FORBIDDEN SYMPHONY

for Orchestra, Chorus & Soloists 1990-1992

David Hellewell

Additional Programme Information

I can best describe the nature of my music by giving two sets of explanations: 1. Real-world visual, sensual and abstract analogies - natural and man-made phenomena, past and contemporary, by which I am greatly affected, and; 2. Purely musical terms. When composing, I work in purely musical processes (but these processes are, I believe, the musical transmutations of my real-world cultural, aesthetic and philosophical interactions). My present 'multi-dimensional' musical language has continuously evolved over a period of some 30 years, influenced by, and drawing its essence from, virtually all cultures and idioms, past and present, ethnic, popular, classical, avant garde and traditional, and the symphony is the culmination of this evolution to date.

My compositional techniques I equate with natural, biological creative evolution. Species (motives, ideas, cells), are created, evolve, mutate and continually transform, and have no predetermined future; only post hoc is there a seemingly- discernable 'plan', 'pattern', or apparent evolutionary goal. The difference between natural and my own musical creativity is that I do have a goal, a specific compositional purpose (no matter how nebulous in the initial stages), and the composition is, in fact, the means by which I bring into being - create - the specific complexity of feelings that were mere shadows at the work's initial conception. I treat notes as living entities, which react and interact with others both individually and in communities, and the most difficult task for me in composition is in allowing these reactions to take place 'naturally' whilst at the same time coordinating, persuading - sometimes forcing! - these into the direction/form that I want. This is a two-way feedback process: I derive direction and new musical ideas from these accidental mutations - serendipity - but also push my own ideas at them, to see how they react and interact. This makes composing always agonisingly-slow for me. Each work is the creation of a new form and species of music, and is the further evolutionary extension of previous works (though each individual work has its own unique identity).

This evolutionary compositional process is, in the symphony, on a grand scale, and therefore much too detailed to be described here in simplified form. Suffice it to say that motives, ideas, textures, intervallic, harmonic and formal entities, evolve, are metamorphosed, developed and transformed (and can be heard as such!) throughout the work (see below for correspondences with the Forbidden City).

There is another very important feature to which I was greatly attracted, and one which particularly corresponds to my own musical (and garden) aesthetics and practice. Within the City are a multitude of diverse buildings, temples, galleries, libraries, pavilions, studios, courtyards and dwellings, housing works of art, ceramics and everyday objects of fine, exquisite craftsmanship.

However, all this diversity is unified by integration with the environmental space, trees, rocks and plants (Europeans would hardly call these 'gardens'': they are plants and natural objects integrated into the architecture - I admire this), together with figures, motives, colours and patterns which recur throughout the complex. For example: roofs are tiled in imperial yellow, and together, seen from a distance, give the appearance a billowing, golden sea. There is 'unity of style and variations in unity'. This is a 'multi-dimensional' work of art. The exquisiteness and creative use of environmental space (and the absence of tall buildings) offsets any feeling of oppressive monumentality that is more often than not an overriding feature of much large- scale state and corporate architecture. This is 'flat' architecture - architecture 'of the earth', but of a celestial lightness, wonderful to experience and walk through.

The descriptive titles and adjectives I give in my programme notes are an amalgam of quasi-programmatic, abstract and musical terms, which I feel is the only way I can even begin to describe this most non-verbal, totally man-made and abstract language of music. However, as I said earlier, I do often find, after composition!, that real correspondences do come to mind.

A good example is in the second movement, where there is is an enormously-slow unfolding of the music. Recently, I visited Cornwall for a few days, to rejuvenate myself by the striking rock formations and coves there, and on contemplating these, sitting on a premonitory rock in a deserted cove, I was suddenly struck by the realisation that this was, sensationally, the same feeling I had created in this 'Infinite Unfolding' section of the symphony: very slow, geological-like unfolding of time, massive volcanic rocks, pounding sea, and the spatiality of the blue sky, taking one back millions of years. But there is a further analogy to this: the Chinese too have revered and admired rocks and landscape. There are, for example, in the Forbidden City, highly-prized rocks mounted, like sculptures, on special architectural plinths for artistic appreciation and contemplation.

Another, quite different, programmatic analogy is in the third movement, which is the largest and longest movement (17 minutes) of the symphony. With this I took the rather dangerous - even brash -decision to make it a fast movement (long movements are usually slow: fewer notes and events are required!). However, the real-life analogy I give for this is not from the past, but from the present: a journey by late 20th century motorway. Here we have fast speed but stable, normal events within the vehicle; whilst outside events, sights and sounds happen at different speeds and perceptive levels relative to the inside observer. Scale, for example, has to be large and relative to the speed and distance travelled: a tiny road sign is of little use at high speeds - it needs to be billboard size. Likewise, landscape events need to be of an observable size: a cottage garden would pass by in a flash.

This modern analogy may seem far removed from ancient Chinese travel, but in my mind there are correspondences between these modes: Chinese scroll paintings, eg. of great journeys through landscapes, actually have to be read sequentially, in time, like a musical score; and the spatiality of Chinese landscape art is not the single-point perspective of Western landscape or cityscape painting, but is infinitely more spacious and flexible - I feel the connections between these ancient and modern modes.

David Hellewell Feb. 1992