For Piece of the Week 100 I thought I would go back in time to one of my earliest pieces that I’d still like to hear again – and that is Sweet Dancer – the last movement of my Three Poems of W B Yeats, which I wrote in 1973.
At the time I was teaching one day a week on the Hampshire Specialist Music Course then sited at Winchester School of Art – this two-year course provided full-time musical training for specially selected 16-18-year-olds (12 per year) – it was an intensive and varied course and many of the pupils went on to become professional musicians. All 24 of them sung in a chamber choir, and it was for them that I wrote these settings, which are not easy, and to which they responded admirably under their director Joyce Greenwood. A couple of years later I changed jobs and moved to Colchester, where the chamber choir of Colchester Institute took them up under their director Ian Ray – and as it happened, the soprano soloist in Sweet Dancer – Janet Dakin – turned out to be my future wife.
Also in that choir was another singer – Lesley Oversluizen (nee Scully) – who subsequently moved to Manchester and joined the William Byrd Singers, showing the score to their director, Stephen Wilkinson, who not only performed the set with that group, but also broadcast them with the BBC Northern Singers. Both Stephen and Lesley recently passed away, and I shall always be indebted to them, and remember them, for their support and encouragement in aiding this piece on its journey from a small provincial music course to BBC Radio Three.
The Yeats poem, Sweet Dancer, has a mysterious quality to it, and it has been variously described a song about a misunderstood teenager, an inmate of an asylum, the nature of depressive illness, and the innocence of youth contrasted with the realities of adulthood – but however you look at it, it is a poem that encourages thoughtful understanding.
The girl goes dancing there
On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth
Grass plot of the garden;
Escaped from bitter youth,
Escaped out of her crowd,
Or out of her black cloud.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer.
If strange men come from the house
To lead her away, do not say
That she is happy being crazy;
Lead them gently astray;
Let her finish her dance,
Let her finish her dance.
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!
Musically, I think I coped with the image of this strange young dancer, alone but ‘in a crowd’ by using a solo voice to continually repeat the refrain Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer – sometimes in a different key to the choir singing the remaining text – gradually becoming more and more frantic. Then, after a pause and a period of repose, the refrain material is taken up by sopranos and altos, each singing independently, while the tenors and basses sing ‘let her finish her dance’.
In the last page of music, reproduced here, you can see that I’ve adopted a popular notational style and texture of the 1960s and 70s, putting the soprano and alto material in boxes with a footnote asking for a feeling of non-synchronisation between the singers. I’ve used this technique rarely since, but here it seemed to me to encapsulate the essential character of the dancing girl seeking to lose herself in solitude amongst the crowd.
There is the BBC Northern Singers Radio 3 performance, with scrolling score, here, and you can visit my Three Poems of W B Yeats page for details of all three movements.
And now for the next 100 Pieces of the Week!!