How best to kick off the Proms?
Composing a new piece for the First Night of the Proms is a unique musical challenge. Ivan Hewett explains how to pull it off
How to begin the world’s greatest music festival? With a brandnew curtainraiser, is one obvious answer. We have one this year, in the shape of Gary Carpenter’s Dadaville, and there have been quite a few new pieces commissioned for the opening night in recent years. Writing a piece for the first night is a big challenge for a composer, as a really good curtainraiser is hard to bring off. It has to make a tremendous, optimistic noise, and indicate the scale of what’s to come, in a style that’s easily accessible without being banal. At the same time it ought to give the effect of somehow leading beyond itself. It opens the door through which we walk.
Pulling all that off was easy in the days when the musical language was tied to a social situation. Every Baroque orchestral suite began with a really rousing curtain-raiser, in the shape of a grand, pompous French overture. This was borrowed from the opening number of the French ballet, which accompanied the entry of the King and his retinue.
In later times, when sovereigns became too dignified to dance in public, and the middle-class took over, the fanfare took over as a way of signalling the start of something big. The noble body language had gone, but the sense of making a grand entrance lingered. Even ordinary folk had one moment in their lives when they could experience that uplifting feeling, when Mendelssohn’s Wedding
March pealed out at their wedding. For decades, right up to 1968, the Proms launched itself in a similarly conventional way, by playing the national anthem at the beginning of the opening night. Just for a moment, the old feeling of symbolically rising to one’s feet came back to life, and the problem of how to begin the Proms was solved at a stroke.
Without that conventional opening, any new piece played on the first night is bound to take on an extra significance. This puts the composer in a dilemma, because the requirement to fashion a good curtainraiser runs slap-bang into a very different set of values. This is the modernist demand on composers to be original, avoid cliché and “make a personal statement”.
There’s another problem for a composer on this august night, which is the British propensity for irony and understatement. American composers don’t suffer from those handicaps, so they have no trouble in fashioning a good curtain-raiser. There’s a flourishing sub-genre in the US of the “optimistic showpiece”, and even quite modest orchestras are in the habit of commissioning one to launch their new season. These openers tend to begin in a mood of oppression or doubt, before gathering weight and heft, and eventually working their way through to a blazingly affirmative conclusion.
British composers aren’t so good at that, as a glance at newly commissioned first-night pieces shows. It’s a fascinating exercise, which reveals how composers have been pulled this way and that by these conflicting demands. In 2001, Colin Matthews dared to write a piece called
Fanfare, which by strict modernist standards was a very uncool thing to do. But he spiked the guns of anyone who thought he was selling out. There were trumpets and drums, certainly, but they made a dissonant, “modern” noise. It then took everyone by surprise by sweetening harmonically and segueing into Britten’s Paul
Bunyan suite. This piece very cleverly obeyed the conventions for a curtainraiser, while subverting them.
Mark-Anthony Turnage did the same in his Canon Fever of 2012. “I hate well-behaved fanfares, the sort with clever little harmonic sidesteps and neat academic counterpoint,” he said in an interview just before the premiere. His piece certainly behaved badly. Judith Weir tried a different tack in her Stars, Night Music and
Light of 2011, piling up big resources onstage to make a modest four-minute squib. It showed that charm is just as effective a weapon as aggression when it comes to undermining curtainraising conventions. Julian Anderson’s
Harmony from 2013 tried a different tack, by setting a text that pondered the nature of time and music itself. He evaded convention by soaring above it.
All these are admirable, but it’s hard to shake off the feeling that in trying to fulfil two briefs, they end up being neither fish nor fowl. They’re not honest-to-goodness occasional pieces nor durable, interesting artistic statements. The gap between intention and execution is especially poignant in Colin Matthews’s piece. His craggy opening has a flavour of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the
Common Man, a wonderful example of something personal yet at ease with its function of being a grand affirmative statement. It’s as if Matthews’s piece is saying that fusion was possible for Copland, in 1942; for us living in the early 21st century, it’s not.
So what can we expect from Carpenter’s piece for the opening night? He is a British composer, in his early sixties, was born in London but has been Liverpool-based for decades. He’s written dozens of ballet scores, especially for Netherlands Dance Theatre, along with operas, a radio drama with Iris Murdoch, and scores of concert pieces. He is not a populist, but does weave references to pop and jazz into a modernist sound-world in a clever way. The piece he has written,
Dadaville, was inspired by Max Ernst’s artwork Dadaville, which he encountered at Tale Liverpool. That sounds properly modern, as does the mention in his programme note of a “gritty, aggressive” section based around the notes D and A. But he also mentions a repeating ground-bass and a muted violin melody, and hints at little surprises relating to Ernst’s enigmatic artwork.
Perhaps it will charm as well, then. Carpenter is a witty and resourceful composer, and he’s sure to give us a whole new angle on how the challenges of writing a Proms curtainraiser can be neatly avoided.
The British propensity for irony and understatement is a problem when composing for the opening night