John Woolrich’s Arcangelo
On 1 March 2003 at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Arcangelo by John Woolrich received its premiere. Commissioned by AAM to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the birth of Arcangelo Corelli, the new work will be performed at eight venues across England, taking in Birmingham, Reading, Southampton, Guildford, Cambridge, Nottingham, London and Truro. This new piece comes fifty years after that milestone of English music — Tippett’s Fantasia on a theme of Corelli — was commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival to celebrate Corelli’s 300th anniversary.
Born in Cirencester in 1954, John Woolrich read English at Manchester University before studying composition at Lancaster with Edward Cowie. He has since been active in teaching composition and encouraging the performance and recording of new work: he has lectured at London and Reading universities, the Guildhall School of Music and at Dartington International Summer School; he founded the Composers Ensemble which has commissioned and premiered over 200 works and, in 1998, he started the Hoxton New Music Days, a highly-successful festival of experimental and avant-garde music. Since 2000, he has been Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where as New Music Fellow at Kettle’s Yard he devises the new music concert series.
John Woolrich’s music is inextricably bound up with the past. He is passionate about the relationship between contemporary music and the avowed masterpieces of the past. Music is, and always will be, in direct contact with what has gone before. His new work, Arcangelo, finds him ‘both reacting to the sound of a period orchestra and also dealing with the idea of another composer’s music, which is perfectly conventional. Music is rarely just about itself, it tends to be about something else and the thing it is mostly about is other music. There is no music that doesn’t relate, in some way, to other music. There are all sorts of levels at which a composer can engage with another composer’s music, and its very hard to imagine that not happening in any way at all. For example, Mozart reacted to Bach in terms of writing out string trio arrangements of Bach fugues and writing preludes in the style of Bach for those fugues, then letting the counterpoint get into his string quartets. It is in the tradition of composing.’
There are many examples in Woolrich’s catalogue. Monteverdi is the motive force behind Ulysses Awakes; the Viola Concerto reveals six allusions to arias (by Mozart, Monteverdi, Wagner etc.) that separate its main sections, while the Oboe Concerto — a BBC Proms commission — is quasi-Baroque in its alternation between solo and tutti passages. Working with period instruments, Arcangelo develops the latter’s idea of the oboe timbre by including three oboes, and using them together in one of three blocks, the others being a concertante group of two solo violins with cello and the main body of strings, in addition to the harpsichord continuo.
It is not the first time that Woolrich has composed for period instruments. In 1991, for the South Bank’s Mozart Now festival, in honour of the bicentenary of Mozart’s death, Woolrich wrote The theatre represents a garden: night for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. This work makes particular use of old horns, although only the first of its 60 or so performances was on early instruments: as ever, Woolrich’s works are intended to be equally playable on modern instruments. Subsequently there have also been two works for the viol ensemble Fretwork.
The nature of these period instruments does make a difference, enhancing ‘the tang of how the sound is produced’. As Stravinsky remarked, ‘you can taste the oboe reeds and smell the rosin in Bach’s orchestral scores’ — and the same goes for Corelli. However, Arcangelo ‘won’t sound Baroque, but you write in the grain of the ensemble. Some things it does well, so you find in your own music what would fit that well and, conversely, you don’t do things that wouldn’t work.’ Such pragmatism informs Woolrich’s craft as a composer, which here also includes a theme made up from the letters of the title, in the same way as Dmitri Shostakovich often used a motif drawn from the principal letters of his name, DSCH (D–E flat–C–B natural). In this instance, Woolrich adheres to Honegger’s system of assigning pitches to letters so that the word ARCANGELO becomes the sequence A–F flat–C–A–A sharp–G–E–F sharp–C flat).
In fact Woolrich has mined something different from Corelli than Tippett’s predilection for slow dissonant movements, from which he created his specific sound world for the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Corelli Fantasia. For Woolrich it was not a question of ‘going for the notes — I haven’t taken the tunes and put them upside down or anything like that — but rather I have taken what in my music is reflected in Corelli’s: particularly the episodic structure.’ This ‘shaggy dog story tradition is akin in literature to works like The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. My favourite novel is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where you are being taken on the longest journey between two points, and it was the rather similar shaggy suite — like structure in Corelli’s concerti grossi that appealed, alternating slow-fast-slow. There is common material utilised throughout Arcangelo, but the music is episodic, with sharply contrasted tempos and colours: like being made out of contrasting panels.’
Woolrich does not disguise the change between contrasting panels: the edges within the musical mosaic have not been smoothed. The score is full of echoes and blocks of sound, opening with bright and rhythmic raucous oboes, loud at the top of the register, packing a punch, with the concertante group and strings soon adding their distinctive rhythmic stamp. However, the forceful start is not reflected at the end as, after the oboes’ wilful final utterance, the music slows and pares away, leaving only oscillating chords on the main string orchestra.
Article based on a programme note and interview by Nick Breckenfield