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- Piers Hellawell
Sound Carvings from the Bell Foundry
(Brass Quintet)- Peters Edition Limited (World)
This brass quintet was written for Stockholm Chamber Brass, a joint commission from the Kristiansand Festival, Norway and the 2006 Belfast Festival at Queen’s, at both of which it was premiered. Like other works in Hellawell’s ‘Sound Carvings’ series, it is a suite of larger and smaller pieces that juxtapose sharp musical contrasts – in this case, six movements, two of which are brief duo or trio interludes. The diverse pieces make several uses of a ‘chant’, written for the children of a Scottish school project to sing during the period of composition, that receives various treatments during the suite. Some percussive extended sounds are employed, including, to close, a set of tuned wine glasses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuO8TEZVai8
Programme Note
The composer writes: “My series of instrumental ‘Sound Carvings’ works through the 1980s and 1990s featured strings and mixed chamber media. Their generic title refers to a formal relationship of short movements, arranged more like sculptures than as a traditional sequence; the works in this series to date have between three and twenty-one movements – while Sound Carvings from the Bell Foundry, which has six, also refers to the distinctive ‘bell’ feature shared by the brass instruments of the ensemble, and likens the creation of music for brass to the casting of a bell; indeed the raw materials of the instrument are an ever present element in the material created for it.
This work is in six movements; these do outline a sequential path, more than previous works in the series, to the extent that two are ‘interludes’ between larger pieces, while the first piece is introductory. The work takes several musical ideas from a recent work in a very different medium: in spring 2006 I evolved and directed music for a theatrical spectacle by children from a Scottish Primary school, called ‘An Dealbh Mor’ (the Big Picture); a number of leading ideas from this project is developed here, in particular the ‘Anthem’, a chant sung by the children in a procession.
Movements 2 and 5 are interludes that treat the ‘Anthem’ like chorale preludes; movement 1 is an opening fanfare, while movement 3 is an austere ternary design, the middle canon for two trumpets framed by a trio for the lower three instruments that then returns in decorated form. Movement 4 is itself a ‘sound carving’ – a juxtaposition of very contrasted slow and fast blocks, and Movement 6 is a vigorous finale for the ensemble, that melts into a serene coda of expanded timbres.
Piers Hellawell 2024