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Divertimento - As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Conductor's score and parts on hire
978-0-19-336058-7
17 July 2008
Price: Available on request
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Written specifically for the same instrumentation as Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, Divertimento focuses on the individual character of each instrument, drawing inspiration from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'As Kingfishers catch fire'. Various techniques are employed to create a number of different sound worlds and colours, ranging from frantic, strummed pizzicato, speeded-up neo-Renaissance counterpoint, to distorted folk melodies in the wind parts and beautiful use of harmonics. After a number of contrasting episodes, the seven instruments finally unite in the closing section. Forces or CategoryChamber
ensembleDuration9 minutesOrchestrationfl, cl, hp, 2 vln, vla, vcProgramme NotesAs Kingfishers Catch Fire was composed in London during the summer and autumn of 2007. Throughout my work on the piece, I had in my mind some lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bells
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing
does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selvesgoes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Like the animals in the poem, I wanted to allow the instruments in my piece to be unashamedly themselves, and this conditioned the musical material: open fifths in the strings, long cantilenas in the wind, and a certain grandiosity in the writing for harp.
The piece opens with a sort of speeded-up Renaissance counterpoint for string quartet perfect intervals and a resonant setting and proceeds through several contrasting but linked episodes: a vertiginous solo for harp; a shadow boxing passage for harp and string quartet; distorted folk music which gives rise to fireworks in the
clarinet part; frantic, strummed pizzicato; a slowly unfolding melody in the wind over string tremolos, which leads back to a transformed, now subdued version of the opening string quartet.
In the closing section all seven instruments, now united, cross a threshold into a slightly different world from which their previous music can still be glimpsed.
© Richard Causton
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
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Richard Causton (b.1971) Richard Causton was born in London in 1971 and studied at the University of York, the Royal College of Music and the Scuola Civica in Milan. He has worked with world renowned performers such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken, London Sinfonietta, and the Nash Ensemble. He has been the recipient of several awards, including First Prize in the International 'Nuove Sincronie competition, the Mendelssohn Scholarship and a 2004 British Composer Award in the Best Instrumental Work category for Seven States of Rain. He was founder of the Royal College of Music Gamelan Programme and held
the Fellow Commonership in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge.Richard Causton on the Birmingham Conservatoire website
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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