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Proença
Conductor's score and parts on hire
978-0-19-362091-9
06 September 1990
Price: Available on request
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for full orchestra Forces or CategoryFull orchestraDuration37 minutesDifficultyDifficultOrchestrationelec gtr solo, 3 fl (I+picc&alfl, III+picc), 2 ob, ca, 3 cl (all+ssx, III+cbcl), 2 bn, cbn, 4 hn, 3 tpt, 4 tbn (IV+btbn), 4 perc (glock, SD, 4 cym, claves, marac, cas, tam, 5 temp blk, timp, congas, tri, jingles, 3 w blks, bongos, 5 tom, timb, tbells, cortales, TD, metal sheet, xylo,
ratchet, guiro), cel, hp, str (20 vln, 10 vla, 8 vc, 8 db)Programme NotesBBC Jubilee commission.
The Languedoc Provençal culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries produced the first European vernacular poetry the basic lyric is still a key form: yet that society was finally wiped out by the medieval equivalent of big power politics, Northern Frank and Church combining in the so-called Albigensian Crusade. Whilst the history obviously has relevance to us today, much of the verse produced ranks amongst the finest we have. I made a selection of texts descriptive of certain obvious stages of the poetic culture, but knowing no Provençal I had to work from translations collected from
various sources and then find the Provençal originals. These Provençal texts and the piece which is continuous fall into eleven groups or sections. The first, from the early troubadours (trobar = to find), deals with their spring-like desire to sing new songs and make it new. The second, largely from Bernard de Ventadorn and the Comtessa de Dia, deals with sexual love. The third, from Bertrand de Born, illustrated the aristocrats feudal love of war showing that however rich the period it was not romantically utopian whilst the fourth, in contrast, speaks in calm wisdom. The sixth and eighth sections, based on Pèire Cardenal, describes the mounting pressures on the society from without, and these alternate with the fifth, seventh and ninth sections of Arnaud Danièl, whom Dante describes
as il miglior fabbro the finer maker. The short instrumental tenth section of the piece derives from the final collapse, symbolised best perhaps from the ruins on the top of Mont Ségur in the foothill of the Pyrenees where, in 1244, some two hundred and thirty men and women were burnt in the field below. The final section is of lines from Guiraud Riquièr, the last of the troubadours, singing only that he was born too late.
To form these layers musically I have used three sources of material, small groups of five or six basic intervals and rhythmic and metrical cells drawn from three actual troubadour sources: songs by Pèire dAlvernha, Bernard de Ventadorn and Folquet de Marseille, which I have used in Layers. Folquet (c.1155-1231) is an interesting figure: in his early manhood he
was a troubadour but later became Abbot of Le Thoronet and later still, as the hated Bishop of Toulouse, persecuted relentlessly the Albigensian heretics. The Folquet material I used first in a piece called Le Terrazze. I use it here in the contrasting third (love of war) and forth layers, but also in the tenth, relating to Mont Ségur. The Pèire dAlvernha material is used as the basis of the first, and in the sixth and eighth layers; the Ventadorn in the second, and in the fifth, seventh and ninth (the Danièl layers). The final layer uses all three, matching the first which introduces some of the connecting cells. The common element between those layers, as well as other connecting factors, create the form and musical structure.
An electric guitar is used in the Arnaud Danièl
section; it is an instrument dominating a good deal of music today, and in Proença it finally takes over from the voice during the highly mannered (and virtually untranslatable) language of Danièl. I find it musically symbolic too; in the description of the young people in Lincoln Park, Chicago, at the time of the 1968 Democtratic Convention and in the context of the political and physical violence perpetrated on them Norman Mailer writes of the electric guitar and its music as a variety of true songs. Well, song is, in a way, what this piece is about verbal, instrumental and vocal; the joy it can represent; and the violence it can meet.
I should like to thank Frédéric Voilley and his colleagues of the Comité Antibois dEtudes Occitanes for the very great help they gave me in
correcting the texts and in the pronunciation and sound of the language.
© John Buller
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
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John Buller (1927-2004) John Buller was born in London in 1927. He enjoyed a musical childhood, but it was not until this thirties, after a career as an architectural surveyor, that his began to concentrate on his musical career. In 1975 he became Composer-in-Residence at the University of Edinburgh, as holder of the visiting Forman Fellowship. In 1978 he was awarded an Arts Council Bursary and in 1985-6 he was Composer-in-Residence at Queens University, Belfast. He died in 2004.
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"Buller's is a talent late in flowering but one, on the strength of this work alone, to be recognised as among the half-dozen most significant in Britain today..." - Stephen Reeve, Classical Music "From the spring-like sparkle of the watery metaphors of the opening through vivid evocations of the sensuality of sexual love, the starkness of war or the intermingling of joy and menace, it is a score that profliferates in precisely imagined, beautifully controlled, musical imagery." - Robert Henderson, Daily Telegraph
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