Composing for COOP from Charles Turner
AMERICAN classical music! When COOP music director Lucinda Ellert contacted me in early 2019, I was excited about her ensemble which performs American music that aspires to universality and eternal relevance. America already has such music, but being an American composer, I wanted more of it.
I love a number of American musical styles: the Southern Harmony singing that descended from William Billings and other early New England composers, Stephen Foster and other 19th Century song writers, ragtime and jazz, rock and roll, Sousa marches, and of course the music of Copland, Harris, and the American symphonic tradition.
Years ago, the phrase “white pilgrim” sneaked into my mind somehow, so I did an online search and found a poem written in the 19th century, possibly by a tent-revivalist. It was a ghost story: someone goes to a distant land to find a missing preacher and instead finds his tomb. The voice of the ghost then tells the preacher’s melancholy story.
I made the poem into a song for myself to sing on a recital and thought that was the end of it. But the sad melody lingered in my mind, and I decided to use it in a new piece for COOP. Good melodies often contain whole worlds of possibilities, and the new piece explores some of these.
I finished “The White Pilgrim” and Lucinda programmed it. Then, looking at the rest of the program, I thought it needed a ‘curtain raiser’ – an energetic, engaging piece to start off the concert with a bang. I quickly wrote a new piece, “Oh Blundering Dervish” for this purpose. It is jazzy and (I think) fun, especially when you hear the orchestra play a carefully composed “stumble” at one point.
I am grateful to Lucinda and her wonderful musicians for performing these pieces of mine, and I look forward to more collaborations in the future. I am excited about COOP’s mission to bring serious (and fun) music to the North Shore, and to prove it, I joined their governing board!
Editor’s Note:
We’re so excited to have Charles on board (so to speak) with us! He composes with the facility others have for speaking and telling stories. As “The White Pilgrim” has settled into this season, we have come to understand the subtlety and emotional pull of the piece — it’s not just a dirge to the dead prophet, but to me I hear the loneliness and passion of a man driven to speak his gospel in the vastness of the colonial landscape. The “Bumpers” referred to in the title of this piece are little pieces of music that connect sections of a variety show. Neither White Pilgrim nor the riotous Dervish are bumpers, but you’ll begin to hear some interesting bits as CommonWealth develops our programming and Charles begins to tie our shows together with his bumpers.
~Lucinda Ellert
Commonwealth Orchestra Outreach Project 