Composing again, a little

Before lockdown I had been in touch with the brilliant violinist Susanne Stanzeleit, cellist Andrew Fuller, and their piano quartet The Primrose Piano Quartet, who I was lucky enough to hear playing the Brahms and Schumann in Battle, a year or two ago. I remember the Primrose performances as breathtaking and how they balanced an incredible energy and chamber intensity, with the luminous and almost orchestral textures of those astonishing pieces. I know Susanne well because in recent years she has often led the New Music Players, the contemporary music band that I started back in 1990, with my partner Liz Webb. Susanne is a soloist who can also play ensemble, which is an amazing skill.

I was reminded of that combination of instrumental virtuosity, and communication, when browsing my copy of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a collection of pieces for keyboard composed in the period between 1562 - 1612, known in England as late Elizabethean and Jacobean periods. In these pieces a simple melody often takes off and is subject to virtuoso and even whimsical elaborations. A new skein is overlaid, while the underlying tune continues and provides a kind of coherence across the whole freely spun composition. A delight in wildness underpinned by a kind of order. I came across two different pieces, both called 'The woods so wilde', one by William Byrd and the other by Orlando Gibbons. Intrigued by the title, which seemed to encapsulate exactly the kind of verdant wandering within an ultimately ordered universe typified by the style and method of many of the Book's compositions, I looked up its origins. The title was inspired by 'Will Yow Walke the Woods soe Wylde', a song from the Tudor era, possibly sung by Henry VIII and his courtier Sir Peter Carew (c.1514-1575). All we have now is the melody fragment that was captured in Byrd's and Gibbons's keyboard compositions. This short fragment of melody that survives features a raised fourth, creating a haunting, searching and restless quality and I like to think its emotional implications were not lost on Elizabethan composers William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons.

Hoping that the piano quartet project might be revived at some point when classical concerts resume, I have started to sketch a movement of a new piano quartet, which takes something from the method of Byrd and Gibbons - coiling new and fantastic elements around a repeating melodic fragment which somehow embeds an underlying 'feeling' into its very structure - and then reaches into the glorious nineteenth century piano quartet format which brings the impact of polyphonic and even orchestral thinking into chamber music. So as usual with me, mixing things up in ways which are completely inauthentic in order to produce something new, I hope.

The first movement sketch begins simply enough with the tune in the cello, but it unfolds over about five minutes and includes some fairly wild sections, which I like to think correspond to the idea of wood as being life enhancing, mysterious, fecund, possibly even slightly dangerous, not necessarily literally but in terms of its psychological effects - surrounded by nature, closing in, with all the associations of dark fairy stories. The sense of walking out of the wood too, which if one is lucky brings feelings of calmness and restoration.

Orlando Gibbons: The woods so wilde (Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Dover edition)

Ed Hughes: sketch for The Woods So Wylde (2020)