Resonance

      I was honoured when Tim and Hilary Reynish commissioned me to write a second piece in memory of their son William. I intended it as a contrast to L’homme armé: Variations – more contemplative and personal. It was written for the Ithaca College Wind Ensemble who gave the premiere under Tim’s direction in Ithaca, New York on April 27, 2006.

    Resonance is divided into two main sections. The first uses thematic fragments arranged in their own ‘orbits’. At each appearance they inter-react with each other and evolve. The second section moves back in time to reveal the whole theme in its original form, a simple hymn-like tune. After three variations, material from both sections combines in a brief coda.

    Resonance is abstract music; there is no programme. However prior to and during the composition process, fleeting, disconnected images and events from New Zealand’s past kept coming to mind. Here are some of them:

• Waves of English missionaries descending upon the North Island intent on rapid conversion of the Maori population.

• The time of the prophets, their writings a vivid amalgam of Victorian Christianity and Polynesian warrior culture – attempts to make sense of the upheaval of colonisation.

• Mission schools built in clearings in the forest: contemporary accounts describe the volume of birdsong as so intense that lessons sometimes had to be abandoned.

• The exquisite sound of a solitary tui or korimako in the forest, like a pale echo of the past.

• According to Maori belief the voices of the ancestors are heard as birdsong.

• My own ancestor in a small mission school in the forest. Did his attention ever drift from the faces of his students to memories of his youth back in rural England?

Christopher Marshall
Orlando, Florida, 2007

Instrumentation: Wind Ensemble/Symphonic Band

Duration: ±11"

Difficulty: Grade 4.5