Gabriel Jackson - Airplane Cantata

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  I am rather obsessed by aviation - the technology, the bravery and daring of pilots, the aesthetic beauty of aircraft, the transcendence of flying - and when thinking about what a piece for voices and pianola might be about, I was very struck by the fact that the (brief) heyday of the pianola coincided with the pioneering years of aviation. The texts for Airplane Cantata come from a variety of sources - poems by Hart Crane and Humbert Wolfe, eye-witness accounts by Louis Blériot and an unnamed newspaper reporter, the musings of Amelia Earhart and 19th-century theorist and inventor Sir George Cayley and a catalogue of factual statements about landmark events in the aviation timeline. The piece is in seven movements, performed without a break: an opening Overture: Icarus (to words by the 16th-century Italian Luigi Tansillo) is followed by a mini-triptych of Take-Off (the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903), Flight (an ecstatic cantilena for the sopranos) and Landing (Louis Blériot's slightly fraught descent to Dover after his first-ever crossing of the English Channel). After that comes an instrumental Toccata Aeronautica, which is followed by a narrative movement that explores key moments in the development of aviation and their implications. Finally in a hushed Chorale-Coda "From unseen depths and dreams undreamt I sing the gleaming cantos of unvanquished space" before drifting upwards into silence and infinity.

  The pianola, with its almost limitless ability to play a lot of notes very quickly and its capacity for articulating complex multi-layered textures (notated on up to six staves) plays a variety of roles in the cantata: a sharp-edged call to attention in the overture, elsewhere an onomatopoeic portrait of a machine cranking into life and taking to the skies, overlapping, soaring arpeggiation in the upper reaches of the keyboard, a nocturnal evocation of glistening stars, a hint of ragtime for period authenticity, clanging bell-chords and evanescent figuration in the coda, and, in the toccata, all-out aerial assault!

  © Gabriel Jackson, August 2011

  
  

  Biography

  Gabriel Jackson [b.1962] began his musical life with three years as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, after which he studied composition at the Royal College of Music. While at the College he was twice awarded the R.O. Morris Prize for Composition in 1981 and 1983, and in addition won the Theodore Holland Award. His music is regularly performed, recorded and broadcast worldwide. His works have been presented at many festivals in the UK and beyond, including Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Spitalfields, Haarlem Choir Biennale, Festival Vancouver, the Sydney Spring Festival and the BBC Proms. His liturgical pieces are in the repertoires of many of Britain's leading cathedral and collegiate choirs and his music has been commissioned and performed by many of the world's leading vocal ensembles, among them The Sixteen, the Latvian Radio Choir, the Tallis Scholars, the Bavarian Radio Choir, the Swedish Radio Choir, Ars Nova Copenhagen and the Norwegian Soloists Ensemble. His music is being recorded with increasing frequency, with over 60 works available on CD. Since 2010 Jackson has been Associate Composer to the BBC Singers, resulting in a series of substantial commissions.