Memories from a Bookmark: A Symphonic Poem for Orchestra

A life becomes a journey; a journey becomes a story; a story becomes music.

 

Programme note

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This piece is inspired by my grandmother, Anne Burton.

Anne was born in Rhymney, South Wales during 1914, around the time of the outbreak of World War One. Growing up poor, she married young and badly. To say the marriage to my grandfather was difficult is to be charitable; it was bad enough for her leave her home and family and seek safety the other side of the country in Kent.

She left at a time when doing so would have been very rare indeed, even frowned upon, but she did it non-the-less, which showed great strength of will and a lot of courage.

Anne lived in Kent, in Crayford to be exact, during the height of World War Two, and found work operating a capstan lathe at the Crayford Branch of The Woolwich Arsenal, making parts for military equipment.

After the war, she met Jack Burton, who was the love of her life, and they lived happily together for about 20 years or so, until his untimely death in 1967.

Anne loved her daughter, Nesta, whom she was reunited with a few years after leaving South Wales, and her two grandsons, John and me.

I remember her love well; it took the form of a quiet care, constant kindness and unfaltering encouragement.

Having returned to South Wales in later years, Anne died in Cardiff Infirmary just after New Year 1980. She was 65 years old. I knew her for too short a time.

......

My music starts with the bookmark. Anne gave it to me over 50 years ago, and I still use it today.

As I turn pages and place the bookmark, I am prompted to remember my grandmother and imagine her life and character.

Firstly, I remember her calm and constant presence.

Then I move on: I imagine her wedding and the sadness and torment that followed it; I sense her resolve to change things for the better; I imagine her journey and her rush of feelings as she leaves her home in Wales and travels by train to Kent; I imagine her at her capstan lathe; I feel her hope for the future; I sense her future love for Jack; I feel again her love for her daughter and grandsons.

The music becomes a dream; perhaps it is a little like one of the dreams Anne had at the end of her life.

This music is about a life that hoped and never gave up hoping.

Compositions by Charles M Lines

Here are the compositions I have written: 

Charles M Lines: compositions

They are presented in chronological order, from most recent to earliest.

If you would like to perform any of these pieces, please leave comment here or contact me via Facebook or any of the other addresses provided. 

Tsurara: A Tone Poem for Small Orchestra and Soprano Chorus

Tsurara is inspired by the Tsurara Onna, the icicle woman of Japanese folklore: a figure who appears in winter and vanishes with the thaw.

Rather than retelling the myth, the piece explores the emotional climate she suggests: beauty held in tension, intimacy edged with cold, presence always on the verge of disappearance.

The music unfolds within a world of suspended breath. The orchestra plays sempre non vibrato and at the softest of dynamics, creating a soundscape that feels frozen, fragile and foreboding. Bright percussion glints through the texture like light catching upon ice.

Eventually, a brief, brittle quickening skates upon the stillness: bright, pointillistic, unstable; it threatens to slightly crack the frozen surface of the music.

Then the work’s most intimate moment emerges: a passage where something a little warmer, melting and more vulnerable reveals itself.

Later, like voices heard through falling snow, a soprano chorus begins to sing: bright, insistent, then distant.

They deepen the hypnotic song of Tsurara.

Then the song fades, slowly rising and dissolving into the cold night air.

What remains is a feeling of something glimpsed and too quickly lost: an ethereal beauty of frost, longing, and gentle breath.

 

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Tsurara Onna

Tree withering cold

Frost fingers tap my window:

Light, light, so lightly;

I feel your ice mist stir me…

Strangely welcome in the night.

 

In winter you come,

To stay with me in the dark:

Feeding on my warmth,

Sharing your seductive cold;

We entwine and slowly merge.

 

Skin withering cold

Lips finding and kissing me

Through the night softly;

I feel my hot life flowing

Toward your rime-crusted heart;

 

Soul withering cold;

Your arms are the freezing clouds

That carry me up,

Up toward the aloof stars,

Where you and I disappear.  

                                                                    CML

Hymn to Ignorance (A Tone Poem for Choir and Orchestra)

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Hymn to Ignorance by Thomas Gray

Hymn to Ignorance is a tone poem for orchestra and choir, inspired by Thomas Gray’s satirical poem of the same name. Though tone poems are most often orchestral, this work expands the tradition by weaving the human voice into the orchestral fabric.

The choir serves as a Collective Narrator: at times it carries the text directly, guiding listeners through Gray’s words; at other times it merges with the instrumental textures, becoming another timbral color in the symphonic palette. Audiences need not catch every word to grasp the meaning: key phrases and the expressive interplay of voices and instruments are enough to illuminate the narrative.

Rather than adopting the sectional form of a cantata, Hymn to Ignorance unfolds as a continuous arc, portraying the irony, grandeur, and philosophical bite of Gray’s poem in musical terms. The orchestra and choir together embody both the voice of ignorance and the forces surrounding it, creating a sound world that is by turns pompous, playful, and haunting.

This is not a ritual or liturgical work, but a programmatic journey: a meditation on folly and wisdom, expressed through the tonal mix of human and instrumental sound.

Cherry Blossom ချယ်ရီ ပွင့် for Small Orchestra and Piano

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I have a friend who, when she wants time alone to relax, goes to stand near or under plants and trees, occasionally reaching out to gently touch the flowers and twigs and branches. 

This piece captures these moments, and a little more...

(To T.G.)  

Mae'r Mari Lwyd Yn Curo (A Symphonic Poem for Orchestra)

Mae’r Mari Lwyd Yn Curo is a symphonic poem that reimagines the Mari Lwyd, the spectral horse‑skull figure of Welsh winter tradition, as an elemental presence arising from the sea. 

The work begins within a submerged watery sound‑world: slow tidal movements, distant glimmers and glints, hints of half heard or remembered sea shanties, 

and a slow low murmur that suggests something ancient stirring beneath the waves. 

As the Mari Lwyd awakens from her slumbers, gradually takes form and moves toward the land, the music gathers momentum...

The scene shifts: a gallop through an eerie forest under a full moon, the rush of cold night air, wind gusting through bare branches, and the unsettling rattle of bones sounding from somewhere unseen. 

The landscape is alive, watchful, and charged with silvery strange nocturnal energy.

Eventually, the Mari Lwyd arrives at a grand, warmly lit gothic manor. She knocks loudly upon the door, and the music becomes a dance; a medieval dance transforms into a frenetic waltz, which in turn fragments into music upon the edge of chaos. The knocking persists within the tumult, as if the Mari Lwyd is everywhere at once: both outside the door in the frozen winter night and inside within the heat of the dance.

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"I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but to me, transparent." 

From Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu 

Mari Lwyd, Lwyd Mari:

 

A sacred thing through the night they carry.

Betrayed are the living, betrayed the dead:

All are confused by a horse's head.

From The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd by Vernon Watkins

For know there are two worlds of life and death:

One that which thou beholdest; but the other

Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

The shadows of all forms that think and live

Till death unite them and they part no more....

From Prometheus Unbound by P. B. Shelley   

    

Pared Pen-Blwydd: A Short Piece for Concert Wind Band

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