MM 2385430 – Mason, Clear Night

Christian Mason

Clear Night

für Orchester for Orchestra

Score

Partitur

Nur das Mikrofon einschalten reicht nicht – Just turning on your microphone is not enough.

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Orchestration:

3 Flutes (2nd doubling Alto Flute, 3rd doubling Piccolo)

2 Oboes

English Horn

2 Clarinets in Bb

Bass Clarinet in Bb

2 Bassoons

Contrabassoon

4 Horns in F

3 Trumpets in Bb

2 Tenor Trombones

Bass Trombone

Tuba

Percussion (2 players):

1. Glockenspiel, Vibraphone, 2 Suspended Cymbals.

2. Crotales, Marimba, 2 Suspended Cymbals.

Harp

Celesta

Violin 1 (2 Soli, Tutti)

Violin 2 (2 Soli, Tutti)

Viola (2 Soli, Tutti)

Violoncello (2 Soli, Tutti, min. 8 = 4 Desks)

Double Bass

Score in C

Duration:

Approx. 6 minutes

Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra in partnership with UBS

World premiere by LSO conducted by Pavel Kotla on 30th September 2008 at Barbican Hall, London.

Performance Notes: Flutes:

Crossed note-heads indicate breathy tone.

Glissandi on the natural harmonics, on the specified string, following the notated contour and applying accents and bow techniques such as trem. where indicated. The notated rhythms are not precise but are indicative of the approximate speed of the glissando.

Flickering natural harmonics played ‘Freely, wild abandon’: lefthand flickering rapidly (quasi-trill) between constantly changing high natural harmonics (ad lib.) and open strings, right-hand playing fast tremolo unsynchronised with left-hand. There should be no synchronisation between players, each playing as if improvising in their own world. The result should be a continuously fluctuating mass of sound with great intensity of colour and energy.

Partitur, Streicher

Partitur, Flöten, Stimmen allgemein, Streicher

Irreg. trem. indicates that the tremolo should have a rhythmically irregular quality, like morse code.

Partitur, Flöten, Stimmen allgemein, Streicher

General:

Wide vibrato is used expressively throughout the piece. The degree of vibrato is left to the discretion of the players/conductor and may vary according to context, but should always be noticeably more than an ordinary vibrato.

Programme Note

Clear Night (2007/2008) begins with an incandescent burst of spectral energy, descending scales cascading over one another as they dissolve into the background, something like a time-lapse film of a shooting star. As the glare recedes, a lush texture of strings and muted brass playing sustained modal clusters emerges, with sharp interjections from harp, celesta and woodwinds, and flurries of sliding natural harmonics from six solo strings: points of light dancing their way across the sky. As the music progresses these points form into melodic constellations, always characterised by percussive colours, with vibraphone and marimba among those joining the array. The texture builds, the layers and colours thicken, and the music intensifies before suddenly giving way to a contemplative moment of bowed crotales; a still point in a turning world. When the flow resumes there is a heightened sense of urgency, with a heavily decorated harmonic progression giving way to the sheer joyful exuberance of orchestral colour. The piece ends in ecstatic stasis with an ad lib. explosion of natural harmonics in the strings above a bright bed of wah-wah muted brass. The emotional world of the piece was inspired by David Gascoyne’s poem Tenebrae, from his 1938 collection Hölderlin’s Madness, on which I recently composed a song cycle of the same name. Tenebrae, the final song, quotes the harmonic progression from the end of this piece, fifteen years later, setting the words for mezzo soprano and ensemble:

Clear night!

He has no need of candles who can see A longer, more celestial day than ours.*

Christian Mason (2023)

* from: David Gascoyne, New Collected Poems, edited by Roger Scott (Enitharmon Press 2014), printed with kind permission from Stephen Stuart-Smith

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