Remember

A setting of the poem by Christina Rossetti:

Soprano Solo: Kitty Smets

Orchestral Rendition: StaffPad

Score Engraving: Sibelius

Vocal audio editing and post production: DaVinci Resolve

In 2019 I noticed a competition to set the above words to music. I sketched the opening 90 seconds, originally for soprano and string orchestra, but I was too busy to spend enough time on it before the deadline, so I put it to one side, much as I'd liked the opening and had the feeling I should do something with it eventually.

A few months later I was at a local concert and was pleasantly surprised to see the soloist in Berlioz Les nuits d'ete was a singer friend. I didn't know she did solo work and I heard later this was the first time she had sung with an orchestra. I was sitting right at the front and was only a few feet from her. When she spotted me she gave me her water bottle to look after which she swigged from between movements. I'd not heard this piece before and was very impressed both with the performance and the composition. It was only a small amateur orchestra but they played excellently and were highly engaged with the music.

When I got home I listened to the Berlioz again with the score (twice!) and thought it sounded highly advanced for its time and for being an early opus number. I felt it presaged elements that would be well developed by the great late romantic composers of rich orchestral songs.

After hearing the Berlioz I was inspired to pick this sketch up again, to orchestrate it for the same small orchestra I'd just heard and to finish it off, which took just a week to do (in a few evenings) as I felt quite driven to write this and had a compelling feeling for how it should go.

I'm familiar with the orchestral songs of Finzi, R. Strauss, Mahler and Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and I feel there are touches of some of these influences in this piece. Although the poem is about loss through death it is also quite life affirming, so I wanted to reflect that. It starts quite plaintively where the poem asks the surviving loved one to remember the other when dead but then later asks not to grieve or to remember if that causes suffering.

You may notice the motifs some of the instruments are playing at the end are from the "do not grieve" section (the "do not grieve" section was from a little sketch I made separately months previously). I felt including the “do not grieve” motive within the finishing words "Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad" worked within the sense of the poem to round the music off (and made for some nice gentle suspensions). Earlier I also I couldn't resist using the half octave changing direction on the words "half turn", holding the note a little on "hold", changing direction again on "turning", and repeating the note on "stay". There is plenty of other word painting, but most not so literal!

I originally wrote this in Sibelius, using NotePerformer sounds, but when StaffPad became available for iPad I imported it into StaffPad to make use of the excellent sampled orchestral instruments there. I was very pleased with this piece, and it got a lot of good feedback on Internet forums, so I asked Kitty Smets (a final year music student in 2021) to sing the Soprano line during lockdown which I then mixed with the orchestra. The production was done in DaVinci Resolve.

The orchestral sounds are all made within StaffPad, using the following samples:

• CineWinds

• Berlin Brass

• Berlin Timpani

• Spitifire chamber strings

The score engraving is in Sibelius as that it was easier to read than the StaffPad score.

Most of my music is pretty light-hearted and I wanted to try something serious for a change, so this is it.

For StaffPad aficionados, the original with StaffPad Voxos soprano, rather than a live Soprano, is here: https://youtu.be/_0knURza7Pw