Scottish Music Centre - Catalogue

Programme Note

This concerto for viola and large orchestra celebrates the life and musicianship of Charlie Maguire. I first met Charlie when, as an adolescent, I was having a piece rehearsed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (then the Light Orchestra). He as leader of the violas played a short solo passage consisting only of two notes a tone apart, repeated a number of times, and after the rehearsal he consulted me about its interpretation. I was amazed by the amount of passion he managed to inject into those two simple notes, and it opened my eyes and ears in ways which have been invaluable to me since then. (This episode is the basis of bars 90-112.) Many many other self-quotations and a few quotations of other composers are included throughout the concerto, most of them associated with Charlie in some way : for example, he may have been involved in the first performance of the piece quoted, or the piece might have been written especially for him. In particular, the music returns again and again to a little tune which is taken from the viola part of a string quartet, my earlier response to hearing of the terrible and untimely loss of this wonderful man (see the list below).
The solo part is crowded with both original and quoted material, at the same time by turns leading or responding to the dense orchestral tissue, in which it is always embedded as a collaborator, never an antagonist. This mercurial side of the concerto reflects the nature of the man himself, but it is not the whole story. Underlying the music and helping to shape it is a large harmonic structure in which I use in sequence every 4-note chord possible within the Western chromatic system : there are 165 of them! This is controlled by a vastly extended passacaglia bass which, while not discernable to the ear, is helpfully self-quoted by the soloist in speeded up form near the beginning and near the end. All that solid theoretical background is a reflection of the bedrock of experience and knowledge underlying Charlie's love of music.
Emotionally, the music has its dark as well as its light moments, because Charlie was nothing if not complex. His sunny nature had its spells of adverse weather! Yet, either way, unflagging energy and a sense of enjoyment of music and music-making were constant in Charlie's life. I hope I've managed to capture a tiny part of this, and set it down as my way of saying that we remember Charlie Maguire, with love, with gratitude, and with the one thing he would have appreciated above all : music!