John Harle - The Keys of Canterbury (with score)

The Keys of Canterbury
Composer - John Harle
Duration: 13’00”.
Orchestration: solo soprano saxophone and adapted symphonic wind orchestra.
Published by Faber Music
Commissioned by The Canterbury Festival.
Premiere: 26.10.2019 at Canterbury Cathedral
Conducted by John Harle.
Solo Soprano Saxophone - Jess Gillam
Wind Orchestra - The Frisian Symphonic Wind Orchestra
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Commentary
Spatial Investigations and Musical Quotation
The effects of listening to music in huge indoor spaces drove the composition of this work for saxophonist Jess Gillam and The Frisian Symphonic Wind Orchestra. The use of a constant, slow tempo and the spatial arrangement of players is organised to accommodate the apparent speeds of sound diffusion in the Cathedral, and to create a form of multi-dimensional audience excitement. Over the length of the work, a ritualistic form of modernism is set against Renaissance polyphony and Medieval plainchant. The composition seeks to combine and potentially resolve these musical elements from a dialectical standpoint.
Materials assembled for the composition of the work were from Medieval and Renaissance sources, and included the Gradual plainchant Posuisti Domine (Canterbury Cathedral musical archive est. 12th Century) and the original score of Giovanni Gabriellis’ Sonata Pian’ e Forte (c.1597).
These materials were superimposed and adapted to form a synthesis that combined to create the consonant elements of the work into a musical hybrid with a constant, slow crotchet pulse.
The roots of the (sometimes simultaneous) modernist harmony lie in chord charts I created from number systems used in the magical experiments of John Dee (1527-1609), originally for my first opera, Angel Magick (1998.)
Both of these main, aesthetically opposite elements were combined, adapted, recomposed and rearranged over the course of the composition to create tension and drama as they seek resolution.
The solo saxophone material is separate and virtuosic. It was created through specific tonal fields around shifting tonic pitches.
The conducting of the work involved a video feed of the main (front) conducting position to the band at the rear of the cathedral to aid synchronisation.
John Harle
July 2019
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Programme Note
The Keys of Canterbury is a work for soprano saxophone and Symphonic Wind Orchestra written for the brilliant young saxophonist Jess Gillam with the Frisian Symphonic Wind Orchestra, and was commissioned by The Canterbury Festival in 2019.
The work loosely follows the drama of the murder of Saint Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 through opposing musical and dramatic elements. A ritualistic form of modernism and a contrasting Renaissance polyphony are set against each other in acute juxtaposition, with the solo soprano saxophone carrying much of this central dramatic drive of the work. The piece quotes extensively from the Sonata Pian e Forte by Giovanni Gabrielli (1554-1612) although this is intertwined with an adaptation of the Gradual plainchant (Posuisti Domine) which is used at Canterbury Cathedral in the Mass for the Feast of St Thomas of Canterbury.
The spatial nature of the Gabrieli (antiphonal brass choirs) seemed ideal for performance in a Cathedral-sized space, and the Gabrieli follows its original format in this. This same spatial use of instruments was also used in Total Eclipse by Sir John Tavener (1944-2013) which was a work for saxophone and several ensembles that he wrote for me as soloist with The Academy of Ancient Music in 1999.
John Harle.
July 2019.

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Superb!