25 - Music Pouring from my Pen

Summary

With the birth of my new language and the beginning of our parenthood, we stopped rushing round the world for concerts, and settled down into an even quieter life in Twickenham. While Camilla contentedly absorbed herself in caring for our baby, I was plunging into a much larger-scale composition, again built out of my three-note cell.

For some time, I had wanted to compose a work with a spiritual message, intended to unite the feelings of all people of all races and religions, attempting to bridge the tragic divisions within our disturbed and ugly world. I was searching for a concept less corruptible than the great ideal of ‘peace’, which had been so distorted and misused by the Soviets and their sycophants. To my joy, I discovered amongst the poetry of Alexander Pope, who had lived only a few hundred yards up the Thames from my home, the magnificent Universal Prayer to the ‘Father of All, by every race and every creed ador’d’, a visionary concept for anyone brought up within the confines of eighteenth-century religion, yet so close to my heart that it might have been written not 250 years ago, but especially for me today.

I took the first words, ‘Father of All’, as an invocation to be sung by the chorus throughout the cantata, imagining as I composed, a vast assembly of performers incorporating men and women of every imaginable colour, race, opinion and belief. The four soloists, I dreamt, would also be each of different race, with a multiracial chorus too. For musical instruments, however, I decided to use simply an organ and three harps.

The construction of the cantata was imposed on me by the classical form of the poem. Alexander Pope himself had written that ‘Order is Heav’n's first law’, a remark which brought me tremendous satisfaction, echoing as it did my own sentiment regarding any viable work of art.

Keeping these words in mind, I created a huge symmetrical framework, and within this structure, my three-note cell with its perpetual transpositions and reflections served me for the whole extended work.