When I was learning my trade in the 1980s, in between writing music for Not
the Nine o’Clock News and Blackadder, I spent a year or two composing for
Wayne Sleep’s live stage show Dash and on the BBC television series The Hot
Shoe Show, both projects riding the crest of a wave of dance popularity that
included Flashdance, Fame and, eventually, Dirty Dancing.
I enjoyed the interaction with dancers enormously - they worked more intensely
and exhaustingly than any other artists I had encountered - but they were a
different breed from us musicians, and it was a standard gag among us that
choreographers would without exception introduce every routine with a
“5-6-7-8” count-in, even if the subsequent piece of music was a waltz
(1-2-3) or some other metre that didn’t add up to eight beats. They’d ask
composers to chop four bars here, add 16½ there, speed up, slow down or
change the instrumentation, or - without embarrassment - ask for it to sound
“like something else”. Yet what seemed like indecisiveness or a cavalier
attitude turned out to be a genuinely stimulating difference of approach.
They might plan a move, but find that with real bodies, everything looked
awkward, so reshape the choreography there and then. Composers, on the other
hand, tend to mould things in their heads beforehand - building the
architecture of a piece longer than a three-minute song is a cerebral, often
private activity, not a communal, improvisatory one. Dance, though, demands
more of its active participants in its creation - it isn’t even like a jazz
improvisation, since in jazz the point is to go on improvising and changing,
whereas in dance there comes a moment in rehearsal when it gels into an
agreed, more or less final form. Choreographers push their composers because
they demand so much of themselves and their dancers.
I’ve never been able to dance myself - most organists, like me, direct their
body’s rhythm in a very different way to their feet, operating an
independent keyboard of the toes and heels, and find the adjustment to dance
extremely difficult. But I began to relish the demands placed upon me as
composer, despite the fact that, in the case of Dash and The Hot Shoe Show
at least, the music was a junior partner to the dance. I ended up with great
respect for the dance community, but bewildered as to how great composers
had combined being original in their music with the need to keep
choreographers happy. Prokofiev’s startling Romeo and Juliet score and
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with its layering of deliberately incompatible
rhythms, seemed like near-impossible feats to pull off.
Twenty years later, dance came back into my creative orbit, and those
questions about musical versus choreographic structure raised their heads
with a new urgency, because the piece I was to create with London Musici and
Rambert Dance Company’s Mark Baldwin was a Requiem for choir, soloists,
orchestra and dancers.
Mark’s previous work for the company of which he is artistic director was
Constant Speed, a piece celebrating Einstein’s landmark mathematical
propositions. When I first saw it, I did panic somewhat at the sheer
velocity, athleticism and visual energy that characterised the Rambert
dancers in it. How could a Requiem, based on the Latin word meaning peace or
rest, find common cause with this breathlessly dynamic choreography? In the
event, the source of the commission and the method we found of collaborating
provided ample answers, and it now seems to me a natural process, though I
didn’t feel so confident a year ago, when this all began.
The vital link between Rambert and this new Requiem is its associate
orchestra, London Musici, which wanted a commission to mark its 20th
anniversary. The idea was to bring together Musici’s two closest artistic
relationships – with Rambert and with the choir of Christ Church Cathedral,
Oxford, with which it annually performs a Passion oratorio. The artistic
director, Mark Stephenson, instigated the project, asking me to write a
combined choral-orchestral and dance work.
For a while, I had wanted to write something that addressed the tragedy of
interrupted lives – that looked into the abyss that accompanies the loss of
someone before their time. No sooner had I accepted the Musici commission
than music for such a Requiem began flooding into my head, prompted in part
by events in public life and closer to home. Normally, at this point, I’d
transcribe the piece onto the page as it flowed out, but this time there was
the dance to consider, so I put the music in my head into a holding pattern
and began a series of revealing conceptual conversations with Baldwin, the
choreographer, Paul Hoskins, the music director, and Michael Howells, the
production designer, about the piece’s intended direction, emotional subtext
and character. These conversations changed the nature of the music as it
played in a loop in my head.
In a musical, any of the individual components - song, dance, play, design -
can be subject to revision, omission or relocation should the plot or the
characterisation demand it. Unlike with opera, the music is as much a
moveable feast as anything else, so the enterprise is profoundly democratic,
all, theoretically at least, serving the needs of the plot. But this
narrative imperative is a feature neither of most contemporary dance nor of
sacred choral music, so how were we to fashion a viable dance Requiem out of
the two? Eternal Light premieres at the Lowry, Salford, on Thursday before
touring nationally We talked about the essence of the Requiem, what it might
mean to a modern audience, how it might be expressed physically, what might
be interpreted from the often apocalyptic imagery of the liturgical Mass for
the Dead, and kept coming back to a Latin phrase in it, “lux aeterna” –
eternal light. Both designer and choreographer wanted to flood the stage
with incandescent light, to create a pool in which the dancers would appear
to be leaving their bodies, like souls, driving toward the final movement,
In Paradisum. From this germ of an idea came many rewards – the leitmotif of
a bird throughout, perhaps representing the departing soul, or the angels of
the Apocalypse (for two movements quoting the Book of Revelation), angels of
deliverance (the central movement, Dies Irae: In Flanders Fields, places
hell firmly on earth, amid the terror of war) or, finally, a bird of
paradise. Connected to this was a broader landscape of what loss might
entail. We agreed that both music and dance should attempt to express a
sense of interrupted life, of the numbness of grief, of the naturalness of
renewal, but that loss was felt differently by everyone and that there are
no easy platitudes about grief nor facile words of comfort.
In the slipstream of these discussions, the music in my head began to
transform into something more patterned and layered, more suggestive than
affirmative, emphasising humanity rather than judgment. Other elements were
gathered in - thousands of Swarovski crystals to throw the already dazzling
light around the space, a spectacular human-sized bird design with a
disconcertingly lifelike headpiece, designed by the famous milliner Stephen
Jones, and the integration of English poems, juxtaposed with the Latin words
to illuminate or revisit the traditional movements of a Requiem.
While the dance needed some moments of speed in the music (not a quality often
associated with Requiems), Baldwin was adamant that the ethereal nature of
much of the music was something he should emulate with the floating, soaring
bodies of his dancers. Rhythmic synchronicity is in any case a misleading
assumption when fitting music to dance and vice versa – the pulse of the
music does not need to be fast for the dancers’ feet to be moving fast, nor
does a “slow” movement in music necessarily mean slow dancing.
Any nerves I may have had about seeing the first rehearsals of the danced
piece were unfounded. What unfolded seemed to me totally at one with the
musical and textual elements I had been working on. It was as if the two
components of music and dance had been born from the same cells. And not a
“5-6-7-8” to be heard.
