Piece of the Week 94: Fanfares for Orchestra

Forty years ago, Colchester Institute celebrated its hundredth anniversary – its beginnings can be traced back to the ‘Albert School of Art and Design’ which opened in 1885. I taught there for many years, and in 1985 it had a large and flourishing music department of over 200 students (on A level, diploma and degree music courses) with sufficient skilled young players to fill a large symphony orchestra.

To celebrate that anniversary, I wrote Fanfares for Orchestra for them. It is an orchestral showpiece – almost a ‘concerto for orchestra’ designed to demonstrate their talents and abilities, and listening back to the piece now I am really impressed with the skills that these young musicians showed as they prepared for their lives in the musical world.

Around that time, I was interested in music in which the notated tempo remains constant but in which the music appears to change speed and mood seamlessly. I wrote several pieces along those lines, but I think this was more successful than some of them, and the unification of tempo and metre enabled me to focus on orchestral colour and, in particular, highlight the different orchestral groupings. I think one can also detect elements of both John Adams and Witold Lutosławski, composers that I was discovering at that time.

I no longer have the sketches for this piece, which might remind me more of its genesis– but there are several particular compositional elements that I can see:

  1. The piece is in 4/4 time almost all the way through, at the same tempo, (crotchet = 120) – there are no accels. or rits. This, together with an oft-recurring ostinato, gives it a kind of perpetuum mobilecharacter,
  2. Harmonically it is based on two groups of six notes (which themselves sometimes split, to create four triads) together forming the 12 notes of the chromatic scale (this is a typical Lutosławski thing). Thus all twelve notes are kept in play, without the rigours of the traditional twelve-note technique.
  3. The instruments are very often used in groups of the same type, ‘cinematically’ cutting from one to the other
  4. Rhythmically, although the metre and tempi are unchanging, the use of the rhythmic proportions 1-2-3-4-5 (or 5-4-3-2-1) means that the rhythm is more varied and syncopated than the steady tempo might suggest. There are many examples of this, but the most obvious are the last five notes!
  5. And, finally, I don’t think it outstays its welcome, at somewhere between 8 and 9 minutes of continuous movement, with plenty of variety of dynamics and textures.

It was only ever performed once – it was a great performance though, and, luckily, recorded here with a scrolling score. The conductor was my colleague Christopher Phelps, and he still lives in Colchester – but I wonder where all the other performers are now?

If you’d like to see a pdf of the whole score, please get in touch – and I still have the set of hand-written parts, if anyone is interested in playing it again!