Spitfire (2020)

for clarinet, violin, viola, and cello

Duration: 17’

Commissioned by Coriole Music Festival for performance by Lloyd Van’t Hoff, Andrew Haveron, Tobias Breider, and Umberto Clerici

Program Note

Composing to a brief is not something I usually do. I’m more of a free rein composer. When artistic director Anna Goldsworthy contacted me about writing a work inspired by the 1930s, I was (of course) curious, but also knew it would be a challenge. How could I be true to the brief and still sound like me? Much of my output explores stylistic juxtapositions, and so I began to look for stylistic inspiration from the 30s. For me, this is a period that celebrates the rise of jazz in all its forms, and its cross-pollination with other musical styles, especially concert music (think Gershwin, Milhaud, Ravel and Copland). The increasing popularity of the instrumental soloist is worth noting, along with the idea of the soloist as celebrity.

Written for clarinet and string trio, Spitfire embraces three key musical personalities as starting points: Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli and Benny Goodman. Aspects of each are threaded throughout: the hot club groove of Reinhardt, the sentimental solos of Grappelli, and the virtuosic swing of Goodman’s clarinet. The piece is a feverish mix of jazz, Appalachian folk, blues and swing, with a touch of vaudeville. There’s perhaps more than a splash of Robert Johnson and Buddy Rich in the middle, too. As guitarists, Reinhardt and Johnson’s influence is reinvented as slide-guitar violin, banjo-strummed viola, and rockabilly slap cello. There are duels, hoedowns, grooves and loops, oom-pah-pahs, and a brief kazoo cameo. You’ll have to wait and hear how Buddy gets a look in. . .

The name Spitfire refers to the fighter plane first introduced by the British Royal Air Force in 1936. Known for its steep dives and overall agility, this is conjured up musically by the clarinet, boasting plenty of bends and scoops, rapidly rising and falling passages, and full throttle motion. I was especially buoyed to discover that the clarinettist would be Lloyd Van’t Hoff, whom I’ve collaborated with before on a solo work. The piece is very much written with his skills in mind, even down to an imagining of physical movement. Lloyd is an incredibly expressive player, and it was near impossible to write a line for him without visualising it in my mind’s eye/ear. Move over Benny Goodman. Naturally, I’m excited to be working with Andrew Haveron, Tobias Breider and Umberto Clerici, all principal players with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, for the first time. It’s been pointed out more than once that Spitfire rhymes with Hotwire, the title of my viola concertino about car theft. Perhaps this marks a new era of my fascination with transportinspired works, but probably not!

Performances

13 April 2024, David Griffiths, Emily Sun, Jacqui Cronin, and Simon Cobcroft, Music & Mountains Festival, Queenstown, New Zealand

27 July 2022, Lloyd Van’t Hoff and Amiti String Quartet, Burdekin Theatre, Ayr, QLD, AUS

25 July 2022, Lloyd Van’t Hoff and Amiti String Quartet, JCU Townsville, QLD, AUS

24 July 2022, Lloyd Van’t Hoff and Amiti String Quartet, TYTO Amphitheatre, Ingham, QLD, AUS

23 July 2022, Lloyd Van’t Hoff and Amiti String Quartet, World Theatre, Charters Towers, QLD, AUS

22 May, 2021, Lloyd Van’t Hoff, Andrew Haveron, Tobias Breider, Umberto Clerici, Coriole Music Festival, South Australia