Off Course – Julian Grant

Composer: Julian Grant

Instrumentation: flute (doubling piccolo), cor anglais, clarinet in Bb (doubling bass clarinet), horn in F, trumpet in Bb, tenor trombone, piano solo, harp, guitar, violoncello, contrabass

Duration: Approx. 24 minutes

Date Written: 1996-8 rev. 2009

Additional information: This work was started in 1996 as a piano concerto, intended to be in four discrete movements: a study in rhythm and harmony, a programmatic scherzo, a static slow movement, and a brilliant finale that was to depict my first impressions of Hong Kong (where I had j ust moved) - complete with evocations of street theatre and Cantonese opera. The first two movements seemed almost to write themselves, and though I had imagined what should happen in the last two, my inspiration deserted me, as I had proscribed the destination too clearly. I had lost interest in continuing this particular journey. The first two movements were premiered in May 1997 by Douglas Finch (piano) and the Continuum Ensemble conducted by Philip Headlam, and it was apparent to me that they neither stood together, nor did I have a notion of how to proceed. So I consigned it to a drawer - it would be my 'Unfinished Symphony'! However, I had a chance to meet the composer Kevin Volans in 1998, and showed my torso to him, and he remarked that there was a bigger, juicier piece inside there, and this set me on a new track. The first two movements are still intact, but they merge into each other gradually. They are [1] a constructivist passacaglia on nine shifting chords that vary in different ways - the original mechanism is rusted, inefficient and bursts into colourful foliage and [2] a scherzo movement inspired by a hunting scene from one of the extraordinary painted caves (The Longmen grottos) in Dunhuang, China, in the middle of the Gobi desert. Now, instead of the original external journey, the piece now charts an internal progress, a discursive and subjective journey that has no fixed destination, with an unexpected outcome unforeseen from the start: hence the title 'Off Course'. The subtitle 'chamber concerto' indicates that though the piano dominates, the argument is carried forwards by all the instruments, which are showcased at various points: thus the trumpet and trombone dominate the ruined passacaglia, the cor anglais, bass clarinet and piccolo feature in the Dunhuang scherzo - and dotted throughout the piece are little moments where the harp, guitar and piano form a sort of composite keyboard. Finally, there is an epilogue, and the horn wanders away with a simple, shanty-like melody, and the journey, unlike the piece, has no end. Off Course was premiered by the same people who premiered the fragment in the Spitalfields Festival, London, in May 1999. Off Course is dedicated to a lost child, abandoned somewhere in central China, with the hope that somebody will find her soon.