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- Gary Carpenter
Willie Stock (2016)
- Cadenza Music (World)
Co-commissioned by Aldebugh Music and 14-18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England and by the Department for Culture Media and Sport.
First performed at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall, on 17th June 2016 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Oliver Knussen.
- 2+pic(fl)+afl(fl).3+ca.3+bcl+cbcl(cl).3+cbn/4441/timp.4perc/2hp.cel(pf)/str
- 10 min
Programme Note
Willie Stock lasts just over 10 minutes and is an arch structure marked by three superscriptions:
It opens with an 8-note motif. In musical ‘set theory’ terms (where C=0, C#=1, D=2 and so on up the chromatic scale) the opening C#-A-C#-F# ‘spells’ the year 1916; the answering phrase C#-A-C#-G#, 1918. The motif recurs at key moments whilst the resultant F# minor tonality vaguely recalls Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. The crux of the piece however is an extended oboe melody which is based on the rising sixth interval found in many recruitment songs of the time;‘Good-bye-ee!’ being a particularly apposite example. This wends its way through the rest of the woodwind section but is eventually supplanted by an increasingly agitated sound world and disappears, only to be returned like a memory to the oboe at the very end of the piece. Other contemporaneous popular songs are dotted around the score; ‘found objects’ that lie like the war dead, splintered and mutilated across the aural landscape.
The orchestra is slightly smaller than that deployed by Berg in his Drei Orchesterstücke Op.6 but large never the less: 17 woodwinds including a contrabass clarinet, 13 brass, 4 percussion, timpani, 2 harps, piano/celesta and strings. Berg is acknowledged in two other ways: his obsession with the number 23 is reflected in my piece’s being 184 (23x23) bars long and in my decision only to use those instruments (and mutes) that would have been familiar to Berg (which thankfully includes the vibraphone!).
Rifleman Joseph William Stock, known as Willie (12th Battalion - King’s Royal Rifle Corps) died aged 25 on 2nd April 1918 after being shot by a sniper during the 2nd Battle of The Somme. He had enlisted three years earlier and had made it through the 1st Battle of The Somme (1916). His war diaries reveal a highly literate, conscientious, teetotal soldier with beautiful handwriting. The sole surviving photo shows a fresh faced, good looking young man, full of life and promise. Like hundreds of thousands of others then (and since), his life was summarily snuffed out. He is the ‘unknown soldier’ I’ve chosen to memorialise because he was my uncle.
Programme note © 2016 Gary Carpenter
...the ghost legions (D.H.Lawrence)
...oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling? (The Bells of Hell, anon. - quoting from 1 Corinthians 15:55)
...nothing but the mist and the snow and the silence of death (Helen Thomas).
It opens with an 8-note motif. In musical ‘set theory’ terms (where C=0, C#=1, D=2 and so on up the chromatic scale) the opening C#-A-C#-F# ‘spells’ the year 1916; the answering phrase C#-A-C#-G#, 1918. The motif recurs at key moments whilst the resultant F# minor tonality vaguely recalls Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. The crux of the piece however is an extended oboe melody which is based on the rising sixth interval found in many recruitment songs of the time;‘Good-bye-ee!’ being a particularly apposite example. This wends its way through the rest of the woodwind section but is eventually supplanted by an increasingly agitated sound world and disappears, only to be returned like a memory to the oboe at the very end of the piece. Other contemporaneous popular songs are dotted around the score; ‘found objects’ that lie like the war dead, splintered and mutilated across the aural landscape.
The orchestra is slightly smaller than that deployed by Berg in his Drei Orchesterstücke Op.6 but large never the less: 17 woodwinds including a contrabass clarinet, 13 brass, 4 percussion, timpani, 2 harps, piano/celesta and strings. Berg is acknowledged in two other ways: his obsession with the number 23 is reflected in my piece’s being 184 (23x23) bars long and in my decision only to use those instruments (and mutes) that would have been familiar to Berg (which thankfully includes the vibraphone!).
Rifleman Joseph William Stock, known as Willie (12th Battalion - King’s Royal Rifle Corps) died aged 25 on 2nd April 1918 after being shot by a sniper during the 2nd Battle of The Somme. He had enlisted three years earlier and had made it through the 1st Battle of The Somme (1916). His war diaries reveal a highly literate, conscientious, teetotal soldier with beautiful handwriting. The sole surviving photo shows a fresh faced, good looking young man, full of life and promise. Like hundreds of thousands of others then (and since), his life was summarily snuffed out. He is the ‘unknown soldier’ I’ve chosen to memorialise because he was my uncle.
Programme note © 2016 Gary Carpenter
Media
Carpenter: Willie Stock
Reviews
The third work brought us back to a more authentic Aldeburgh, and provided a perfect contemporary link to the previous pieces: Gary Carpenter (born 1951) and a world premiere performance of his 15- minute-long orchestral piece, Willie Stock – evoking “ghost legions” (a quotation and superscription from D.H. Lawrence). The composer’s programme note explained a very personal resonance for the music; the title referring to his uncle, Rifleman ‘Willie’ Stock, killed in 1918, and serving in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps through the Somme campaigns. The work began in a vein very similar to that of the eerie, yet commanding opening of the second movement of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony; Carpenter creating a nocturnal fanfare, but with a degree of dissonance and continuing darkness that made itself felt through the course of this compelling, cohesive, compact work. At its finale, a prolonged, sinister rattling from the side drum left us in suspension – as if the ghosts of all those lost Shropshire lads and Willie Stocks were still there, mustering and marshalling on the battlefield. An extraordinary piece.
1st July 2016
Of the newcomers, Gary Carpenter’s Willie Stock, inspired by the fate of the composer’s uncle, one of 419,000 British casualties at the Somme, hit the spot most precisely. Bugle calls, fragments of wartime songs, martial percussion; the sounds couldn’t have been more atmospheric as this ten-minute piece twisted through elegy and anguish until it reached a lone side-drum, rattling in the wind over a desolate landscape. Expertly crafted, vividly expressive, I thought it a miniature triumph.
20th June 2016
Butterworth was claimed by a sniper’s bullet at The Somme. He was 31. Joseph William Stock was a sniper in The King’s Rifles who survived The Somme but was felled in 1918, the also-young victim of a German bullet. To memorialise his uncle, known as Willie, Gary Carpenter has included in his eponymous piece some ditties that were familiar to and voiced by the British trench-warfare soldiers. Scored for large orchestra and opening in uneasy fashion the popular songs are fragmented and, pictorially, left to rot in the mud. The music is an uneasy setting, if with the occasional explosive and militaristic connotations of war, but mostly this atmospheric score is ominous and ends with a longheld roll on side drum that may be heard as signalling the anxious wait for orders to go “over the top”.
17th June 2016
Discography
Gary Carpenter: SET
- LabelNimbus Alliance
- Catalogue NumberNI6380
- ConductorClark Rundell / Andrew Manze
- EnsembleRoyal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
- SoloistKathryn Rudge, mezzo soprano; Iain Ballamy, tenor saxophone
- Released2019