SYMPHONY No. 3
(Dark Forest — Monument & Reflections)

A compelling nature-connected musical narrative…

This symphony has about it a certain rather lean and gaunt character, having a strong sense of narrative — of telling a compelling story —, so that it feels to be unusually 'horizontal' for a work calling itself a symphony.

It's an expansion of Monument and Reflections, a flute-and-piano work, written as a crude sketch in 1978, which was conceived as little more than a play with ostinatos and an experiment in relating together two exotic scales, the first of which is a sad Japanese-sounding one and the second a curious and very colourful scale which can be full of darkness and menace, which bears the distinction of having a flattened second note, a sharpened sixth and a missing seventh.

Despite its being written at that stage for just flute and piano, what emerged was my most symphonic and organically conceived work up to that time. Its title was with me from the start, and I sought to convey the sense of reflections both pictorially, as reflections in some deep dark lake, and in the reflective spirit of certain sections. The monument of the title was never intended to be specified or physically represented; it merely indicated something of the essence of the whole work.

However, during the orchestration and associated elaboration of the work a vision emerged of mysterious shadows and spirits in dark northern forests, which resulted in the new title for the symphony. But then in the light of a more recent understanding of the background of the work's inner content, I amalgamated the two titles for the symphony; both of them are just too pertinent for one to be abandoned in favour of the other. In producing the symphony from the original work I retained and adapted the prominent piano role.

Thus no doubt the odd tedious musical commentator / critic would say it isn't a symphony but a piano concerto — and of course a pretty poor example even of that! But, to the devil with all those categorizers, and let's simply be carried along by this music's urgent narrative!

As for Monument and Reflections as it now exists — this has been produced by taking the original, rather crude and sketchy piece and incorporating various improvements that were made during composition of the Third Symphony. Even though it would be listed as 'chamber music', it's still a symphony at heart, as it always was. Although the flute and piano duo is the original version, in my view the most effective version of this chamber work is the trio for flute, clarinet and piano.

I avoid setting out to express my own emotions in music. In my experience all fields of art work better when the artistic creator follows the inner logic intrinsic in the starting materials of a piece. If a fire burns within the creator, then, without any attempt to express emotions, fire will be in his art and it will inspire higher and deeper emotions and visions than the pathetic animal emotions of one insignificant mortal in one transient life upon this little world.

In the case of my 3rd Symphony a disturbing quality has emerged, which wasn't of my original choosing, and which some listeners find difficult to come to terms with. As I experienced the symphony, it seemed to carry a burden of some deep loneliness and suffering that wasn't of this lifetime of mine.

The burden of this work is such that its 'positive' ending feels like no more than a distant dawn light, seeming to reflect a resolution that is longed for rather than yet experienced, and it's necessary for the listener to move on to other works (or indeed areas of one's life) to find that resolution.

Although I've hinted at some sort of past life experience(s) being implicated in the background to this symphony*, I urge people not to go making the simplistic sort of statement that I've already seen posted in public about it — that it's about particular past life experiences of mine. That is a very limited and limiting view of music that should really be allowed to mean all manner of things to all manner of people. I'm not saying at all that this symphony is 'about' one thing or another, but I'm simply giving some pointers to how I've experienced the music as I produced it, and to a way that it could be experienced by some other people. All truly inspired art is liable to draw on experiences that are deep within the artist's consciousness, without him ever seeking to produce works 'about' these things.

The Symphony is headed with these (provisional) lines:

You, among dark forest shadows in the Arctic winter night;

You, lone wolf, wandering, searching, running, running from dream to dream;

Was it yours, the howl to the moon from forest clearing, which I caressed in the unseen baleful vastness of the winter night?

Was it you who stared into my eyes in the umbrous depths of forest lake,

And in them saw reflections upon reflections of past lives to which you can never return?

Were the dreams yours that I shared, of dawn choruses echoing from a land you are destined never to find?

I, dear friend, am the spirit of the forest depths where only souls and memories reside.

I, too, am restless with dreams this winter night:

Dreams of the dark spirits in their multitudes whispering -

Whispering of the mysteries of the forthcoming spring…

The following section titles, really belonging to Monument and Reflections, the original flute-and-piano work, are a late afterthought, and are purely for the benefit of newcomers to the work who want some sort of guide to start them off; they don't reflect an original plan, programme or interpretation of the work at the time of composition. These sections still exist in the symphony, with one addition (No. 7), though their 'meaning' has become more ambiguous.

It's worth particularly noting the opening melodic motif of the symphony and its recurrences at odd points in the work in different forms and contexts. As I experience it upon listening to the work, that motif functions without my bidding as possibly the only 'leitmotif' in my whole musical oeuvre. It seems to speak of a hero who's found himself in a bizarre world in which he is completely disconnected from, and can't even remember, whatever he was supposed or destined to be a hero about!

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1. Reflections 1a (By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept)

2. Darkness 1

3. Reflections 1b

4. Darkness 2 (There was a great darkness over the earth) — groping for light

5. Reflections 2 — to be played as though the music might die at any moment

6. Storm

7. Dreaming of heroes and dawn choruses (this section in the symphony only)

8. Darkness 3 (Darkness is drunk in its own glory)

9. Reflections 3 (Longings! Longings! Longings!)

10. The transfigured night (Mother Nature transforms winter into spring)

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