Two Ladies

3.3.3.3 4.3.3.1 Timp. 2Perc. Pno. Hp. Strings (14.12.10.8.6) Audio is available by request.

Programme Note

1. Violet (after Dorothy) c. 4 minutes

2. David, His Wife and Jasper (Stacey) c. 5 minutes

The two movements may be played together or as individual pieces.

This work consists of two short movements, which were written between 2015 and 2018. These movements focus on different characters from books which all involve, what I call, an ‘almost’ reality. A reality which is slightly altered from our own or one that is transformed by an event or another character in a magical or peculiar way.

Dorothy is an iconic character. This movement is not based on that Dorothy, but rather a character from Augusten Burroughs’ memoir ‘Running with Scissors’. Both Dorothys arrive in a gust of wind (one physical, one metaphorical) and change the world they enter. Everyone’s lives begin to alter and things run awry in ways they have never done before. The two Dorothys similarities end there. Their odysseys take very different paths, and they turn into inverted images of each other by the time they reach the end of their own paths, or yellow brick roads. The character arcs of these women, lead me to another character, named Violet. Taking the initial sketches of Dorothy, I plotted this new character’s musical path, and thus, Violet (after Dorothy) came into existence. In Violet, I explore the ‘almost reality’ in the most cartoonish of ways, creating a comic book journey between different sounds and intensities. After an initial escalation, the music starts weighing itself down more and more, until eventually individual lines start to break free, running wild and unsupervised around the orchestra, until the music reaches bursting point.

Part of Dorothy was workshopped by the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, under Christopher Austin in 2015, and Violet (after Dorothy) was workshopped by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2018, François-Xavier Roth.

David, His Wife and Jasper are a family, and the main characters in Andrew Kaufman’s short story The Tiny Wife. These people, their relationships, and the world in which they exist are the players in the narrative of this movement. David, His Wife and Jasper (Stacey) is a story, a context and perhaps a moment shown from the angle of the mother and wife of the family, Stacey. The piece is abstract yet programmatic, expressive yet strict, dark and light, and, most importantly, intrinsically linked to the original texts brevity and my reaction to the magical, yet real, story. Starting from a similar place as Violet, but taking a drastically different and controlled path, we see a character shrink until the world is completely altered, and the purpose and importance of gestures are flipped and played with, much like a child with a new toy.

David, His Wife and Jasper was written for the London Symphony Orchestra through the LSO Discovery Panufnik Composers Scheme, supported by the Helen Hamlyn Trust, and premiered at LSO St. Lukes under François-Xavier Roth on 20th April 2017.

Liam Mattison (London, March 2018)