Cantus Maris – some background:
Dear friends,
I’m very keenly aware what a challenge you are valiantly taking on, in the form of this new piece of
music, and for some while it has seemed proper that I should offer you (to take or leave, as you wish)
some sense of the events that prompted it. I realise that some could feel this is a piece entirely about
other people and things – but I hope the prevailing sense will be that this was something awaiting its
moment, and that the opportunity given to me by Vivace brought about a confluence of a kind which is
entirely fitting, given the presence of Brahms’s Requiem on the same programme. To that end, then,
here is a bit of anecdotal background:
In 1991 I joined the Choir of Winchester Cathedral as one of four adult new arrivals. One of the other
three was Peter Butterfield, native of Vancouver Island and moving to Winchester with his English wife,
Sarah. In 2001, when I left the choir, again I was one of four departing, and again Pete was another in
the quartet; he and his family were returning to live in British Columbia. In the intervening years a warm
friendship had grown up between us, and between our families as new members of each made their
several entrance. Friendships extended also to Pete’s energetic and outgoing parents, James and Sybil.
In 2003 I was due to go on a research trip to Moscow, and recall James , on a return visit to the UK,
announcing that he would go too, as my baggage handler, since he would like to ‘check out’ the Russian
capital. Sadly this never came to pass; but, as is often the way with such things, James’s baggagehandling status became the stuff of a running gag on which various riffs were routinely played.
In 2009 I learned of James’s death. The realization how deeply this affected me brought with it a
heightened awareness how much the Butterfield tribe in toto - Peter and Sarah in particular - meant to
me and my wife Ginny, and it may be that something of that communicated itself in the message I sent
to Peter. The reply I received remains one of those things which argue eloquently for the abolition of
email and a return to the civilised art of letter-writing – for the extracted words below demonstrate that
Peter is a man who can write, and whose thoughts are capable of speaking for most, if not all, of us.
References to me are left intact not out of vainglory, but because they impart the necessary sense of
depth and convey so exactly why the seed of an idea or appeal planted here could not but take root and
flower sooner or later:
‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your words, and friendship from a distance. These have been the
most changing of times, though it is hard to articulate exactly what has happened. The sense of loss is
fundamentally altering.....where did they go?....how could it all be so swift and inevitable, and yet appear
to drag on for decades and the end be utterly, shockingly final. The mysteries are part of faith, I
understand that, and James, I believe, did as well. He marvelled at the universe and its ways. His
experience at sea (where a man learns to pray ....) sorted out so much for him, and not least a reliance
on 'whoever is running this mud-ball'! (his words). Those of us left are really here to provide dignity and a
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certain integrity to their memory. I remember you in the throes of losing your mother... the decisions, the
moving of things, the discussions with siblings… These things are universal, it would appear.
The Memorial service will have several readings. You will be familiar with Psalm 107:
They that go down to the sea in ships,
And occupy their business in great waters…
My inner preference is never to read a psalm, as they resonate with the entire history of music, and are
infinitely more expressive when set. However, I will be reading it. It did occur to me that when you read
the above verse, great waves of melody and harmonies will be forming in your mind. The connecting of
the dots integral (excuse my referring to you as a dot.....rhyme unintentional...) to my life are what l
seem to try to do. You met James, and me, he loved ships and the sea, you love music and words, I am
reading the words for James and his community, you write beautiful music, I love the psalms, Felix
[Peter’s son] is singing the psalms, you are a friend, l love attaching the magic of a creative experience to
human existence .....thus, were you to set the verses of Psalm 107 in the way you do, so many dots would
be connected. Potted dots? Dotted Potts? Oh dear. Just an idea, Fran. When we moved to Winchester in
1991, you were the very first person I met. Maybe it was after an initial choir practice of some kind. The
reason I remember is that you offered to help us move things, or just , to help. That isn’t so unusual, l
guess, but the way in which you said it (with sincerity and a genuine humanity) remains one of the great
memories of you, as I immediately felt I would have a friend here in this new place. I was right, and I
value it still.
Think of us Saturday, Fran, and on Sunday James's ashes will be scattered from a smallish boat, in a brief
ceremony at the entrance to Vancouver Harbour, where he sailed in and out many many times.’
The fact that Pete and Sarah are the only people on ‘this mudball’ who have ever dubbed me ‘Fran’
merely emphasises a connection special to both sides. Pete is godfather to my daughter, and it is his
wife, Sarah Fryer, who is to perform the mezzo-soprano solo part of Cantus Maris on May 1st. Sarah is
one of an extremely small and select minority who can say that they studied (inter alia) with Dame Janet
Baker, and her solo career underlines how her involvement in the new piece is as far from mere
exploitation of friendly connections as it could possibly be.
Cantus Maris is conceived as a sort of miniature ‘Sea Requiem’ and, indeed, bore that working title until
something else suggested itself (Latin being by its nature timeless in feeling and a common preserve of
western cultures). In 1993 I had written a commissioned setting of Psalm 126 for the Southern
Cathedrals Festival, held in Winchester that year, and I can recall Pete telling me more than once how a
particular melodic fragment had lodged itself permanently in his mind. It seemed apposite to go back to
that score and see whether, for Cantus Maris, I could extract a small cell of material as a starting point
for the taking of fresh directions. In the event, however, a separate idea from the earlier piece leapt out
at me and I realized that its sense of momentary harmonic tension and release fittingly suggested the
rising and breaking of a wave. Accordingly, a version of this first appears as early as bar 7, and another,
more archetypal instance in bar 10 of the orchestral preamble. This recurs at many points throughout
the music.
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The text of Cantus Maris is drawn from many places, and it will be noticed that the voice of the mezzosoprano soloist cannot be ascribed consistently to any single presence; instead, there is a blurring of
identities, sometimes placing the soloist alongside those in peril on the sea, sometimes narrating,
sometimes articulating a prayer for protection and, finally, conferring valedictory blessing after the
fashion of Newman in the poem which later became Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. The final section, in
particular, arises from the scattering of James’s ashes in the entrance to Vancouver Harbour. However,
its potentially universal dimension was aptly – if also poignantly – brought home when the need to
clarify copyright ownership in the final words (from the Carmina Gadelica – Celtic blessings and prayers
anthologized by Alexander Carmichael in the 19th century) led me to one of their subsequent editors,
Esther de Waal. A postcard in a distracted hand eventually arrived, needlessly thanking me for writing
the music and telling me that the mere knowledge of it brought timely consolation in the aftermath of
the death of a 26-year-old grandson in Los Angeles.
I have provided a print-out of the collated text as a separate document, showing the various sources. As
the assembled words imply, the music is an attempt to trace some existential, metaphorical journey
through the rhythms of the sea and through the risk-taking of our human passage across its everchanging face. The central section seems at times to be evoking the forces of nature in an exuberant
fashion, but then gives way to mortal fear and the increasing menace of the elements. The final Epilogue
section sees the human vessel safe home to its ‘wistful harbour’ and bestows blessing upon life in the
evening of its years, before a final chord (deliberately transplanted from my earlier oratorio The Cloud of
Unknowing) enfolds all in the perpetual, disconsolate mystery of the sea.
I was asked recently to contribute some more reflective comments on this music to the website of the
University of West London, where I work. Since the question I’m most often asked is “how do you write
music?”, and since also the honest answer is “I don’t really know”, the following glimpse into the inner
turmoil of the struggling composer may be of interest to some; if not, please feel free to move hastily
on!..
‘Edwin Muir once wrote that he mistrusted the term ‘technique’, preferring the word ‘skill’ on the
grounds that it seemed to carry more of a sense of the thing actually being said. For the orchestrator
this is sometimes true, sometimes not. Consider, for example, a fugal passage of writing, where the
‘argument’ arising from interaction between parts (conventionally these are dubbed ‘voices’ even in
instrumental writing) is of greater significance than the instrumental colour in which parts are clothed.
In such a case, one’s main concern may be actually to eliminate anything which calls undue attention to
a single voice at the expense of the others. While that may call for choices and decisions of a particular
kind, such a process can safely be left until later, given that it is essentially one of eliminating and
discounting, and ‘colour’ per se isn’t the prime concern; therefore, there is little or no risk of coming
back to the passage in a few weeks’ time and struggling to recover the thread of the initial thought.
In contrast, there may be moments or passages where the music and the colour given to it are
indivisible; that is to say, the colour itself is very largely the crux of the idea, notwithstanding that it will
still have to be articulated through some choice of notes, rhythms and harmonies. To leave this type of
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task until later is to risk forgetting the underlying inspiration, inviting in its place a cul de sac of
subsequent confusion and frustrating half-memory.
These two situations lead respectively to two different outcomes. In the first, the composer is hurrying
onward, committing his ideas to paper in what is usually termed ‘short score’: the music is notated pro
tem. on two musical staves (like the rehearsal score), such that it can be played by a pair of hands on a
keyboard – or else it may be spread onto three, four or half a dozen; but even six staves still represent a
provisional, shorthand, compressed picture of the envisaged end result laid out for an orchestra. In the
second scenario, however, the composer has to break off from his composing and attend to a complete
working-out of the idea in full orchestral ‘battle dress’. This will take time, and may sometimes have the
same effect as Coleridge’s now-proverbial ’person from Porlock’, who unwittingly interrupted the poet’s
rural Somerset idyll in mid-opium dream and, with it, the goings-on inside Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure
dome. More to the point, the interlude given over to orchestration will also cause the music to be
written down somewhere new – not as a continuation of the ‘short score’, but as a separate document
altogether.
Fast-forward with this, and we arrive at a final picture in which the composer has in one sense ‘finished’
the work – except that nowhere is there a single, continuously-written representation of it. There are
bits here and bits there; fragments on one size and format of paper, fragments on others. Piled
sequentially together, these don’t even make a reassuringly tidy edifice – but the process is an
ineluctable part of the struggles that take place in the name of ‘composition’. There exists a recording of
Igor Stravinsky reminiscing in his distinctively fractured English about how, when embarking on what
became the score of Le Sacre du Printemps , he rented an unfurnished apartment in Paris (scene of the
work’s scandalous première in 1913, at which members of the supposed intelligentsia of the city
reportedly urinated over the dress circle in protest: -only in France….!). Stravinsky in effect became an
interior decorator: he would paper his empty work room with blank sheets of manuscript paper, then
work haphazardly around it, ascribing notionally temporal placings of extracts, as they occurred to him,
through the expedient of spatial separation on different walls. Thus, it would have been possible for him
– in some moment of epiphany – to realise that what he had accomplished next to the radiator on
Monday morning actually linked up with what he had done on Friday afternoon beneath the light switch
(assuming, admittedly, that such a facility existed).
The concept of physical space and its metaphorical resonance within finished music is probably quite
widely, perhaps even instinctively accepted – but if the formative stages of a composition have tapped
into the idea in more literal, circumstantial ways, that may be rather less apparent. It may be no
accident that composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and the French-Swiss neo-classicist, Frank Martin,
were also chess players of significant prowess: chess involves not only powers of recall and spatial
instinct, but a kind of ‘forward memory’ whereby a hypothetical series of alternative moves and
consequences can be processed within the competitive brain. The composer working on long-range
detail, substance, ‘argument’ and structure becomes a form of chess player, albeit probably the kind
who makes a move, crosses to the seat opposite and then opposes himself. The problems to be
overcome are of his own making, or at least defy being ascribed to any other agency. As composers’
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wives have been known to say, with varying degrees of despair and/or superiority, “you have only
yourself to blame”.’
In my particular case, life is ruled by a trio of terrifyingly capable and practical women: my wonderful
wife, my boss and my agent, all greatly loved and all declaiming the dispiriting truism above in fearsome
unison. I cower in my desk well in a foetal position, feebly waving my metaphorical white flag, and wait
for the storm to pass…
I hope all this may add some dimension to your generous efforts with the music. Like Vaughan Williams
commenting on his own Fourth Symphony, “I don’t know whether I like it – but it’s what I meant at the
time”!
In advance, thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
Love,
Francis.
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