The award-winning music of Julian Anderson (b. 1967) – luminous, playful, and rhythmically athletic – has cut a deft figure on the dance stage, championed especially by Mark Baldwin and presented by companies including The Royal Ballet and Rambert.
Anderson’s most recent choreographic work was The Comedy of Change, written for Mark Baldwin and Rambert in 2009 – his third collaboration with the choreographer. The acclaimed ballet – with “a magnificent score…particularly for dance…sumptuous, highly sprung and yet light-touched” (The Arts Desk) is inspired by Charles Darwin, and explores in movement and music the character of animate nature. The ‘comedy’ of the title aims to capture the extreme and strange features of the natural world and its evolutionary processes, with the piece’s seven sections exploring different kinds of change or transformation.
The 23-minute work is scored for a chamber ensemble of 12 players. It premiered at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, with the score performed live by London Musici and Paul Hoskins, before an extensive national tour of over fifty performances; in 2013 it was revived by Rambert in 2013 for a further run of performances at Sadler’s Wells.
In 2001 the pair collaborated on The Bird Sings With Its Fingers, a specially-commissioned ballet score for the Mark Baldwin Dance Company and Sinfonia 21, inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Orphée; it premiered at The Swan, High Wycombe. The 15-minute work for chamber orchestra was conceived as both a scenic and concert work, subtitled ‘Four Choreographic Studies’, each named for the strange phrases emerging from the car radio in the film. ‘The world is illuminated by a single glass of water’ sees a single melodic descend through the ensemble three times over; ‘The bird sings with its fingers’ is a scherzo with trio, brightly coloured, high and agile. ‘Mirrors would do well to reflect again’ sees rhythmic and harmonic ideas undergo distorted transformations, before the kaleidoscopic conclusion of ‘Jupiter warns those he wishes to abandon’, which sees material from the previous three movements combine.
In 1999 (in their first collaboration together) Anderson created Towards Poetry, devised for Baldwin’s choreographic debut with The Royal Ballet – an expansion of his 1997 ensemble work Poetry Nearing Silence. Its witty movements cover diverse musical terrain over 19-minutes, scored for flute, clarinet, harp, two violins, viola, and cello, with the second violin also taking up a ratchet – or fishing reel – and triangle.
In the lugubrious ‘Know Vienna’ there are hints of a disjointed waltz and a blues; the violinist’s ratchet provides “a sort of composed background noise” in ‘my future as the star in a film of my room’. Two folk-inspired movements pay homage to the music of Leoš Janáček – Anderson’s favourite composer – and that of the Carpathian Mountains. The titular movement sees an offstage clarinet – the ‘voice outside’ – challenging the quiet ticking of the onstage ensemble. Its prompt is a portrait of Samuel Becket – one of the great masters of theatrical silence. “For much of the piece silence plays a vital role”, Anderson notes, “in punctuating the music, disrupting it, concluding it, or stopping it in its tracks.”
Works composed by Julian Anderson from August 2014 onwards are published by Schott Music