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Millennium Scenes
Conductor's score and parts on hire
978-0-19-362275-3
15 July 1999
Price: Available on request
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for full orchestra Forces or CategoryFull orchestraDuration15 minutesDifficultyModerately difficult to DifficultOrchestration3 fl (all+picc), 3 ob (II&III+ca), 3 cl (III+Ebcl), 3 bn (III+cbn), 4 hn, 4 tpt, 2 tbn, btbn, tba, timp, 6 perc (2 apito (samba whistle), tam, log dr, crotales, gong, high japanese w blk, pedal BD, 2 cbells, 2 sus cym (med & high), 2 car horn, TD, small thunder
sheet, bongos, metal wash board, 5 tom, vib, large BD, 2 roto-tom, sandpaper blks), pn, str (16, 14, 12, 10, 8)Programme NotesMillennium Scenes (1999, rev. 2001)
Music for large orchestra in two parts
I: Feroce Largo Dance Interrupted Dance
II: Chorale 1 Intimo Berceuse 1 Grandioso Brutale Chorale 2 Berceuse 2 Coda
This piece was composed in 1998-9, during the run-up to the turn of the millennium. Alongside several forecasts of the end of the world, there was a very real nervousness about terrorist attacks and the unpredictable consequences of computers failing to recognise 1st January, 2000: a feeling that almost anything could happen. At the
same time, and with a kind of hubris, plans for elaborate and costly celebratory shows such as that at London's Millennium Dome were under way. I remember reading in the newspapers at the time that sponsors could not be found for the Dome's Faith Zone, the exhibition exploring the spiritual, emotional and moral dimensions of humankind. The irony of a spiritual void right at the centre of our celebrations seemed very telling.
While working on the piece, I had in mind a series of fleeting images or cinematic scenes - a TV commercial, perhaps, a couple arguing, laughter, a dead animal on the road, religious fervour, a child being hit - almost anything, in fact, but all of them real events taking place around the turn of the millennium. I felt that such a film would tell a very
different story from the one to be told as part of the official festivities; and so my piece became a response to their apparently empty triumphalism.
Millennium Scenes is also a very private, very sad piece. I didn't intend to write this kind of music at all: I would like to have composed something freer, less oppressive, even uplifting. Instead, the piece crystallised into something heavily laden with the past, nostalgic and backward-looking (Part II), and something highly energised, violent and forward-looking (Part I). And because the one seemed to invite the other, the boundaries between the two are not always clear: a little fragment of Part II turns up, inexplicably, near the end of Part I; and later, the calm exterior of the music in Part II seems increasingly fragile as
it is assailed, then overpowered and destroyed, by the brutal return of music from Part I.
The atmosphere of 1998-9 already seems a distant memory; it appears that the global dangers and insecurities that we so feared began not with 1st January 2000, but the tragic events of 11th September 2001. As time passes, however, the need for understanding between faiths and cultures is all the more evident and urgent. We must consider this if we want to ensure that our descendants will be there to bring in the year 3000.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of passionate intensity
(Extract from The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats)
© Richard Causton 2008
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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