The forms of pre-tonal music and how they may shape Sinfonia

Sinfonia will reflect my interest in early English music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We can still perform this music today because scores were copied and shared in  manuscripts from this period. I am fascinated by its variety which ranges from vernacular song to polyphonic motets to viol consort music. Across this range there is a love of melody and a particular taste for harmony around thirds which a French contemporary of Dunstable called the contenance angloise. When I first heard recordings of music of this period, I was immediately drawn in because of the intense and bitter-sweet yet restless harmonies as they seemed to me, which point towards a sort of expressivity that gives voice to the individual within larger forces of the spiritual and secular. The individual somehow speaking through or with those forces via highly characteristic harmony. At the same time as being interested in its expressive harmonies, I also found this music offered fascinating approaches to different musical structures, or compositional models. As a composer I am always interested in this question: how do composers solve the problem of making music through time-based structures? Particularly pre-tonal composers. These early composers, like Cornysh, Browne, Tallis, Tye, are incredibly resourceful because they use rhythm to power their works and build complex music through designs using durations and lines of notes. Early organised sound, for sure, which was both an intellectual resource and governed by a rich, sensuous harmonic sensibility, balancing the secular and sacred, in which rising lines gesture towards the infinite, transforming from earthly concerns to spiritual visions. But I hope this composition is not going to be simply a rehash or arrangement of early compositions. It is a composition for a musical ensemble of fantastic contemporary musicians, many of whom I have known and worked with for 25 years or more, using my own musical language, albeit influenced by early harmony and an individual response to the round, the carol, the motet, the song, the pavane, the fantasia and so on. I hope to produce something that is fluid and of today, and yet echoes the structural inventiveness and imagination of this early world of extraordinary polyphony.

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