BENJAMIN: Jubilation | Dance Figures
Jubilation
Dance Figures
George Benjamin was born on January 31, 1960, in London, England, and lives there today. Jubilation was commissioned by the Inner London Education Authority with additional funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. The composer led the London Schools Symphony Orchestra and additional groups from several ILEA schools in the world premiere, on September 16, 1985, at the Royal Festival Hall. These are the first San Francisco Symphony performances. Jubilation is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, double bassoons, four horns, piccolo trumpet, two trumpets, three trombones, percussion, harp, piano, synthesizer, and strings. Per the score, extra groups include twenty recorders (or four piccolos), one piccolo trumpet, three trumpets, four horns, four trombones, approximately one hundred children’s voices, seven steel drums, and ten or more players on claves and cymbals. These performances feature four piccolos (in place of recorders) and members of the children’s chorus playing the claves.
Dance Figures was commissioned by Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie/Koninklijke Muntschouwburg, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for MusicNOW, the orchestra’s new music chamber series. Daniel Barenboim conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere on May 19, 2005, at Orchestra Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago. These are the first San Francisco Symphony performances. Dance Figures is scored for flutes (two doubling piccolo), two oboes, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, double bassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, and strings. Percussion: temple blocks, guiros, ratchet, tam-tam, bass drum, glockenspiel, small cymbals, anvils, fishing-rod reel, cencerros, vibraphone, whip, vibraslap, side drums, tambourine, log drums, and alarm bell.
Librettist and screenwriter Alan Jay Lerner—the first “L” of the celebrated team of Lerner and Loewe that gave us such Broadway classics as My Fair Lady and Camelot—was a near-obsessive perfectionist where his song lyrics were concerned. No detail was too small for scrutiny, no potential shortcoming unworthy of his fullest attention. In his autobiography The Street Where I Live Lerner told of his struggle with one single line of a song lyric for the movie Gigi. It simply wasn’t right, but incessant pruning and endless rewriting yielded no improvement. Doggedly he kept at it. Finally he achieved the effect he wanted, only to discover that he had come full-circle back to his original version. He went on to observe:
“It reminded me of a daydream I have often had about lyric writing that goes something like this. I am locked in a hotel room for three days working on a song. Suddenly the door opens and there stand all the members of my family and my closest friends. One of them says: ‘What have you been doing in here for the three days?’ I reply: ‘Writing.’ One of them says: ‘What have you written?’ I reply: ‘I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night, And still have begged for more.’ They look at each other hopelessly, call the appropriate medical authorities and I am put away for the rest of my natural life.”
Lerner would have recognized a kindred spirit in British composer George Benjamin, who observed that his fifteen-minute work Dance Figures “really is different, not least because it took me only three months to write from beginning to end.” While such a statement would seem almost funny coming from Milhaud or Martinů—two composers noted for quick facility and fast turnarounds from conception to completion—that tell-tale “only” in Benjamin’s remark speaks volumes about a writer who works slowly and meticulously. Given that his previous orchestral outings, the Palimpsests, had required a gestation period of a good three-plus years, it becomes clear that to write fifteen minutes worth of music in three months’ time is tantamount to creative lightspeed for this most painstaking and lapidary of composers.
George Benjamin’s output consists of over thirty compositions to date since 1977, when the then-teenager brought out a pair of sonatas and a work for brass band. The total might seem rather meager, but given Benjamin’s aspiration of making each work a complete world in itself, as well as his scrupulous attention to detail, one should not expect a sizeable catalog. Thus the dig from a London journalist that “Mozart in a morning wrote more music than [Benjamin] in a decade” explains little and illuminates nothing, given the inappropriateness of the comparison being made. Mozart, after all, worked within a culture of standardized, clearly delineated forms and idioms. A much more apt parallel can be drawn between George Benjamin and Arcangelo Corelli, that luminous mid-Baroque violinist–composer of perfectly wrought gems that have served as models of classy instrumental finesse for centuries. (Like Benjamin, Corelli was also an accomplished teacher and performer.) And of course there is the example of Maurice Ravel, that paragon of exquisite workmanship, technical wizardry, and carefully limited yield who looms large in Benjamin’s estimation.
Benjamin acquired his polished technique by dint of careful study and rigorous application. He was accepted into Olivier Messiaen’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire when he was only sixteen years old, a rare distinction indeed. A 1978 class photo shows a beaming, bespectacled George Benjamin seated at the piano alongside his legendary teacher, clearly in the position of honor. Messiaen may well have been the ideal teacher for the exceptionally gifted youngster, master that he was of balancing intensive technical training with his role as mentor, model, and inspiration. Interviewed for an article about the training of young composers, Benjamin described Messiaen as the very exemplar of a great teacher:
“He wasn’t really a teacher at all. He was like a relation, very, very distinguished, noble but not grand—one enjoyed learning from him so much because it was so exciting, so enthusiastic, so loving in every musical way. One was oblivious of being taught; it was more like being an apprentice. The joy of teaching, he says, is to forget that he’s called Olivier Messiaen and simply to put himself as a servant to the pupil’s vocation and to help the pupil find his voice—he’d never want a pupil to copy what he does. What he teaches you to do, deep down, is to think and hear; the more you know about what you’re doing and what you’re trying to do, the better composer you become.”
The earlier work Jubilation, from 1985, witnesses Benjamin’s commitment to schools and education. Commissioned by the Inner London Education Authority, Jubilation was premiered by the London Schools Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction at Royal Festival Hall in September of 1985. True to its intention as a piece for school orchestras, Jubilation is written for a large, but variable conglomeration of instruments and voices, requiring professional and untrained players alike. For example, Benjamin has included parts for twenty recorders, those perennial favorites in elementary music classes. However, as he specifies in the score, “Less, or more, than twenty recorders can be used; the minimum is twelve.” The mammoth percussion section includes parts for seven steel drums, about which Benjamin remarks: “The steel drum parts can be reduced to three players (lead, second, and tuned bass); these parts are easy and do not require the players to read music.” A chorus of “100 or more untutored children’s voices” adds to the work’s versatility in the face of the ever-changing availability characteristic of school ensembles.
But with all that—choir, recorders, steel drums, synthesizer, percussion battery, strings, massive woodwind and brass forces—Jubilation aims for a quiet, contemplative effect rather than indulging in the raucous noise-fest one might expect under the circumstances. It begins nonchalantly, with a soft rattle of six claves (each starting independently of the other) that continue until, as the score specifies, “the clapping has stopped and the audience is quiet.” From this simple beginning the piece develops steadily and surely as a processional with a clearly delineated slow march beat. At no point during the course of the ten-minute buildup is the entire orchestra heard together; rather, individual sections fade in and out of the acoustic space. Finally, near the end, the children’s choir enters singing a charming elementary exercise in classical solfège, identifying the pitches they are singing by name: Fa La Sol Fa La Sol Fa Mi Re, and so forth. Soon enough their voices fade away, and the final moments are provided by the ghostly sheen of a bowed vibraphone and a few delicate taps on finger cymbals.
George Benjamin describes his Dance Figures as “(in part) a much expanded orchestral transcription of Piano Figures, a series of short piano pieces intended for children to play.” The orchestral work was the result of a joint commission between Belgium’s Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for its MusicNOW project. From the start the work was intended to serve either as theatrical dance music, or as purely orchestral music, and it was premiered in both guises—first by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2005, followed by a theatrical performance choreographed by Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker for the 2006 Brussels premiere. Benjamin has related how “I had seen Balanchine’s wonderful choreography to Stravinsky’s Agon, with its little forms that leave space and air for the dancers to work in, and it seemed to me that writing for dance demands a succession of small forms rather than narrative, symphonic discourse. Actually, I’m a bit fed up with constantly evolving, big symphonic forms in modern pieces, and I like the challenge of making single statements which have a strong profile and character of their own. It isn’t easy to do.”
Performing Dance Figures is not a trivial undertaking. The score calls for the full armament of the modern symphony orchestra, including a breathtaking array of percussion instruments such as guiros, cencerros, anvils, vibraslap, a brass alarm bell, and even a fishing-rod reel. But sheer noise is not Benjamin’s objective; each of the instruments in his gigantic orchestra has a specific coloristic and/or expressive reason for being included, whether that be the husky purr of the E-flat clarinet (a frequent sonority throughout the work) or the brisk clank of a temple block. Only rarely is the orchestra heard as a single, massed entity; most of the time, small groups are heard in chamber-like scoring, with instrumental solos being common throughout.
Dance Figures offers up nine short, contrasting “choreographic scenes” grouped in two sections; movements 1 through 6, played without break, make up the first division, with the remaining three movements (also played without break) following after a substantial pause. The movement titles—not included in the printed score—stem from the work’s original incarnation as piano pieces; according to the composer they may be useful for orchestral audiences as well, so they are included here. George Benjamin has provided brief program notes about each movement, reproduced as the paragraph headings in the following commentary:
1 - Spell: a simple introduction, exclusively for divided high strings. Made up of three expansive phrases, the first opening with a violin solo complemented by discreet string harmonics, “Spell” sets the soundstage for the composition to follow. Although the color palette is limited and the motion subdued, the final statement introduces a fleecy breeze of soft whirs in the muted violins, winding up on a soft concluding harmony that sounds remarkably like a classical dominant seventh chord.
2 - Recit: an ornate melody shared amongst the winds, underpinned by a sonorous harmonic texture. Operatic “recitative” is constructed of melodic lines that follow the contour of the text instead of forming a fully-shaped melody. Here the recitative-like melody is presented by a solo oboe, mirrored by a solo flute at the upper fifth, a sophisticated use of fundamental acoustic properties that renders a richly colored single pitch rather than two separate notes. In addition to marking the entrance of the winds, the movement also introduces the brass in the form of muted trumpets and trombones. The enormous percussion battery, however, lies yet in wait.
3 - In the mirror: A brief polyphonic movement, divided into two halves—the first legato and plaintive, the second more energetic and pointed. Although sporting the fastest tempo mark so far, the overall sense is not so much of speed as it is of a well-oiled, sinuous slide. Three pairs of instruments (two clarinets, two bassoons, and solo violin and viola) state contrasting melodic lines. No two lines are precisely the same, but nonetheless the impression is of traditional imitative counterpoint. The second, faster section is announced by the first appearance of the French horns, which underpin effervescent figures in the woodwinds.
4 - Interruptions: various musical materials cross-cut and superimpose in this volatile movement: virtuoso woodwind flourishes, heavy chords in the lowest regions of the orchestra, a fierce quartet of horns, a hesitant oboe solo . . . a distant, slow chorale. The percussion section makes its long-awaited appearance in this movement, albeit as yet limited to the traditional timpani and bass drum. Strident tremolos in both brass and string instruments add to the general mood of growling menace; the tessitura is generally low and the sonorities tartly dissonant. Even the frequent Ravelian woodwind cascades cannot offset the music’s overall anxiety; only at the final statement of the distant chorale (in winds and strings) do the jitters fade.
5 - Song: a flowing song, sharing the main line between a viola solo and muted trumpets. An abrupt change of atmosphere marks the coda, where an E-flat clarinet takes the foreground. There is something effortlessly endearing about this movement, with its mumbling woodwinds and the ear-tickling juxtaposition of solo viola against muted trumpet. At the coda the percussion returns with the delicate sounds of vibraphone, light ratchet (a fishing-reel is suggested), harp, and celesta. Together they create a metallic shimmer that whirs daintily about the E-flat clarinet’s final melody.
6 - Hammers: the full orchestra, employed as a single mass, placed almost entirely in a high register. Monolithic pulses are disrupted by abrupt changes in pace while blaring melodic fragments hocket across the brass. The percussion arrives in full force at last, including temple blocks, side drums, cowbells, guiros (a gourd used like a ratchet), tambourine, log drums, tam-tam, vibraslap, whip, ratchets, and finally a brass alarm bell to bring the whole to a raucous conclusion.
7 - Alone: after a pause, a complete contrast—a veiled texture, subdued and low in tessitura. Most welcome after the pounding just administered, this movement might remind listeners of the delicate sound structures of Ligeti, or Messiaen in his most intimate moments.
8 - Olicantus: a longer movement, reflective in mood and scored for chamber-like resources. A dark-hued canon between bass clarinets and cellos prefaces three statements of the same, simple melody. At each recurrence the tempo slows considerably while the melody is harmonised and embellished in different ways. Don’t bother looking for a definition of “olicantus” in the dictionary, Latin or Oxford English Dictionary; you won’t find it. Oli- refers to Benjamin’s close friend, composerconductor Oliver Knussen, thus it translates as “song for Oliver.” In many ways the heart of Dance Figures, “Olicantus” offers three separate statements of its material, each successively incorporating new sonorities. At the opening, just clarinets and strings; on the next iteration, the harp and horns enter. As the tempo slows even further for the final statement, celesta, harp, and vibraphone together with soft pizzicato chords in the strings create a fine, feathery atmosphere, ending the movement on a luminous, gently-fading sonority.
9 - Whirling: a very short but energetic Presto, exploiting a play of perspectives across the full orchestra as a melodic line mainly in the first violins, spins its way through a mass of other materials. Quite the gung-ho finale, marked Prestissimo (i.e., as fast as possible) and written in a dizzying array of meter changes. The overall sonority is tantalizingly Stravinskian, but the melodic gestures, and the delicate interplay of the sections of the full orchestra, could be by none other than George Benjamin.
—Scott Foglesong
Scott Foglesong, Chair of the Department of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, is a Contributing Writer to the San Francisco Symphony’s program book and a regular speaker at SFS pre-concert talks.
More About the Music
Recordings: For Jubilation— Jubilation has not yet been recorded commercially.
For Dance Figures—Oliver Knussen conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Nimbus)
Reading: George Benjamin, by Risto Nieminen, Renaud Machart, and George Benjamin (Faber) | Faber Music’s page on George Benjamin at fabermusic.co.uk | A video interview of George Benjamin may be found at community.sfsymphony.org