Victorian Time Machine

On 25 March 1436, Pope Eugenius IV dedicated the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence with its great dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. During the ceremony the Papal choir performed the motet Nuper Rosarum Flores that Guillaume Dufay had composed for the event, apparently basing the numerical structure of his work upon the proportional module used by Brunelleschi in his architecture.

My own work takes the original Dufay as a starting point for a set of continuous thematic transformations compositionally articulated in time by means of a complex series of proportional sieves. The resulting melodic contours, each sharply characterized in terms of tempo, register, and timbre, unfold in an overlapping and multi-layered system which, with their isorhythmic and isomelic structure, may be regarded as a kind of “same musical space” that the four sections of my work share in common with the Dufay.

Nuper Rosarum Flores was commissioned by The Victorian College of the Arts to pay tribute to the distinguished work of Dr Phillip Law, AO, CBE, Vice President of the Victoria Institute of Colleges, on the occasion of his retirement. The first performance was given by the Victorian Time Machine, directed by the composer and in the presence of Dr Law, during a private ceremony in the Orchestra Studio of The Victorian College of the Arts in July 1977. The work is dedicated to David Munrow, In Memoriam.

This piece represents a further development for me in the area of performer–composer interaction. The highly experienced and intuitive members of the Time Machine enabled me to replace a conventional notation with a partly verbal, partly notated score which was used as a beginning point for the composition. I was then able to work closely with each performer to fix the material of the piece.

The basic idea of the piece is to explore four simultaneous, separated, but ultimately co-existing and complementary solos, investigating loneliness. The everlasting chord and the “bell tones” were pre-recorded and played to the performers during the recording process. These also serve to suspend and distort our perceptions of time.

The “actors” humorously, intensely, explosively reveal themselves, somehow held in the bounds of the four pitches, until in the last section of the piece they coalesce into a cry for assistance.

This is certainly my most expressive piece and is intended to be a comment on the isolating nature of the modern world.

When I visited The Victorian College of the Arts in July 1977, I gave the first performance of my Music for Brass Instruments I, which I had composed in 1975 for brass quintet and pre-recorded tape. During these rehearsals and the various lectures which I delivered in that three-week period, I began to know many of the brass players at the College and when my thoughts turned to composing a piece for the Victorian Time Machine during my tenure as composer-in-residence at the College during 1978, it seemed quite natural to write a work for this group of people.

My works have often employed graphic scores and extended technical resources, especially for brass players, but Music for Brass Instruments III uses only conventional playing techniques and standard notation – in part because extended techniques mean that many players are unable to approach the scores and because many others are unable to form an image of what the piece sounds like. It has recently seemed important to me to confront these two problems.

I have not used any pre-planned compositional scheme for the work. I just sit down and compose.