Graham Fitkin’s orchestra work BIRCH 1871 will be premiered in Sweden on August 28, 2014. The composition has been commissioned by Umea City of European Culture. In this interview, Graham Fitkin tells us more.
1. Your latest work is linked to Umea, Sweden, which in 2014 will be the European City of Culture. Have you been associated with the city and its orchestra before now?
No, I hadn’t worked with Norrlands Operan Symphony Orchestra, and in fact never visited Umea either. They have a fantastic building there with two good halls—one specifically a concert hall, the other a full opera house—and they also have conductor Rumon Gamba who I have worked with before, and it will be great to work with him again. I had done a concert tour in that part of Sweden before and remember deep snow in April, and specifically driving a 15-seater minibus with spiked tyres to an airport in the middle of nowhere, for a 4am flight, without a map, when all the road signs were covered with snow. I visited Umea last September and it was all beautiful warm sunshine, lakes, forests, and not a hint of winter. I met with the orchestra, conductor, lots of local people and had a wonderful time.
2. The commission calls for the work to be performed twice with different instrumentation (the orchestra and your band). Has this presented any particular challenges and how have you structured this new work BIRCH 1871?
The idea behind the commission is to create two completely different perspectives on the same musical material. Often when I’m composing this is something which naturally crops up without much conscious planning, but I generally get rid of it as deviating from the driver of the piece. So I have never done this before with conscious planning.
The concert will be a standard two-half event; in the first half they will perform the new orchestral work (which is about 40 minutes long), and in the second half, the audience will move to the other hall in the same building, and my own ensemble will perform there, gradually joined by members of the orchestra. This part of the commission will take the same material but rework it with an entirely different vibe.
3. What sources of inspiration have you drawn from the experience of working in Umea?
It’s quite a long story. For me it was important that this work was imbued with something specific to the area and the culture there. However I wasn’t born and bred there; I don’t have a great deal of experience of the area, and so I can’t just assume knowledge of what is important or unimportant. In essence I’m an outsider.
This has both disadvantages and advantages, and I have to approach it from this standpoint. I have learned a lot about the area and of course its traditional links with Sami culture. When I was last there I had good meetings with Marco Feklistoff, Artistic Director at the Noorlandsoperan, and Michael Lindblad, Chair of the Umea Sami Association. We talked about the history of Umea, the issues surrounding integration of Sami culture in Sweden and the present climate. I travelled out into the larger Vasterbotten County area, and as I’d taken my trainers [running shoes], I also ran around the city and countryside which also helped me put things into place.
Bit by bit I started to make decisions about what I might and might not use in the piece, and I became more and more keen to use data in this work, specific objective information which could serve in some background way as a ‘map’ for the music. In the end it seemed to come together in the shape of a tree, the birch tree.
It [the birch tree] is a real omnipresent feature of both the city and the surrounding landscape. It has been central to the Sami, used very specifically in construction, used for firewood, and it plays a big part in the reindeer herding culture.
And then in Umea itself, following a huge fire in 1888 which decimated a huge part of the city, the reconstruction involved planting thousands of birch trees through the city to prevent the spread of fire from building to building. So the city has all these birch trees spread through it. Okay, that was intriguing, and beautiful as they are, I really wanted some hard data about birches, their life cycle, growth patterns and so on.
And of course it so happens that Umea’s University has a Department of Forest Ecology headed up by one Lars Östlund. Lars and I have been in contact many times and he has been the most incredible help. He has supplied me with all sorts of data, images, graphs, and he has cored a particular birch tree for me which shows the width of the growth rings so that we can establish a life cycle over 100 years. This has become my map.
Fitkin: worklist