Your cart

Total
NZD
Shipping and discount codes are added at checkout.

Work


Nocturne, Havrincourt 1918

for baritone saxophone and double bass

Year:  2017   ·  Duration:  10m

Year:  2017
Duration:  10m

Nigel Keay
Composer

Composer:   Nigel Keay

Films, Audio & Samples

Nigel Keay: Nocturne, Havri...

Embedded audio
See details ➔

Nigel Keay: Nocturne, Havri...

Embedded video
See details ➔
Sample Score

Sample: Pages 1 - 8 of score

See details ➔

Borrow/Hire:

To borrow items or hire parts please email SOUNZ directly at info@sounz.org.nz.

About

The idea of writing a work for baritone saxophone and double bass grew out of two separate meetings, firstly with Eric Tallet who had performed in a concert by the ensemble Traces d'Aujourd'hui where my piece Allusions for Clarinet had been on the programme. Eric suggested that I write something with baritone sax in it so I started to think about an instrumentation. Some weeks later, after hearing him playing in a concert, I met Will Cravy. We eventually had a discussion or two around the double bass's capabilities, and I rapidly began to imagine a duo of the two instruments. I launched into composing the duo in the autumn of 2017.

The Nocturne, as the title implies, is a single movement, and is episodic in nature. It's based loosely on variation form where melodic motifs evolve throughout. There's a constant dialogue between the two instruments with the two lines criss-crossing so that both function as bass and upper voice in the counterpoint.

As for the choice of Nocturne as a title, 2017 was a year in which some more family history came to light thanks to a first cousin once removed visiting Paris and connecting up. I learnt that my great uncle had been killed in action in France in the last months of World War 1, and that my grandfather had been wounded during this conflict, also in France. Nocturne is therefore a symbolic title, one that intends to encapsulate this dark period of the world's history. If this discovery was coincidental, it remains difficult to say the degree to which it affected the writing of the work. The two instruments with their low tessitura generate, rather naturally, an often sombre and sometimes turbulent ambience. This history might have provided fertile ground to create a programmatic piece, but even if staying fairly abstract I decided to give it the subtitle Havrincourt 1918 as away of documenting and thus keeping alive the memory of the events.


Dedication note

Dedicated to Eric Tallet and William McClain Cravy


Contents note

One movement - 'Maestoso'