4 minute read
Our Junior Ensemble takes centre stage
Rob Hall’s role encompasses teaching saxophone and clarinet, composition and piano, as well as chamber music coaching and leading the Junior Ensemble. He describes his latest project with the Junior Ensemble, recording a performance of four works for the 2022 CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) Festival, as ‘doing something a little bit different’…
What drove the selection of the pieces you decided to perform?
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In many ways the CoMA Festival was the catalyst for putting the programme together. I selected Los Arcos from Open Score, their catalogue of flexibly-scored works, and hand-picked and arranged the other pieces to work around it. We’ve got five violinists, three cellists, four pianists, a sax player and a trumpet player, aged between nine and thirteen, in the Junior Ensemble. The repertoire had to be shaped around that – you can’t just pull something off the shelf. It was a matter of finding the right pieces, to work with this age group, and arranging them to suit the instruments in the Ensemble.
Can you describe the themes, challenges and the highlights of the four pieces you selected?
The centre piece, Los Arcos, is by the Irish composer Fiona Linnane. It’s dramatic and incredibly musically descriptive, composed in four sections with four distinct themes – bells, rain, thunder and pilgrims – which we approached through improvisation games that explored extended techniques. One pianist, Daniel, had to pluck and strike the piano strings for thunder – he really got into that role! Another of our young pianists, Elizabeth, volunteered to play the percussion part, which she did beautifully. Working improvisation into the themes with that age group worked really well.
It’s good to balance contemporary music with established classical music, for a sense of lineage and I wanted to place Fiona Linnane’s work very carefully in the centre of the performance. We opened with Gerald Finzi’s Carol – the middle work in his Five Bagatelles for Clarinet and Piano from the early 20th century – it’s very lyrical, very pastoral, and I arranged it so that the sax and trumpet would share the part of the clarinet melody. The second piece Now See! is more contemporary. It’s by John Surman, a jazz saxophonist and composer from Devon whose work often engages with classical and folk traditions, and I arranged the plucked string elements for cello rather than jazz double bass. However, we needed someone to take on the jazz improvisation role that Surman would have played, so we brought in John, a senior pupil. He’s a classical saxophonist but has been working on jazz and improvisation with me and was really ready for this. We finished with Last Bloom, by the multi-reedist, Paul McCandless. It’s simple and its beautiful, a lovely way to come down from Fiona’s more dramatic piece – almost an epilogue. But it was also the hardest piece to master because it’s all homophonic, and the chords are all in close harmony, so the instrumentalists had to phrase together and be absolutely accurate with their timing and tuning. I transcribed the two jazz pieces from recordings and adapted them to suit the Ensemble.
What are the benefits of introducing younger musicians to contemporary and new music?
I think it can be transformative. I don’t think there’s any age at which you can’t respond to any type of music. What I love about working with this young group is their open-mindedness. They haven’t yet fully developed their musical identity so you can go in any musical direction and they will follow. As the Ensemble Leader, it’s my responsibility to find music that challenges them but is also manageable.
How important are recording experiences for young musicians?
To take these pieces up to the level they did is serious stuff; recording is a concentrated process and they really had to raise their game. The instrumentalists see me every week for rehearsals, so for the recording I decided to hand the conducting role to Will Conway. This happens in the real world – players have to get it together very quickly with a new conductor – and I also felt that this would bring out something special in the Ensemble for the recording.”
We had fun learning a new piece of contemporary music. I play piano and, when we were playing a piece called Los Arcos, I had to actually hit the piano!” Daniel (piano)
“Piano is my first study and I’ve been playing the saxophone for about a year. I liked the opportunity this gave us to play different genres of music. It was fun and quite a different experience to the music we often play. I really like the Junior Ensemble and the collective feeling you get when playing with other people.” Michelle (saxophone)
