under the wide sky
Guy Turner (pictured) was born in 1955 and read music at Cambridge, where began a (so far) 34
year long musical association with the choir's conductor John Wright. In 2008, after thirty years of full-time teaching,
he went part-time, in order to take on more singing and composing work. He is now a lay-clerk in the choir of Southwell Minster, teaches in Nottingham,
leads workshops for Sing-Up and devotes a good deal of time to composing.
As a composer, he has mainly written choral music, including a Requiem (performed by CKCS in 1998). He has also written for stage, and a great deal of close-harmony work (including pieces for the international close harmony groups Cantabile and Voces 8) and comic songs. Other premieres this season include a Missa Brevis for Southwell Minster Girls' Choir and a cycle of George Herbert settings entitled To Extol Thee for the Wyvern Singers in Leicester.
Guy Turner writes:
From my student days I had always had a liking for the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, especially the short stories and poems,
rather than the more famous adventure novels. Like most singers, I performed and loved Vaughan Williams's setting of some of Stevenson's
Songs of Travel.
My association with John Wright also goes back to student days - we were exact contemporaries at Cambridge, and John soon became my 'organist of choice' as accompanist to the St Michael's Singers of Cambridge, and the Tudor Singers of London. We have performed together now for 34 years, most recently this past summer at Southwell Minster.
In 1984 I set four Stevenson poems for choir and piano, and these were performed by Egham Choral Society. I always hoped to revisit them one day, and the Charlton Kings commission provided the perfect opportunity.
I completely reworked the original four songs - one of which, The Infinite Shining Heavens, became a solo rather than choral movement. All the other movements were composed from scratch, and gradually a balanced order became clear. It was a particular pleasure to be writing for a tenor soloist of the stature of James Gilchrist.
The scoring of the piece was largely determined by the instruments being used for Mozart's Mass in C minor, but the more I worked on it, the more clarinets kept recommending themselves, and so they were added in to the texture, particularly as a foil for the horns, which are used a great deal.
The texts mainly come from either Songs of Travel, or from A Child's Garden of Verses, with one (Autumn Fires) coming from the smaller collection, Garden Days. There are a lot a common themes in the fifteen poems used (most of which are common themes in the bulk of his poetry): night, the sky, stars, fire, love and separation, wistful memory, birdsong, and especially travel, which is a running theme in all his work. It was Stevenson who coined the famous phrase, 'It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive', and who ended his days far from his native Edinburgh, in Samoa.
The title of the work comes from another Stevenson Poem, Requiem, part of which is inscribed on his gravestone.