Cat No. JM44971
Price £170.00
Composer: Peter Graham
Category: BIGGIES - Grade 6.0

Grade 6.0

The sea, with its many facets and moods, has long held the attention of numerous composers: Felix Mendelssohn and his overtures, The Hebrides and Calm Seas and Prosperous Voyage; Claude Debussy’s monumental La Mer; Ralph Vaughan Williams with his Symphony No. 2, a sea symphony for orchestra and chorus; and Benjamin Britten’s two operas, Billy Build and Peter Grimes, the latter of which contains the wonderful Four Sea Interludes. In the wind band world, one finds Anthony Tannaccone’s Sea Drjft, based on poems by Walt Whitman (ABAI Ostwald Award winner in 1996), and Francis McBeth’s Of Sailors and Wales: Five Scenes From Melville, op. 78.
In this tradition, Peter Graham has composed an exciting yet contemplative work based on the historical development of a clock that would enable a ship’s crew to ascertain their exact location on the high seas through knowledge of exact time on shore and on the ship. Graham’s own composer’s notes provide the background for this musical depiction of this monumental undertaking:

At 8:00 p.m. on the 22nd October, 1707, the Association, flagship of the British Royal navy; struck rocks off the Scilly Isles with the loss of the entire crew. Throughout the rest of the evening the remaining three ships in the fleet suffered the same fate. Only 26 of the original crewmembers survived. This disaster was a direct result of an inability to calculate longitude, the most pressing scientific problem of the time. It pushed the longitude question to the forefront of the national consciousness and precipitated the Longitude Act. Parliament funded a prize of £20,000 to anyone whose method or device would solve the dilemma.

For carpenter and self-taught clockmaker John Harrison, this was the beginning of a forty-year obsession. To calculate longitude it is necessary to know the time aboard ship and at the homeport or place of known longitude, at precisely the same moment. Harrison’s dream was to build a clock so accurate that this calculation could be made, an audacious feat of engineering. [Harrison’s search eventually resulted in the first chronometer, a time-measuring instrument that keeps accurate time at all temperatures. —Ed.1

This work reflects aspects of this epic tale, brilliantly brought to life in Dava Sobel’s book Longitude. Much of the music is mechanistic in tone and is constructed along precise mathematical and metrical lines. Aural echoes of the clockmaker’s workshop alternate with nightmare dream pictures: Harrison was haunted by the realization that countless lives depended on a solution to the longitude problem. The emotional core of the work reflects on the evening of October 22, 1707, culminating in the sounding of eight bells and the ascension of the mariners’ souls in the sounding of the handheld bells.

Though the distance of almost two centuries may separate us emotionally from the horror of that evening, the metaphor that Harrison’s Dream conveys remains timeless.

Harrison’s Dream was commissioned by the United States Air Force Band, Washington, D.C., Colonel Lowell E. Graham, Commander/Conductor. It was awarded the prestigious ABAI Ostwald Award for Original Composition in 2002; it is highly identifiable with Graham’s personal British heritage as well as in recognition of his roots in the Salvation Army Brass Band movement.

Harrison’s Dream contains many rapid articulated passages that contrast with tender oboe and horn solos. A middle section calls for several small bells rung in aleatoric fashion to commemorate the Eight Bells signal aboard ship.
Donald Hunsberger.