No, not 'Royal' then, eru, not until 1991.


The title was probably a catch-all for a compilation featuring four composers, three of whom were at that point strangers to the catalogue (and German only for Merrie England and the Nell Gwyn Dances) and names quite unknown to the record-buying public. I'm trying to remember what was on the original sleeve....

The hit of the disc was the MacCunn, the big tune of which was nabbed for a  1970s BBC series about a Procurator Fiscal in a small Scottish town (Sutherland's Law IIRC).

Do you know that his orchestral music (both pieces, one of which is an orchestration of Debussy) has never been performed, and that his orchestral piece Musique de l'Indifférence has not even been published. Actually UE only currently sell one score by Hopkins, and that's Sous-Structures and those other UE scores have errors in them. Makes you think doesn't it?

No I didn't know that but I can't say it surprises me. I take it that Nic H, being a Hopkins scholar, has corrected the score he uses for his performance. Maybe the mistakes were what made me think the harmony was so arbitrary when I first heard the pieces, because it doesn't sound like that to me now. Maybe it's me who's become arbitrary.

Strangely enough, it had occurred to me that you'd like these pieces, Evan. Now why is that?

Galina Ustvolskaya, Composition I

Can anyone help me? This music seems to make no sense at all.

I think that the Etudes scores are ok though I've never followed it in great detail with the score (actually the way that the score is laid out in polyphonic lines rather than as a conventional piano score creates problems of its own on this front).
There are inaccuracies in the score for Two Pomes certainly. Not quite on a level with those present in the score of Birtwistle's Précis but they do require a level of editorial intervention.

It may be that the nature of the notation creates the errors in performance that you heard. I'd be interested to talk to Nic H about this issue since I know that he was closely involved in the edition of Sous-Structures.


There's really not much to record. I don't really like Sensation but I don't know if that's down to the recording or the piece. I quite like the Two Pomes but they aren't 'fully formed' IMO. I do really like the piano Etudes and Pendant.

I don't think so. I just immediately thought that the Hopkins studies would be your kind of thing.

I realise that my comment was probably not terribly helpful... But it does have a particular impact when performed live which is just not equaled by any recording (even if it is of the same performance). I suspect that many of us would say the same about any piece...
All three Compositions are rather bleak but for me they have a sense of physicality. They push their way into your ears rather than waiting for you to hear them. In so far as that's true, I don't think that there's much to understand really. Perhaps a bit like Feldman? Now there's a comparison I thought I'd never make... I've probably got recordings of the Huddersfield concerts where I first heard these pieces somewhere. Maybe I'll dig them out when I'm back in Durham to box my stuff up.

Ah yes. I think I know who you mean. Had an interesting non-conversation with Chris Fox about that composer once. We were both tactfully non-committal.

It's been far too long since I heard for me to say anything more coherent about them.
The wooden box in Composition no 2 shows up James MacMillan's use of the same object in The World's Ransoming IMO, but then that possibly won't surprise you.

Incidentally, do you know Shostakovitch's early Aphorisms op. 13? I play them sometimes. They're very obviously related to the later work but have that sort of insane bleakness you get on the outskirts of Scriabin and which you get in the better Schnittke, and which Ustvolskaya sort of orchestrates to maximal intensity in her late work.