Poetic forms and musical titles

I’ve always been intrigued by poetic forms, and the ways in which they might (or might not) be used as musical ones. Back in 1987, I wrote a work for the Aldeburgh Festival in memory of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears (who had died just the year before). Knowing that the sonnets of William Shakespeare had been very important to them both, I looked again at those wonderful records of an ambiguous set of relationships, and decided to arrange a group of them in a way that corresponded to the overall pattern of a single sonnet, with 14 ‘rhyming’ and interlinked sections. The piece was scored for three singers and a small ensemble of nine players, and it seemed logical to call the work simply ‘Sonnet’.

Later, in 2000, I became very interested in the Japanese haiku, and set out to create a work using a collection of these tiny gem-like texts as the basis for an ambitious piece for mezzo-soprano and orchestra. How to extend the idea of poems of essentially just 17 syllables into the overall structure of a large musical form? (Incidentally, I discovered that 17 syllables were regarded as the optimum number that can be comfortably spoken in a single breath.) It became apparent that a haiku basically has content that aligns it with one of the seasons. Fine, but there are four seasons and a haiku has only three lines: in the end the solution was to organise 17 haiku (of course) into three season-based groups and then to insert a purely instrumental section (representing the ‘break’ that haiku have as part of their form, usually between the second and third lines). Therefore, the overall shape became Winter (5 haiku), Spring (7 haiku), Summer (orchestra alone) and Autumn (5 haiku). For the title, I chose The Floating World and was fortunate to have at that time a Japanese student, who was able to write that for me in Japanese characters as part of the final cover design.

More recently, I came across the concept of a Crown of Sonnets, actually in the work of Peter Scupham – the title poem from his collection The Hinterland. A ‘sonnet crown’ consists of a sequence of 15 sonnets, with the following intricacies: the last line of one sonnet becomes the opening line of the next, and so on until the final line of sonnet 14 repeats the opening line of sonnet 1. Then the miracle happens – the final sonnet consists of all those 14 repeated lines, in order, in rhyming pattern, and still makes sense. For several years I wondered how this amazing structure could become a musical form, and the solution came to me in the context of the chance to write a new large-scale solo piano piece for the brilliant young artist, Clare Hammond. The pattern required the creation of 15 sections, each of which would be based upon an established piano genre, such as Nocturne, Mazurka, Etude, Intermezzo and so on, culminating in a Chorale. The relationship to the sonnet crown would be made by germinating a musical idea during the course of each section that would be revealed at its close and which would then become the opening idea of the following section. At the end, the Chorale would be a treatment of all those 14 motifs in a valedictory chorale style.

Clare Hammond, the Royal Philharmonic Society's 'Young Artist Award-winner in 2016, invited John to compose using the Crown of Sonnets structure

So far, so good. It was fun to compose, making for several new departures in my own writing and was finally completed in February of this year. There was then the issue of a title, so that Clare could announce it and start to include it in her offerings to concert promoters and venues. Last autumn, while the discussions with Clare about this piece were taking place, the obvious thing was to call the work Crown of Sonnets. This seemed a bit flat to me (and it still does) but some further inquiries with poetic friends revealed that the form (like that of the Sonnet itself – a little sound) was Italian in origin. So clearly, Corona di Sonetti seemed it would be a classier title for this new piece. Little did we realise at the time what associations would accumulate around the word ‘corona’! So I am left with a bit of a dilemma: given that the piece is unlikely to reach a public performance before the middle of 2021, should I leave the title in place and hope that by then, the word will have lost its link with the terrible disease that is causing so much distress all over the world, or should I think of something new to call the work by? Any suggestions would be gratefully received, but please don’t put forward ‘Corona Spinea’!