Meditations

Conductor's score and parts on hire

978-0-19-362027-8 31 August 1978

Price: Available on request

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

for string orchestra

Forces or Category

String orchestra

Duration

14 minutes

Difficulty

Easy to Moderately difficult

Programme Notes

Meditations for strings is Michael Berkeley's first acknowledged orchestral work. It was written at the beginning of 1975, in response to a commission from Colin Mawby and the Westminster Cathedral String Orchestra, who gave the first performance. It was the work that led to Berkeley, a late developer as a composer, doing post graduate studies with Richard Rodney Bennett. In 1977, Meditations won the Guinness Prize for Composition and it was this piece and the Concerto for Oboe and Strings that first brought critical attention to Berkeley's music.
Michael Berkeley writes:
The piece is called Meditations because its atmosphere is essentially contemplative, though the nature of the subject is far from being continuously passive. Another reason for the title is the inspiration behind the thematic material - though the actual melodies are original, they use rhythmic and melodic patterns suggested by Gregorian chant which I sang every day as a chorister at Westminster Cathedral.
The piece falls quite clearly into two sections bound together by the tolling ostinato figure in the bass of the orchestra that begins and ends the work. Virtually all the material that follows can be traced back to this opening music. Each section begins with an Introduction followed by a statement of themes and a discussion, and a coda rounds them off. Broadly speaking, part two considers what has passed and adds to it, but now the argument becomes more intense - an agitated solo violin attempts to move the conflict onto an altogether more agitated plane and soon the whole orchestra bursts into a fast animated passage. Gradually, via a recapitulation, the music becomes more settled, and the work ends as it began, with the repeated note E on the double basses.
© Michael Berkeley
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

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