Music: De Profundis - Note Mine

De Profundis - Note Mine
John Wallace
For brass band and narrator
The Music Company (UK) Ltd.

Although best known as one of the World's finest trumpet players and former Principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, John Wallace CBE is also a composer of no mean ability. His latest work,
De Profundis - Note Mine, commissioned by East Neuk Festival, was given its first performance on 1 July at The Bowhouse Farm, St. Monans, Anstruther, by an augmented Tullis Russell Mills Band (in which both he and his father once played). This truly innovative work was based on an idea by the Festival's artistic director, Svend McEwan-Brown, and was intended as a tribute and a memorial to generations of local miners, who endured unimaginable conditions and dangers deep underground every day of their working lives.

This 'Note Mine' was created by John Wallace in collaboration with his tubist colleague Tony George, who directed the first performance, and incorporates the poetry of Joe Currie and Edward Purdie. It is what may be described as 'an immersive experience’; the audience enters the performance area in almost total darkness as the band plays phrases in free time. The band is divided into four sections spaced around the audience, so the listeners are enveloped by sound from the start. After the doors are closed, the music dies down and an actor reads a short poem evoking the depths and profound silence of a coalmine. This is followed by the band playing a very slow, solemn arrangement of Sir Henry Walford Davies's setting of De Profundis (the Latin version of Psalm 130 - ‘Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord’).

After this, a recording of the song of a blackbird is heard along with another poem written in Scottish dialect - Merle on a Rowan. The band then improvises, seeking to imitate the song of the bird, which is followed by the De Profundis chant played in the manner of Hebridean free psalm singing. The next section involves another dialect poem, The Image o' God, whilst the band produces eerie breathing and clicking noises from the instruments. Next comes Walford Davies's melody in jig style and involving a musical Mexican wave, which travels through the band from top to bottom and back again.

The final section is, however, soft and mysterious in reference to the 'deep silence' below ground.
While some may find it challenging, this bold and imaginative work takes a brass band audience out of its familiar comfort zone and into an experience, the like of which few will have ever encountered before.

DR. RODNEY NEWTON

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