Name: Copley, Peter: A City Awakes
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Copley, Peter: A City Awakes

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When the opportunity arose to compose an extended orchestral work for the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, my initial conception on receiving the commission took the form of a concerto for orchestra and the first sketches were concerned with developing material that would be exclusively the property respectively of each section of the orchestra. The piece, or at any rate, one movement of it was to consist of the interplay of these exclusive fragments. Some of the ideas survived into the eventual work and as they are all clearly audible, I think it worth listing them here in order of their first appearance:

- A moment of ‘frozen time’, or ‘a deep breath before the plunge’, scored for harp and tuned percussion
- A vigorous interruption to the main thread of the music composed for horns and brass
- A series of short, syncopated and accented chords played by the woodwind
- An extended canonic loop for strings

Having composed these fragments, I started to question the initial conception. While the ideas seemed to me to suggest many possibilities for further development, with the exception of the horn and brass motif, none of them had that specific character that, rightly or wrongly, I associated with concerti for orchestra. This quality could be characterised as ‘extrovert virtuosity’. My choice was either to abandon these first thoughts and develop material that did have that quality, or to change the concept and develop material that I had already. I decided to work towards a single movement piece that would only incidentally be virtuosic in character.

At this stage, I began to see the necessity for the work to have what could be described as an emotional centre of gravity. The challenge that I set myself was to see if it were possible to write an extended identifiable melody: recognisable as such to a non-specialist listener and yet constructed in such a way that the result would be free of cliché and capable of varied treatment. The melody that emerged is first played by the violins about a quarter of the way through the piece and then disappears until after a point of maximum tension, when it emerges as a clarinet solo after which, it is played by each section of the orchestra in turn with varied accompaniments.

Although the shape of the work is roughly, Slow - Fast – Slow, both slow and fast ideas are often heard simultaneously so in several places, the overall tempo may appear both slow and fast to the listener. For example, the brass and woodwind ideas, which are basically fast, should give the impression of interruptions to a slow pulse in the first third of the work. Later, they become the main ideas and when material from the opening is added, rather than returning the music to a slow pulse, they take on the character of pedal points added to a fast-moving pulse. A City Awakes was chosen as the title of the finished work, partly because at the time of the work’s completion, Brighton & Hove had been granted city status and partly because the title expressed pictorially something of that which I had tried to achieve in purely musical terms. A partial analogy may be made between some of the thematic material heard in changing perspective as the accompanimental backgrounds and tonalities vary and the changing manner in which unchanging phenomena in a city landscape may impinge on our consciousness depending on the time of day, our point of view and varying aural backgrounds or their absence.

A City Awakes is dedicated to Tony Woodhouse, outgoing General Manager of the Brighton & Hove Philharmonic Society in gratitude for many years of support and encouragement. It was first performed on the 20th October 2002 by the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth in a concert given at the Dome concert hall in Brighton.

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