Professor Martyn Harry At His Majesty’s Pleasure World Premiere
HMSC Keble Early Music Festival
Martyn Harry, professor of composition at the Faculty of Music, will conduct the world premiere of his evening-long work, “At His Majesty’s Pleasure” on February 28th as part of the Keble College Early Music Festival. Although “At His Majesty’s Pleasure” has been released on CD in 2012 and performed by His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts in New York, Munich and Santander, the performance at Keble Chapel will the first time that this work has been heard in its entirety.
“At His Majesty’s Pleasure” is scored for a royal consort of renaissance brass instruments, harpsichord and organ, and was commissioned in 2010 with funding from the PRS Foundation and the Living North Pennines project. The work is completely instrumental, but it is unusual in that its twenty-one movements build a narrative across the work set in a fictional Royal Household roughly five hundred years ago. It examines the problems that occur when a young child becomes King; the music is composed from his skewed perspective as he begins to engage with court life, and eventually begins to challenge the status quo. The music reflects these events through alluding to a wide range of stylistic ingredients, including early music, contemporary music and children’s music.
The Faculty of Music itself presents another dimension on the original commission, which the Spanish media mistakenly characterised as the first time that His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts “has commissioned a new work for 500 years”. Nevertheless, HMSC takes its name from the ‘five-part tthings for His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts’ that were composed for the coronation celebrations for King Charles II in 1661 by Matthew Locke, one of Professor Harry’s predecessors at Oxford University’s Faculty of Music.
At His Majesty’s Pleasure is a suite of twenty-one short movements scored for “royal consort” – four cornetts, four sagbutts, harpsichord and organ. The provenance of His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts’ name emboldened me to create my own portrait of Royal life. At His Majesty’s Pleasure is a surreal, regal homage to Robert Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. Generally speaking, each movement depicts a department or member of the Royal Household roughly five hundred years ago, at a fictitious time when a young child ascends to the throne. It presents the confused and exploratory perceptions of the child King himself as he participates in a series of large state occasions and encounters for the first time a court determined to maintain the status quo.
In the complete cycle a developing narrative also underscores this set of character pieces. After an opening piece that depicts our fictitious state at its most self-serving and corrupt (His Majesty’s Customs and Excise), the next five movements present memories from the future King’s early childhood. When it becomes clear that his father will shortly die, he is introduced for the first time to the machinery of state (movements seven to ten). He encounters the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) and various departments of the Royal Household: His Majesty’s Livery and Regalia, and – in a tour-de-force for this particular ensemble – His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts. The prince is crowned King, inheriting a country about to go to war.
In the second half of the work, we begin to sense the isolation that comes with the King’s new responsibilities, particularly in The Lady Clerk’s Reproach and Throne II. Despite consoling himself with music, luxurious living and trips to his country retreat, he becomes aware that something is seriously wrong (His Majesty’s Retreat II). His final act of resistance is to abdicate (Best Intentions) and he leaves the court (Law). The final movement, Broken Consort, no longer presents the slightly skewed, heightened impressions of the young King, but a picture of the court without him: yet we do not know whether his departure from the Royal Household is a form of release for him, or whether it indicates something more sinister.
Listeners will be struck by the varied handling of the instrumentation, evoking the vivid impressions of childhood, and references to other music that the child has no way of knowing, creating a situation, like in a Jane Austen novel, where the audience is in a better position to understand what is really going on than the main protagonist. The idea of composing hidden messages into the music was prompted by the transcriptions of sixteenth-century vocal music that His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts play in their concerts, where it is almost possible to hear speaking in the music. In some cases I have made covert transcriptions of my own vocal works; in other movements, works by other composers have been stripped down and then recomposed. Following the model of Schumann’s piano cycles, clues are also hidden in motivic connections between apparently unrelated movements.
The composer, Martyn Harry, writes about his piece:
At His Majesty’s Pleasure is a suite of twenty-one short movements scored for “royal consort” – four cornetts, four sagbutts, harpsichord and organ. The provenance of His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts’ name emboldened me to create my own portrait of Royal life. At His Majesty’s Pleasure is a surreal, regal homage to Robert Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. Generally speaking, each movement depicts a department or member of the Royal Household roughly five hundred years ago, at a fictitious time when a young child ascends to the throne. It presents the confused and exploratory perceptions of the child King himself as he participates in a series of large state occasions and encounters for the first time a court determined to maintain the status quo.
In the complete cycle a developing narrative also underscores this set of character pieces. After an opening piece that depicts our fictitious state at its most self-serving and corrupt (His Majesty’s Customs and Excise), the next five movements present memories from the future King’s early childhood. When it becomes clear that his father will shortly die, he is introduced for the first time to the machinery of state (movements seven to ten). He encounters the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) and various departments of the Royal Household: His Majesty’s Livery and Regalia, and – in a tour-de-force for this particular ensemble – His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts. The prince is crowned King, inheriting a country about to go to war.
In the second half of the work, we begin to sense the isolation that comes with the King’s new responsibilities, particularly in The Lady Clerk’s Reproach and Throne II. Despite consoling himself with music, luxurious living and trips to his country retreat, he becomes aware that something is seriously wrong (His Majesty’s Retreat II). His final act of resistance is to abdicate (Best Intentions) and he leaves the court (Law). The final movement, Broken Consort, no longer presents the slightly skewed, heightened impressions of the young King, but a picture of the court without him: yet we do not know whether his departure from the Royal Household is a form of release for him, or whether it indicates something more sinister.
Listeners will be struck by the varied handling of the instrumentation, evoking the vivid impressions of childhood, and references to other music that the child has no way of knowing, creating a situation, like in a Jane Austen novel, where the audience is in a better position to understand what is really going on than the main protagonist. The idea of composing hidden messages into the music was prompted by the transcriptions of sixteenth-century vocal music that His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts play in their concerts, where it is almost possible to hear speaking in the music. In some cases I have made covert transcriptions of my own vocal works; in other movements, works by other composers have been stripped down and then recomposed. Following the model of Schumann’s piano cycles, clues are also hidden in motivic connections between apparently unrelated movements.
Tickets available via www.ticketsoxford.com
