Changing Landscapes (1990)

This work is scored from alto soloist, chamber orchestra and chorus and was written in the first half of 1990 in response to a commission from Musicon in collaboration with the Northern Sinfonia. It formed one of a number of projects I undertook during my time as Northern Arts Fellow in Composition at Durham University.

The work comprises three interrelated movements, the first and last functioning as prelude and postlude, and the second as a large-scale development. The three movements play without a break. As with many of my works literary texts play an important role.  However, in this instance it is poetic imagery rather than literary structure or technique that is relevant, as this reflects the pun involved in the work’s title. So, ‘Changing Landscapes’ refers to both the natural evolutionary change brought about through the cycle of the seasons and the more revolutionary changes that result from human action. The first of these is most obvious in the second movement in which each season in turn is reflected in the work of four English poets: John Clare, Edward Thomas, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Hardy. Furthermore, the landscape described changes to a different part of England, so autumn involves a setting of The Fen and Northamptonshire Fen by Clare. The poet’s bleak watery visions then lead to Thomas’s melancholic winter landscape in Snow, which evokes Steep in Hampshire. Hopkins’ Oxford Bells introduces spring as a fast, light dance and the cycle is brought to a close with a slow setting of Hardy’s summer mediation On Sturminster Footbridge in Dorset.

The theme of human action changing landscapes is reflected in the poetry of the first and third movements, the former a setting of John Clare’s Remembrances and the latter Philip Larkin’s Going, Going. The affinity of vision shared across time by the two poets is matched in the music; both settings are primarily for the alto soloist and orchestra, both employ a rondo-like structure, and the lament of the first movement is rescored for two cor anglais in the third. They also both share a similar harmonic sequence; indeed, the sequence is the same as that for movement 2, so, in effect, the cycle of the seasons underpins each movement.

Ultimately, Changing Landscapes reflects my concern for the environment. Although the setting of both the Clare and Larkin could suggest a reaction against change that has existed in England for hundreds of years, there is a sense in Larkin’s poem that perhaps now we really have gone too far:

“It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last.”

Changing Landscapes was premiered on 24 October 1990 in Durham Cathedral by the Northern Sinfonia Chorus and Orchestra with Beth Kessler alto, conducted by Christopher Seaman.

Philip Grange