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Dr Peter Kalve
12-21-2005, 10:56 AM
<center><table border=1><tr><td>http://www.notation.com/discus/icons/attachment_icon.gifElegy for Clarinet and Strings
Elegy.not (http://www.notation.com/discus/messages/35939/Elegy-27762.not) (296.0 k)</td></tr></table></center>

This is a pastoral elegy for clarinet and strings - I wrote it last month, far too quickly, originally as an exercise in the genre: as such, it is, I must admit, a bit unbalanced and unpolished. Two slow outer movements, with a rhapsodic English pastoral type of piece stuck in the middle. The outer movements sound too much like the opening of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, and the middle section sounds like a poor imitation of Vaughan Williams with a hangover!

I live in a old stone-clad-cottaged English village (Moulton, in rural Northamptonshire), and so I don't really apologise for writing an English pastoral. From my study window as I type this on a crisp Tuesday morning, I can hear dunnocks and sparrows singing outside, and a robin is looking at me from a fence. And beyond the fence, between the stone cottages, I can see a patchwork of brown and green fields, waiting for the spring to come and stir them like a spoon in tea. Yes such places do still exist.

So why an elegy? Well, although I wrote it originally as an exercise in the genre, I conceived of it it ultimately as an anthem for a time that seems past for me now - perhaps for I am beginning to feel old. Ooer!

Be it as it may be - the piece is dedicated to my beautiful 14 year old daughter, Rosemary, who is, more and more, becoming an English rose.

Mark Walsen (markwa)
12-21-2005, 03:43 PM
Hello Peter,

This piece definitely invokes English pastoral imagery.

The brief excursion into mixed tonality in the middle section felt isolated to me rather than integrated. However, such a composition device is certainly legitimate. (I particularly enjoy hearing the opposite in pieces that have complex tonality and then briefly make an excursion in simple tonality.) In this brief dischordant portion of the piece, you've reminded your daughter that she's heard stranger 12-tone compositions sounding through the walls of your study.

Cheers
-- Mark