleluias’, and the piece ends as it began, with the gently rocking lullabies. The metre of the music changes frequently, but there is always a sense of flow and shape.

Here are some different performances:

St Martin’s Voices CD ‘A Babe is born’

Houston Chamber Choir (with scrolling score)

Houston Chamber choir (with images)

Phoenix Consort (live performance)

Please visit this page to read more and to obtain the music

When I was a student at the Royal College of Music, I purchased a paperback reprint of the late nineteenth century edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book edited by Fuller Maitland and Barclay Squire – two fat volumes of keyboard music by Byrd, Bull, Gibbons, and a host of other composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (‘Virginal’ is an old name for ‘keyboard’, and the original manuscript is housed in the Fitzwilliam Museums in Cambridge).

My appetite had been whetted for this music when as a schoolboy I acquired a collection of music of the same period called Early Keyboard Music, edited by Louis Osterle, which was heavily ‘edited’, with extra notes, expression marks and phrasing, in a possibly misguided attempt to make this music suitable for the modern piano. I loved this book and played from it nonstop as a 12-year old, and still do use it occasionally, despite its inauthentic qualities. It is quite instructive to compare these two editions, published within five years of each other!

At the time I was at the RCM the concept of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was heavily entrenched in the thoughts of some of the older professors, who were born around the time that great discoveries of early English music were being found and documented, and it’s not surprising that my composition teacher, Herbert Howells, wrote much music for the organ and the clavichord which was clearly inspired by these late Renaissance models. So I suppose, although I maybe didn’t really acknowledge it, something of that influence trickled down into my own musical language too.

So it was an interesting reminder of those days when the American composer and concert organist, Carson Cooman, asked me to contribute to a project in which he was asking around 150 composers to each write a pavane and a galliard, interpreting the traditional dances in their own way.

In his ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke’ (1597) composer Thomas Morley described the pavane as ‘a kind of staide musicke’ and the galliard as ‘lighter and more stirring’. And traditionally the two dances were paired, the steady two-in-a-bar pavane being followed by the livelier three-in-a-bar galliard – and they often shared the same musical ideas, as well.

So in my contribution to Carson Cooman’s project I wrote a pair of dances which shared the same musical material, which was a twelve-note phrase based on the commissioners name, produced by using the simple device of continuing up the scale as the alphabet continues – so H is A, I is B, J is C, and so on (transposing down an octave or two to keep the notes on the treble stave.). Thus CARSON becomes CADEAG and COOMAN becomes CAAFAG. In the Pavane the music is quite free flowing and decorated, and later the twelve-note phrase becomes the basis of the harmonies rather than the melody. The dancingly rhythmic melody of the Galliard uses the same notes, repeated several times with intervening episodes and gradually introducing more decoration. And in keeping with the late-renaissance feel, the music is written for a chamber organ with just one manual, two stops, and no pedals – the kind of instrument that the wealthy might have had in their house at the time, and which would also have been used as a continuo instrument. And for today’s keyboardists, this means that it could also be played on a harpsichord, clavichord – or even a piano.

You can hear Carson Cooman’s scintillating performance on YouTube here, and if you are interested in buying the music please visit this page on my website. And thank you to Carson for giving these ancient dances a new lease of life!

Just over twenty years ago, Oxford University Press published a collection of new Latin motets – maybe a bit of a niche market, but one which gave many composers the opportunity to respond to the long tradition of sacred music in Latin in their own contemporary musical style – composers like Kerry Andrew, Michael Finnissy, Tarik O’Regan, Francis Pott, Gabriel Jackson, as well as Bob Chilcott and John Rutter.  And many more, including me!

The collection (which is still in print, and the pieces are also available separately as digital downloads) is called ‘Cantica Nova’. All the Latin texts are religious, ranging from verses from the Bible to hymns from the Middle Ages and later, and I chose Ave maris stella (Hail, star of the sea) an 8^th-9^th century hymn to the Virgin Mary.

In my setting I took the opening verse:

Ave maris stella, Dei mater alma,
atque semper virgo, felix caeli porta.

and made this into a chorus, which is repeated four times, each time with a fuller texture. Between this the remaining three verses appear, in a predominantly chordal texture, and again building to a climax for the last verse. Finally the music subsides for an extra statement of the opening phrase. So, for me, that gave the music a structure, and, perhaps, an air of ‘meditative celebration’ which would have shape and interest even though the words might not be readily understood.

I’m writing about this piece now because recently I heard a fine performance of it by the Erasmus Chamber Choir, directed by Julian Merson, in a programme which placed a number of new settings of Marian texts alongside the Missa Sancta et Immaculata of the sixteenth-century Spanish composer Francisco Guerro.

Here’s a link to my Ave Maris Stella (with scrolling score)

A link to the entire concert may become available in the future.

The score is obtainable from www.oup.com/sheetmusic and the text is below:

Ave maris stella, Dei mater alma,
atque semper virgo, felix caeli porta.
Solve vincla reis, profer lumen caecis,
mala nostra pelle, bona cuncta posce.
Vitam praesta puram, iter para tutum,
ut videntes Jesum, semper collaetemur.
Sit laus Deo Patri, summo Christo decus,
Spiritui Sancto, tribus honor unos.

English translation:
Hail, star of the sea, kindly mother of God
and ever virgin, blessed gate of the sky.
Undo the chains of the guilty, bring light to the blind,
drive away our ills, ask for all good things.
Bestow a pure life upon us, prepare a safe way,
that, beholding Jesus, we may alway rejoice.
Praise be to God the Father, glory to Christ on high,
to the Holy Spirit, one honour to the three.

Of course I cannot claim any responsibility for this hymn – but you know when you get something in your head and it goes round and round and you can’t get rid of it?  That’s what happened to me a few weeks ago with the tune Eventide. Written by William Henry Monk in 1861, to words written a few years earlier by Henry Francis Lyte, ‘Abide with Me’ soon captured the hearts of churchgoers, and later of football crowds, worldwide. (The illustration is of the original printing in ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’, with an alternative version for ‘chanting’ on the second page)

Its popularity is not surprising – the words offer comfort to us all as we go through the troubles of life, pointing us to a greater being who is always there for us. And the tune has a predictability and ease, and a reassuring logic in its musical direction. The simplicity of the melody is the key to its memorability:

• There is a melodic range of just six notes (and it doesn’t go too high)
• Within each phrase there are just two different note lengths, plus a longer final note
• The first and third phrases are very similar
• Each phrase has a gentle shape in which the highest note is somewhere in the middle
• The key-note (E flat) is used less than the other notes – just once in phrases 1 and 3, not at all in phrase 2, and twice in the last phrase.
• Each phrase ends on a different note and the E flat is reserved for the last note of the final phrase. So the air of ‘finality’ is saved till last.

Harmonically, musical interest is achieved by

• Traditional 4-part harmony, with much use of contrary motion (movement in opposite directions) between the top and bottom voices (treble and bass)
• Both the second and third phrase modulate at the end (change to a different key-centre) thus providing harmonic variety

So overall there is a sense of predictability moderated by sufficient melodic and harmonic interest to avoid boredom. So that’s why I couldn’t get it out of my head.

So, the only thing to do was to try and look at it from a different angle – so I’ve made three versions of it in the last few weeks. One is a straightforward ‘easy piano’ simplified arrangement that my wife Jan and I did for our piano series – because playing music in four parts, and in three flats, is quite a challenge for beginner pianists. The other two are very similar to each other, and they are ‘fantasias’ on the tune.  They begin with another melody – a descending figure – and then the Eventide melody creeps into the middle of the texture, coming in at a slightly unexpected point, as if the accent of the phrase is on the longer notes in the 2^nd and 4^th bars rather than at the beginning – Abide with me rather than A-bide with me. In the next section we find the melody in the lowest part, with other ideas above. In the third section the basic shapes of the hymn are developed and taken on a slightly different journey, and then finally the descending melody with which we began returns, but now with the Eventide melody at the top of the texture.

Here are links to recordings of these arrangements:

Eventide – Fantasia on Abide with Me for piano solo
YouTube   Soundcloud

Eventide – Prelude/Meditation on Abide with Me for organ solo
YouTube   Soundcloud

Abide with Me – arranged for easy piano (Janet and Alan Bullard Piano Series)
YouTube

Scores of all three versions are available for purchase from www.sheetmusicdirect.com, www.sheetmusicplus.com  and (the first two) from www.jwpepper.com

So maybe it’s time to say farewell to Eventide now – I expect something else will pop into my head soon…

For the last few years I have directed the once-a-year Christmas Choir in the Suffolk village of Friston, and I’ve usually written a couple of arrangements for the Lessons and Carols service.

Last year one of our carols was Little Jesus, Sweetly Sleep (the ‘Rocking Carol’) which has been at the back of my mind ever since I first sung it at primary school. It is a traditional Czech carol (Hajej, nynej) which became more well known when it was printed in the original Oxford Book of Carols nearly 100 years ago. It’s in a gentle 2/4 time and I think the thing that attracted me to it (even at primary school) was the sharpened fourth in the first phrase – almost a dominant modulation (or a bit of Lydian mode) before it’s got started – which is almost immediately cancelled out in the next phrase.

The somewhat Lydian flavour – the sharpened fourth degree of the scale – was one of the things that coloured my arrangement; but the other thing was that I felt that the melody was over a bit quickly, even though there is quite a lot of repetition in it. So I stretched the melody out, putting it into 3/4 time (though aware that this might not suit the regular rocking of the cradle quite so well), and shared the melodic line between the voices. The result is that this familiar carol is looked at from a slightly different angle.

The words were ‘freely translated’ from the Czech original by Percy Dearmer, who, as co-editor of the English Hymnal (1906), Songs of Praise (1925) and The Oxford Book of Carols (1928) played a very important role in widening the musical repertoire for parish churches with re-discovered traditional hymns and carols from many countries. In the spirit of ‘free translation’ I adapted the words a little more, extending them to three verses while retaining their traditional feel, and I hope that this version, music and words, will give the traditional song a new lease of life.

You can see and hear a scrolling score here.

It is published by GIA Publications, Inc, as a printed copy or a digital download – details here