The Southwark Consorts of Winds

Argentine Music

• Marisol Gentile - In B            Natalia Solomonoff - The Blue Plumed Cobra

• Luis Menacho - La curvatura de A     Luis Menacho - Consonanze Stravaganti

• Marisol Gentile - Aire de Fuga           Dante Grela -  - Lejanos Reflejos

English Music

• John Dunstable - Preco Preheminencie Giles Brindley - The Four Temperaments

• Benjamin Wardhaugh - Hill on a Walk        Alan Taylor - Voices

• John Dowland - Lachrymae             Guy Wolfenden - Serenade for Sophia

And also

• Tomas Luis de Victoria - Mass a 6

Programme Notes - Argentine Music

This piece was written for Southwark Consorts of Winds, and is dedicated to the ensemble. Marisol Gentile is the director of the Ensamble Rosario, in the city of Rosario, and organises many events there for the promotion of new music. She teaches conducting, and teaches and performs viola.

The snake, and especially the cobra, are seen as symbolic animals of great ambiguity in their meaning. In several pre-colombian cultures, the image of the plumed serpent, which combines the symbolic qualities of birds and snakes, is of great importance as a symbol of the union of opposites.

The piece is composed of ideas containing different elements. These follow one another, and are superimposed on one another. As in the symbolic image of a plumed serpent, the piece deals with the unification of opposites and the generation of a cyclical structure.

The title of this piece, "The Curvature of A" gives little away about this 3 minute piece described by the composer as "very expressive'. Luis Menacho is a teacher of composition in the School os the Arts in Berisso, a city to the south east of Buenos Aires. The school seeks to give opportunities for development through the arts to young people who would otherwise lack opportunities.

This piece was written for our double wind quintet in 2004. Dante Grela was born in 1941, and is currently Professor of Composition, Analysis, Orchestration, and Electroacoustic Music at the National University of Rosario, and is also a Professor at the National University of the Litoral, the Rosario Higher Institute of Music, and the Provincial Conservatory in Pergamino. His music has been played throughout South America, and has also in the USA and in Europe. He has recieved numerous awards for composition.

This is an arrangement for clarinet consort of a piece written early in the composer's career for two flutes, two clarinets, horn, and cello.

This piece is based on an organ work by Giovanni Macque, a Florentine composer from the early Baroque period. The idea for the piece arose from a description of playing in a clarinet consort as feeling like being inside an organ while it is playing.

Programme Notes - English Music

John Dunstable is probably the most important English composer in the history of music. As the Middle Ages moved towards the Renaissance, the development of the 'English Consonance' - a sweeter sounding harmony in thirds, rather than the more austere sound of harmony in fourths and fifths, played a fundamental role in opening up new possibilities in musical expression. Dunstable was the foremost exponent of the style.

This short piece consists of a 16-bar quotation from the 2nd movement of Schoenberg's first strictly serial work, the wind quintet op.26, followed by three variations on it. The theme is played three times with different instrumentation, the first being Schoenberg's. The first and third variations are serial, and slower than the theme. The second variation is faster, and acerbic in tone. The fourth variation in the same tempo as the theme, and is successively in the Phrygian, Lydian and Aeolian modes.

This piece was written in autumn 2004 in response to a commission from Southwark Consorts of Winds, and represents something of a new direction in my compositional thinking. The ambiguity of the title is intentional - is the hill walking or being walked on? - and the 'walk' refers to the structure of the piece. Sometimes the walk refers to a previous location; sometimes it moves in an unexpected direction, but there are unexpected reversals or changes of perspective as new vistas open up. A small amount of musical material is constantly reinterpreted: in a sense it is the opening flute melody which goes on a walk.

If the players are seen as two quintets, the relationship between the two shifts from generally cooperative to generally antagonistic during the central section, and the resulting tension is not resolved.

The piece is based on a shifting drone consisting of two chords of a different character superimposed on one another, broken by sudden exclamations. The exclamations each use all the pitches found in the drones, and their rhythms are taken from the vocal rhythms of the words of torture victims describing their ordeals.

The words used are those of victims of torture in China; Rwanda; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Cameroon; Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq; and Iran. Most of the words were found on the web site of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and donations to their work are encouraged.

John Dowland was one of the talented group of composers who worked in England and elsewhere late in the reign of Elizabeth I, and early in the reign of James I. Unlike his older contemporary William Byrd, he did not find permanent employment in Britain, and spent many years in Europe as an itinerant performer.

His viol consort music includes the well known Lachrimae, a set of seven short pieces, each of which begins with the same motif, before developing in a different direction. As one progresses through the set of pieces, the tonality become further and further from the original A minor, concluding in a very distant region. Their melancholy character reflects the composer's self description, Dowland semper dolens.

This piece was written to celebrate the birth of the composer's first grandchild, in 2001. It consists of three movements. The Intrada sums up the happy event of Sophia's arrival, and is in a forms A-B-A structure. The Dance which follows taps into the rich culture of Sophia's Jamaican relations. The finale plays on the juxtaposition of two contrasted moods, first reflective and then happier.

Programme Notes - Other Music

Written in memory of the Empress Maria, Victoria's employer, this Mass was Victoria's last work and masterpiece. It is a Requiem for both the Empress, a true 'Renaissance Woman', but also for the musical style of the Renaissance, then rapidly being replaced by the early Baroque style of composers such as Monteverdi.