Wounding Dart
Written For Rolf Hind & Joby Burgess

Wounding Dart was written during the CoMA Contemporary Music Festival Summer School held at Doncaster College, High Melton Campus (UK) between 20th and 26th of July 2008. I attended a course called 'borrowed materials' led by Michael Zev Gordon. The course is best summed up by the summer school's flyer:

"Borrowed Materials:
Transcription, transformation, quotation, collage, folk song, jazz, the classical past... this course explores the important role of borrowed materials in composition, and will help you to develop a new work to be performed by Rolf Hind and Joby Burgess towards the end of the course."

I decided to base my piece on the Dowland lute song Come Again! Sweet Love Doth Now Invite. (The score to Come Again can be downloaded by clicking the picture to the right.)

The piece was played in a workshop on the 24th July and first performed in concert by Rolf Hind and Joby Burgess on the 25th July 2008. The recording above is an extract from that performance.

If you would like to print or view the score, please click here. If you wish to purchase the score, please email me for a price list. Upon receipt of the fee, a PDF of the score will be emailed to the purchaser.

Recent Performances:
-(25/07/08) Doncaster College, High Melton Campus, South Yorkshire, UK. First performance by Rolf Hind & Joby Burgess at a lunchtime concert at CoMA Contemporary Music Festival Summer School.

Pointless facts
The piece was written in a very short space of time: mainly in the early hours of the morning between the 21st and 23rd July 2008. First ideas composed on the 21st were rejected. The main idea (now found in (bars 1-88) was composed in the early hours of the 22nd along with the first 4 bars of the slow middle section. The rest of the piece was written during the day of the 23rd and was completed at 2:30am on the 24th. Editing and typesetting took place on the 24th with the first draft completed ready to be workshoped at 2pm.

Analysis Part One

[Please note that if you have a copy of the score which which predates, the 28th of July, the bar numbers in the following analysis will not concord as time signatures have been adjusted. Bar numbers in red refer to the original score]

I thought I would post a full analysis here as I plan to submit the piece as part of my Mmus which requires a commentary.

In class, we had been given a folk melody and set the task of composing a piece in 20 minutes. It was during this task that I came up with the method of taking the melody from the first part of the folk tune and layering it note for note over the top of the second part to form two-note chords. I decided to do the same with the Dowland when composing Wounding Dart. I removed some of the repeated notes from both parts and ended up with the following:

Note that on the 'working staves' the green melody (which corresponds with the vocal line of the verse to Come Again!) is 19 notes long, and that the red melody (the vocal refrain from Come Again!) is 21 notes long. I copied and pasted these melody (with slurs to define their beginning and ends) until they repeated 399 notes later. They were then layered together to form a two-note chord 'pitch isorhythm' (see top stave of 'working'). The subtle differences between the piano score of Example 1 and the final score will be explained in due course.

I created a number sequence by working out the amount of quaver contained within each melody notes of the first phrase of the Dowland:

This gave me the pattern 3+1+8+4+4+4+6+2+8 which I planned to use throughout the piece. In the first draft of the piece the grouping and accents of the piano part employed this number sequence throughout the course of the whole isorhythmic pitch pattern:

etc.

The time signature were eventually adjusted (mainly to 2/4) to aid reading. In the final version the 6/8 and 2/8 bars were retained whilst the 3/8 and 1/8 bars were ironed out into 2/4 with appropriate accents to retain the original feel.

The drum line was also created using the number sequence, but this time backwards:

Note that the written accents following the number pattern but backwards. Also note that the snare drum and bass parts of the drum line appear to conform to parts of the number pattern when counting the hits and the gaps in between. I cannot remember the actual system but I think I applied number control rigorously and then adjusted the result according to intuition in order to make the line more musical.

As a result of using the pitch isorhythm outlined above, the piano part sounded a little too stable (an effect I didn't want). In order to disrupt the note rows, I used the number pattern to add chromaticism:

Example 5 shows how the final piano part compares to the original pitch isorhythm. Notes that are highlighted blue have been chromatically altered from the original isorhythm shown on the top stave. The choice of which notes to alter was determined by the note pattern: the distance between each highlighted note is 3+1+8+4+4+4+6+2+8 (thus following the original bar lines). This was continued throughout the isorhythmic pattern.

Go to Analysis Part two