October (Ian Gardiner): Between Worlds - Orchestrating the Universe

Welcoming Ian Gardiner - orchestrator extraordinaire - who gives us the inside track on the making of The Silent Planet — a bold collaboration that brings Holst’s The Planets back down to Earth and its roots in folk music and out again into a whole new orchestral world...

Hallmark LP HMA207, Holst’s Planets Suite played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, was the first long-playing disc I bought, and, as far as I remember, cost 79p from Woolworths. Its sleeve design set multicoloured Spirograph traceries against a space-black background. I listened to it countless, countless times, sometimes trying to follow the music on the Hawkes Pocket Score borrowed from the local library, and soaking up every tiny detail in sound and on the page. It’s music now wholly ingrained in my subconscious . . . but also similarly embedded in broader culture, through its melodies recast as hymns and pop songs, its frequent excerpting for TV title and incidental music, and the equally frequent pilfering of its soundworld and ideas by composers of epic orchestral film scores post-Star Wars. It’s one of those classical pieces that guarantees a sell-out audience, always in the top 10 of the Classic FM Hall of Fame.

Holst wrote for a huge orchestra of around 90 players, and while there have been many arrangements of the suite for other forces, maybe none have been as radical a re-invention as Will and Delia’s – reducing the music down to a percussion and melodeon/harmonica duo. When we were first discussing the Silent Planet project, and to give me a sense of their ambition for it, they sent through their version of another monument of 20^th century British classical music, Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.

What they had created was both respectful and irreverent, with its folk-influenced melodies singing through with authentic poignancy and vigour, an extraordinary palette of sounds, textures and dynamics from just two players, and instantaneous changes of style and register from section to section, rather like very rapid costume changes. In short, there was so much for an orchestrator and arranger to respond to and to highlight (and in fact, after Silent Planet, I created a string orchestra arrangement around this Lark Ascending adaptation for a performance with Sinfonia Cymru).

This was the model for the collaboration. Delia and Will devised and recorded fully rendered duo versions of each of their four chosen Planets, as well as the new Earth movement, around which the orchestral arrangement was then moulded, using a chamber orchestra a third of the size of Holst’s but retaining some of its characteristic instrumentation, including solo woodwinds, horns, harp, timpani, and what Holst designated a ‘tenor tuba’, more universally known as a euphonium.

Jupiter was the first movement that they completed, and although Holst’s original itself travels through a compendium of styles – from heroic flourishes and fanfares, end-of-the-pier music hall number, through a village clog dance to noble, solemn Edwardiana – Stevens and Pound’s remix unfolded a sequence of episodes at high energy, recasting melodies through various folk dance forms, or something akin to electronic dance music, or something perhaps vaguely Balkan-inspired.

I was immediately struck by its middle panel, a rendition of the famous ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ theme stripped of its hauteur, as a desolate harmonica solo over bowed vibraphone notes hanging in the air. This evoked for me a cinematic vision of the World War I trenches, reminding that Holst wrote The Planets at the same time as the War, and although he would later deny any connection – pointing out, for example, that Mars, the Bringer of War was written before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 – it does lie as a kind of veiled presence, a shadow behind the whole piece. For this section all I needed to add was a little perspective to the landscape, through distant trumpet calls, deep rumbles from the percussion, and fragments of Holst’s original treatment.

For each of the movements of The Silent Planet, the first step was to transcribe their duo recording into notation - not always straightforward because both Delia and Will revel in the liveness, the ‘in the moment’ decisions in their adaptations. Delia starts from the score of the piece, but then commits it all to memory; Will doesn’t use notation, learning the whole piece as it is devised and rehearsed; and both are likely to spring spontaneous variations into every playthrough. So transcription involved not just writing down the notes, rhythms, bars, tempos, structure correctly, but also deciding which of these elements are ‘fixed’ and which are ‘loose’, finding ways to integrate that flexibility into the architecture of the pieces, and finding the spaces around, above, below and between to locate the orchestra.

Across all four movements I looked for moments where I might reintroduce glimpses of the original, sometimes interpolating direct quotations in the familiar voice of Holst’s orchestration, rather like portals in and out of the original piece. As much as it seeks to reinvent The Planets, the Silent Planet is also often a dialogue, a discourse with this classic piece. 

Working out how to notate Will and Delia’s parts also involved identifying which instrument and how it was being played. Even though I have a background as a percussionist, some of Delia’s playing techniques and instruments were tricky to pin down: a guitar placed horizontally and thrashed with a side drum stick; panpipe-style blowing across the resonator tubes of the vibraphone; rhythmic splatting of all the keys of a toy piano simultaneously; and what I thought might have been a jaw’s harp turned out to a wonderful springy contraption called a ‘helix bowl’; etc, etc. I knew that Will was playing a conch shell in Mars, but how was he obtaining those disturbing percussive breath sounds? It was also important to consider how to allow space and support for all the duo’s distinctive sounds and textures to speak above the orchestra, particularly allowing for the gamut of dynamics from the most delicate (as in Venus) to the most headbanging (the ‘Emerson, Lake and Palmer’ groove in Mercury!).

Once fully transcribed this duo text then provided the skeleton for the orchestral score, and I started to sketch in the empty spaces. Orchestration involves not just the selection of appropriate sounds and colours for the specific moment, it also has to communicate the contour of the piece, to realise the shape and narrative - saving up for the big moments, finding vivid and distinctive sonorities for quieter episodes, looking for edit points in the structure to integrate contrasts in texture and timbre . . . and in the case of the Stevens & Pound arrangements, tuning into the rapid and playful changes of style, bouncing from a Morris dance, a slip jig, Quebecois clog dance, bluegrass, to metal, New York minimalism, space age exotica, contemporary classical, as well as undefinable mixes of all (or none) of the above.

I love this part of the arranging process, drawing out these references through orchestral styles and idioms, making them more specific or explicit, and also undertaking some research – what and how do bluegrass fiddle players play, and how can I translate that for a classical string orchestra??

Once the full orchestration was drafted, then the duo’s original recording was melded with a virtual orchestra performance of my score via my notation software, tracked in synch to the tempos of the recording – to act as a demo, first for comments from Will & Delia (very few amendments, and lots of positive feedback and excitement!), and then as a rehearsal tape for them to relearn and practice these pieces in the light of what I’ve placed into the orchestra. Will has spoken about this process in a previous blogpost here.

Even though I’ve created a clear sonic emulation of what it should sound like in the concert hall, the first rehearsal is where all is revealed, and where the balance and alignment between orchestra and soloists is fine-tuned with the help of conductor Clark Rundell. I sit in the stalls, head buried in the score, and ears fully extended to spot anything that needs adjustment . . . but it all sounds good, actually it all sounds amazing, with Will and Delia in the driving seat and sparking similar energy from the orchestra.

What would Holst make of this reworking of his piece? I think he would identify just how robust his musical conception has been, its melodies and ideas, its brilliant and lucid orchestration, the strong characterisation in mood for each movement. And he would appreciate the playfulness of the approach, where his self-penned folk tunes receive folk-inspired retelling and recasting. But above all, his interest in nature and the metaphysical, his pacifism and compassion, would connect with the conception of The Silent Planet, to use his most celebrated piece to draw us into the contemplation of our own planet and its future.

www.iangardinermusic.com