Talk for the Viola da Gamba Society, Conway Hall, June 2003

I began composing when I was 31, although I've always composed in the context of rock music and choirs. My first 'real' piece was Meditatio (1989) which coincided with the outset of a Jungian analysis. The first pieces covered a wide range of commissions: orchestral pieces, saxophone quartet, choral works, percussion concerto, and lots of chamber music. In 1998 I began working with Robert Fripp of King Crimson on arrangements of his music. Robert introduced me to the lutenist Jacob Heringman. This began an interest in writing pieces for period instruments. I've since written for lute, treble viol and lute, theorbo for Jacob and Susanna Pell and Matthew Wadsworth. I've also written several pieces for Virelai, Fretwork and Gothic Voices.

When writing for period instruments I've had the feeling I've come home. Although I'd never written for viols I had the feeling that I should write freely and see where it led. It seems to have led me into a closer intimacy with music and unconscious itself and a musical area of great intenmsity and passion.

Afterwords - this is piece Fretwork are performing today, and the piece they have recently published. It was written in 2000 and commissioned by the ensemble, and is for five viols. It's a re-composition of a choral piece I wrote in 1997: a setting of Sylvia Plath's The Moon and the Yew Tree. I've always seen Plath's work as containing a kind of inner drama: an interplay of conscious and unconscious contents which was particular evident in Ariel. Although she wrote the Moon... as an exercise set for her by Ted Hughes it concentrates itself very much on many of her interests in symbols she knew from Robert Graves centred around the Goddess and the God. I took my original choral work and fleshed it out with new material writing round it with freedom. It includes homophonic passages as well as contrapuntal sections and structurally the piece is a wordless setting. This is the reason I chose the title - 'afterwords'. It's in four main sections, slow-slow-fast-slow, with a coda and follows the four verses of the poem. The first section begins on 'D' and the final section is on G# a tritone away. there is, therefore, a corresponding collapse between the poem and the music. The central verse is a bell-like idea with viols intoning repeated notes and decorated descending scales. The repeated notes are always present during the piece. I didn't use any complex techniques such as change-ringing to generate material. It's all spontaneous. The whole piece is motivically related: a rising/falling semitone and major third are important.

I found no real problems transferring the music from a choral medium to viol consort, because I've always felt viols are close to voices anyway in their sound.

Fretwork will now perform Afterwords....

I will also mention a new piece commissioned by the Yukimi Kambe Viol Consort of Japan. This is to be performed there in November. It's for four viols and consists of four short pieces ordered slow-fast/fast-slow. Each piece has a different character and I was asked to write something which included a humorous element. I've never done this before (!) and can't say that I feel this piece takes on this characteristic. Whatever, the harmonic language is quite different from Afterwords. It was inspired from two separate sources: a painting by Sulamith Wulfing called Gefunden; Tammo de Jongh's book on archetypes, The Magic Circle. There is a connection: Peter Sinfield (former King Crimson lyricist) sent me both the painting on a postcard and the book. The piece took around three weeks to write in April and early May of this year. The first piece is, essentially, an accompanied melody on A, while the second piece is more mechanical and centred on C#. The third piece returns to A, and the music alludes to The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby. The fourth piece begins and ends with a plainsong-like melody and the central section is a free harmonisation of the Japanese folsong Sakura (Spring Blossom). It is a lamenting hymn. The whole piece was written spontaneously, but one or two of the rhthmic details in the third piece use the I Ching hexagrams to generate material, as well a ciphering process I've used since 1993 in my piece for saxophone quartet, Wrestling with Angels.

Andrew Keeling, June 2003.