John Purser Suite for Solo Violin

CREATIVE SCOTLAND

RACHEL BARTON PINE, VIOLIN

PROGRAM NOTE BY JOHN PURSER

Musical suites are made up of a variety of dances or character pieces, often preceded by an Overture or Prelude. While my Circus Suite and The Old Composer Remembers consist of character pieces, the Suite for Solo Violin is cast in a more traditional baroque style, using different dance forms.

The whole CD is a kind of kaleidoscopic suite featuring a variety of idiom and instrumentation, and made up of music I composed over several decades. The Flute Sonata is the earliest (1965) and of course The Old Composer Remembers (2002) for solo lute, is among the most recent. Recent, too, are the tributes to Hirini Melbourne, whose untimely death was such a loss, in particular to Maori musicians, and for whom I composed the poem and flute solo featured here. The last piece is my Cello Sonata. Composition, voice and cello were my main studies as a student and, in a sense, this piece combines all three as the cello covers the range of the human voice, male and female, and always speaks from the heart.

Of the three CDs of my music, this one covers the widest time-span and is perhaps the most classically orientated. I studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with Dr. Frank Spedding, and with the help of a Caird scholarship, went on to study with Sir Michael Tippett and Dr. Hans Gál. Spedding was a fine composer of technical brilliance, but who generously gave me my head as a student. His was a liberating influence. Tippett was composing his Concerto for Orchestra when I was studying with him. It remains one of the most structurally radical and inventive pieces of the twentieth century, and his ability to blend lyricism with intellectual vigour continues to inspire me. It was with Gál that I studied the longest. He embodied and sustained the traditions of European classical music, making me feel I had a right to be part of that great community of composers, however humble my own offerings. His music is now enjoying a revival, a just reward for his unswerving adherence to truth. I trust their ghosts will not be too troubled by the musical gratitude of their student.

In my childhood we had no radio or television. We did have a wind-up gramophone, but most of our music was made in the home, or heard live in the concert hall. My mother played the piano, my sister became a professional flautist, and my brother played the trombone and the piano. I played the cello and sang. I sang as a boy soprano and then as a baritone, and singing was my first subject at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, though cello and composition became increasingly important. My father, a poet, philosopher and lecturer in English Literature, loved to listen.

We often made music together: even so, starting out as a composer in my mid ‘teens seemed a very daring thing, especially as, in those days, the family taste in music did not venture far beyond Debussy. Fortunately, my music teachers at Fettes College – Michael Lester-Cribb and David Gwilt – propelled me into the twentieth-century and I soon became a devotee of Bartók, Shostakovitch, Stravinsky, Frank Martin, Carl Orff and many another. In those days both Tchaikovsky and Carl Orff were looked down upon as too light and popular. As for Brahms, he was derided for being too serious! But I never succumbed to musical fashion, perhaps inspired by my mother who would explode with passion in defence of Shelley – also out of fashion at the time. It meant nothing to her that she was addressing professors and lecturers of English Literature. She knew her Shelley and nobody was going to tell her what to think.

In the 70s and 80s, many composers followed the modernist movements of serialism and atonalism. As a child brought up singing Irish and Scottish traditional music and Brahms and Schubert lieder, I simply could not abandon tonality and melody – not for any imagined intellectual or formal gain. But with a philosopher for a father, and Bach, Beethoven and Brahms as daily fodder, I was and remain very conscious of the need for formal control and intellectual rigour, and much of my music uses strict forms and formal devices. They are there, however, as the servants of a higher purpose, to try and reach out to something finer than ourselves.

Suite for Unaccompanied Violin

This virtuoso piece was commissioned by Leonard Friedman, to whom it was dedicated and who gave it its first performances and broadcast in 1970. It is placed firmly within classical traditions, and makes due homage to Bach and the traditional dance forms he used. I knew a little about virtuoso violin tradition as my aunt Bay Jellett was an orchestral leader and had studied with Adolf Brodsky – the first violinist to play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto: but this Suite employs no pyrotechnics, but is very demanding in its different ways.

The Prelude is entirely in double stops and is followed by a double Fugue, which is hard to achieve on solo violin, but the challenge was irresistible. The first subject, mostly in semi-quavers, is announced simultaneously with its counter melody. There are three entries of the subject before a return to double stops heralds the second subject which moves in quavers as though on uneven stepping stones, the gaps between soon being filled by its counter melody. Again there are three entries, before the music breaks out into fierce chords alternating with little phrases of dance. Finally, the first subject returns in altered form, combines with the second subject, and the whole ends up in celebratory mood.

The theme of the Pavan is used for three variations in different dance forms. The idea is to integrate the form of the Suite, so that the succession of dances makes a coherent whole. The Pavan itself is thoughtful and stately. The dance and its name are said to derive from the strut of the peacock. This particular peacock is, however, a sensitive creature and woos with decorum.

The Galliard which follows is entirely pizzicato and, for all that it is a dance, is without measure, its brief silences following the pattern of silences in the Pavan.

The Saraband is composed in thirds and has something of a late Viennese feel to it. Sarabands traditionally emphasise the second beat of the bar, as does this one, but it can also be thought of as an impossibly slow waltz.

The Double is a type of variation which elaborates on its predecessor. Fast as it is, it still retains all the essential elements both of the Sarabande and the initial Pavan, to which it makes a final brief return.

This saraband is to be played freely and is more personal than communal. It leads straight into the final Gavotte which I allowed to get out of hand, the performer being told to accelerate little by little, throughout. The opening tempo must therefore be carefully chosen if it is to remain possible to play the end of it, by which time the dancers should be beyond help.

CREDITS

Recording Engineer: Bill Maylone
Recorded: WFMT Studios, Chicago
Mastered: Mike Monseur, BIAS Studios, VA
Photographs and Design: Seán Purser
Producer: John Purser

My grateful thanks to all the musicians who have given so much of themselves, and in particular to those who have commissioned or accepted pieces from me. I am honoured by their outstanding performances.

Above all, I thank my family and especially my son Seán and my wife Barbara who have done so much to make this project a reality. Seán is responsible for design, photography and many other aspects of production: Bar has brought her own musical sensitivities to bear and given constant support in every way. She has been a cello teacher for many years and the final track, the Cello Sonata, is dedicated to her.