Benedicite

About

This work arose as a creative response to the early phases of the lockdown in Great Britain occasioned by the planet-wide pandemic of COVID-19. I was hunting through the psalter used at the church in which I had sung as a choirboy, trying to find a particular chant that was haunting me. Eventually I realized that this was a fabrication emerging from memories of the singing I had done for many years as a young teenager. In the course of working to evoke — but with instruments — the joyful memories of singing, I also recalled early formative encounters with 20th-century orchestral music, particularly Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra which was a selected work in my GCE 'A-level' syllabus. Bartók's second movement cunningly plays with instrumental pairs moving in strict intervallic relationships, a technique I have explored with diverse pairings of the instruments from the two balancing quintets.