Good Kiss continued

Scott Good was a one time student of the National Arts Centre summer music school for budding composers. In those days, he was studying for a "double major" in trombone-playing and composing at the University of Toronto. The Kiss, which I heard in rehearsal this morning, is his 12th composition for orchestra, although he is still young, with a two-month-old baby and a two-year-old child when he was working on this 18 minute piece, which took him two and a half months to compose. It should have taken less time, only he threw away the first two weeks of work and started again because it had sounded too abstract.

How do I know this? Before this morning's rehearsal, the composer himself gave a talk to NAC Foundation donors. He told us that seeing the Rodin sculpture was an experience that had such a powerful effect that "it changed me!" It made all the more of an impact when he learned the story behind the sculpture: a couple, Paulo and Francesca, caught in flagrante by the Paulo's brother, the husband of Francesca, who then, according to one version of the story, walled her up alive. Dante, in his Inferno, places these characters in the second circle of Hell.

Scott Good thought up a melody for Paulo and a melody for Francesca. Put together, the melodies form the harmonic progress of his piece which crescendoes to a climax (of course), after which the music "dissipates and falls away like a memory." Rodin studied the way Michelangelo's art turned motion into stillness. Likewise Scott, the composer, has spent a great deal of time studying the composers of other eras. He admits to being influenced by Messiaen and Lutoslawski (whose string quartet has no bar lines).

He spoke of music freezing time, as does sculpture. Music, he said, is sculpted onto paper but in that form is "not all that entertaining" until it is actually performed! He wrote one recent work called Shock Therapy Variations which features rock and funk styles, incorporating electric guitars, but this composition we heard today, The Kiss, has "classical harmonic content, and is rooted in the romantic era (indeed, it sounded very romantic to me—reminded me of Khachaturian) with echoes of Tchaikovsky, the composer said, plus a folksy element, the pentatonic scale for the man's theme, and the woman's theme takes its inspiration from the "exotic" Middle East or India with a hint of quarter tones.

"So how do you set about composing?" somebody asked. The answer was that he begins with the theoretical construction which gives rise to the melody lines. His wife, also a musician, had given him a warning, though. "Once you've written a piece it's not yours any more," she said. The performers and the listeners take charge.

It started with a sort of monotonic hum on gongs, vibraphones and strings, but before long the woodwind, solo cello (played by Amanda Forsyth in this performance) and violins begin to soar, and the rest sounded more conventionally lyrical to me.

The violin features prominently in the rest of today's programme too, the other items being Korngold's Violin Concerto (even more like Khachaturian) played by a brilliant, Manitoban violinist James Ehnes, and Elgar's Enigma Variations. The orchestra hadn't got round to the Elgar before their break at 11:30 a.m.; leaving after that, I never heard it. On the way out of the building I paused to take this photo of the extraordinary work of art in the foyer: not quite Rodin, but interesting, you must admit. Look at the "feet"! Believe it or not, because it creates an optical illusion, the rest of the sculpture is concave, too.