Concerto for Orchestra

How do you compose a concerto for orchestra when you come from an island with multicultural music traditions that don’t include an indigenous canon of music composed in the Western classical music tradition?

Answers came from the concerto that inspired me, aged 15, to be a composer: Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Studying it offered a profound understanding of musical architecture, structure, form and orchestration. Decades later, reading his biography, I understood why his concerto had resonated so deeply with me. For Bartók, composition fulfilled his quest to forge a national musical language rooted in Hungary’s traditional music and capable of fully expressing his native land.

In my own concerto I have sought to make the orchestra the vessel that reflects Trinidad’s densely rich and multi-layered natural and human landscape. I have shaped the vocabulary from a multitude of music languages and traditions to explore the syncretism* that ensured the survival of spiritual beliefs and practices forbidden under slavery, nevertheless sustained by the sheer power of imagination and will.

The first of the three movement, “From the Birds”, opens with a series of blackbird calls and responses. I have combined the calls of Trinidadian and English blackbirds to reflect the opening of a playful and multi layered conversation in which each voice enriches the conversation with a new perspective. Moments of collision and overcrowding eventually clear to embrace each individual voice, that has become a vital and interdependent part of a new organic body.

The second movement, “Fragments”, refers to Derek Walcott’s Nobel lecture in which he described Antillean art as “…the restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent”. The opening melody in the clarinet is repeated by the woodwind accompanied by rhythmic clapping from the percussion, harp and string sections. A fragment of this melody resurfaces and travels through the orchestra via a series of transformations alongside snippets of memories that comment and accompany to converge on a fully formed melody evoking the lyricism of past calypsos.

In the final movement, “Of Gold and Horizons”, two distinct themes appear symbolising the encounter between the Old World and the New. The voices of the Old World adopt the repeated melodies they encounter. As they adapt to each other, clashing and tenderly entwining, a vigorous new melody bursts forth, each orchestral section asserting their voice as part of a unified whole surging to an abrupt climax.

* Syncretism: the combining of different religions, cultures or ideas.  Slaves were strictly forbidden to practise their religious and spiritual beliefs, so they developed a system of layering the names and qualities of their own deities onto images of Christian Saints.

© 2024 Dominique Le Gendre