Millennium Scenes

Conductor's score and parts on hire

978-0-19-362275-3 15 July 1999

Price: Available on request

Customers in the US order from C. F. Peters Corporation

for full orchestra

Forces or Category

Full orchestra

Duration

15 minutes

Difficulty

Moderately difficult to Difficult

Orchestration

3 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 Notes

Millennium 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

Millennium Scenes

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