February Meeting:Word Painting in Music; Roxanna Panufnik with Richard Thomas.

Roxanna Panufnik is one of the UK’s leading present-day composers, well known for her melding of words and music, or “word painting”.  She leads an exceptionally busy life, so we were lucky to be able to tempt her down from London for a Friday evening visit, albeit not one of our traditional Third Fridays.  Maybe the unaccustomed day, the atrocious weather and possibly her talk’s somewhat unliterary-sounding title, were together responsible for the rather low turnout for what proved to be a fascinating and inspiring multi-media event – a talk with musical and graphic illustration.

Roxanna began by pointing out that many composers, past and present, have used music to “paint” words, citing among others Haydn, Schubert and Britten, but explained that she would concentrate on her own experience as a current practitioner.  Much of her work involved settings of established and traditional texts - both lay, such as her recent “Four Choral Seasons” for the Bach Choir, which included words by Rosetti, Manley-Hopkins, Binyon and Shakespeare; and liturgical, embracing Jewish, Sufi and Zen, as well as Christian, material – a reflection of her deep interest in World Music.  By way of illustration Roxanna played a video excerpt* from "Zen Love Song" from her "Love Abide" CD.  She pointed out that the Zen Love Song was of particular musical interest as she was using a traditional Japanese lullaby (inJapanese)

along with an English translation of words by the 15^th century Zen master Ikkyu Soyun.  The multi-media presentation of this first illustration was provided by synchronised animations of a stylised oriental bird dipping his head forlornly in time to the music against a dreamy background in the manner of a Japanese print, created by Roxanna’s sister-in-law, the talented “VJ” Mischa Giancovitch.  (A “VJ”, so Roxanna explained, is a Video Jockey - like a Disc Jockey, but one who mixes visuals in time to music.)  

Asked whether she had ever used her own words, perhaps to boost a libretto for a new opera or, more specifically, when she was reconstructing the semi-forgotten 18^th century Anglo-Barbadian singspiel “Inkle and Yarico”, Roxanna said that she had never had the courage to use any but other people’s words, even when working on a subject as bizarre as a music-painting of the experiences of someone trapped in an overturned yacht in the Southern Ocean.  In this case she set the words of the sailor himself, Tony Bullimore, as adapted by the narrator, Richard Stilgoe in her "The Upside-Down Sailor", from which we heard an extract.

Roxanna agreed that instrumental music, as an abstract form, could be inspired by words Recently she had composed a piece for trombone and piano based on Pablo Neruda’s “The Queen”.  She would select a text and follow the emotional and atmospheric structure, purely through instruments. Her next audio example was inspired by Viola/Cesario’s “Willow Cabin” soliloquy from Twelfth Night.  This first materialised as her “Olivia” string quartet, but the commissioners also asked her to create an optional part for children’s chorus.

Roxanna told us that all her work was usually the result of commissions, though some of these had come about after she had read or heard words that cried out to be set to music.  The prime example, part of which she played to us, in a performance narrated by Simon Russell Beale, resulted from hearing, at Sir John Tavener’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey, his daughter Theodora bravely read his “99 Words for My Darling Children”.

Roxanna acknowledged that she had inherited musical genes from her father, the late émigré Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik, who had been granted political asylum by Britain, naturalised, and later knighted.  Though of Jewish descent on her (British) mother’s side, she had been brought up in a more or less atheist family.  Later, after her father’s death, she became a practising Roman Catholic, latent in her Polish ancestry.  However she drew on all kinds of spiritual inspiration, not just Christianity – World Religion as much as World Music.  And as it happened her absorption in word painting owed little to her father, who had concentrated mainly on instrumental composition.

Knowing that the Society had recently enjoyed a talk on Julian of Norwich prompted Roxanna to use, as her final illustration of pure, intentional word-painting, her setting of Julian’s reassuring “All Shall be Well” text combined with a prayer that Polish Knights used to sing before going into battle 900 years ago.

 
The meeting ended with questions from the audience and an erudite and witty vote of thanks by Bill  Doherty.  

* The whole YouTube clip can  be reached by CLICKING HERE