Songs and Dances of the Islands Suite No. 2

This suite of songs and dances was commissioned by the piano/clarinet duet of Luca Ferrini and Jože Kotar. The suite is in three movements and each movement is either inspired by, or an arrangement of songs and dances from the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago.

The first, Biguine is a typical Martiniquan dance built on a simple verse chorus structure and without doubt, the result of the fusion of African and European cultures over centuries. The dance is historically associated with the town of Saint - Pierre (birthplace of my own maternal grandfather) and the form has evolved from the beginning of the 20th century to encompass satirical themes, politics, love, and the carnival. The clarinet is the main instrument of the Biguine, a name whose origins are highly contested although the most widespread belief is that it comes from the English verb, “to begin”.

The second movement is an arrangement of a quadrille song, You know one Joseph Keeba from a field recording in the village of Toco, in Trinidad. In 1939 an American couple, Melville and Frances Herskovits, both scholars, undertook a series of field study recordings in villages across Trinidad and Tobago as part of their life-long study of West African and African American societies. The Herskovits’ were among the first scholars to paint accurate accounts of African culture in North America, The Caribbean and South America and thanks to their recordings, traditional songs that have long disappeared from practise can still be found and serve as inspiration for generations to come. The words of the song make fun of the cuckold husband.

The third movement, Time for Man Go Home is an arrangement of a work song from a collection of Trinidad Folk songs by the eminent Trinidadian musicologist Edric Connor. In this song, built on a call and response, I have combined the solo melody with the chorus response to give the sense of a long working day coming to its end at dusk and the workers calling out that it is time for man go home. Mr. Connor’s note in the collection remarks that this is the only song calling to stop work that he knows.