An orchestral concert in November 2008 at the Melbourne Concert Hall captivated Maribel Steel . Enthralled by the beautiful music of Nigel Westlake’s ‘Shadow Dancers’, Maribel came home with a dream to create the Tarka World Premiere.
Her dream was to inspire a group of people, to help bring to light the exquisite music of Tarka.
She imagined a live performance for the music loving community of Victoria. In the small hours of the night, she wrote up ‘a plan’ as she dared to dream. ‘It seemed like a far fetched idea at the time, but my heart knew we would make it happen’…
Like sending a mysterious message in a bottle, Maribel believed in her dream.
But how would she reach the right person? Maribel emailed her local community. Mary Crooks responded, ‘sounds interesting, let’s talk‘. This led to Spring Studio and The Victorian Women’s Trust beginning their collaboration.
Tarka Music 1978
The possibility of creating music for a film of Henry Williamson’s classic novel ‘Tarka the Otter’ encouraged Harry and Anthony to write the music in 1976. Henry’s inspired descriptions of the natural world opened the eyes of so many to the beauty of England’s West country. The music closely echoes Henry’s descriptive text, and the section titles are clues to the locations of each part.
Tarka – became a modern symphonic work in three movements with a codicil, the Anthem. It was first performed and recorded by members of The London Philharmonic and BBC National Orchestras in Wembly studios 1978. Co-composers Harry Williamson and Anthony Phillips play on that recording.
Tarka Movement One – First Light
We completed the scores in 1977. Subsequently we found the promised use of the music with the film of ‘Tarka the Otter’ became a strategy to get my father to sign the film contract. For 10 years the recorded music sat on a shelf. Actress Susan George loved the music and her film production company bought the synchronisation rights in about 1986 and financed the completion of the work in 1987. Tarka was finally released on LP and CD by PRT (formerly Pye) to critical acclaim in 1988. The recordings remained high in the New Music Charts for some time and consequently achieved considerable sales in Europe.
Harry Williamson 2022
Mary Crooks, director of The Victorian Women’s Trust , saw the link between the music of Tarka – and the message of Our Watermark.
Tarka is old Norse ( Norwegian) for ‘wandering as water’. Interestingly in sanskrit it translates to ‘reasoning’ or ‘logic’ which I find amusing.
Our Watermark – was a thoroughly researched book produced by The Victorian Women’s Trust . It is a wake up call to become actively involved in creating projects to conserve our water. With the support of Maribel Steel, secured an invitation to perform with a community orchestra in Melbourne in 2010. But first, the orchestral scores needed to be updated.
Collaborative spirit for Tarka World Premiere
With the seeds of possibilities now sown, Harry and Anthony found themselves collaborating all over again, after 30 years!
They retrieved the Tarka scores from various hiding places in the UK and Australia. As they revised pages they realized the work would need re-scoring in places order to accommodate the needs of a live orchestra. Additionally several passages had never been scored previously, particularly the guitar parts in Movement One.
Copious emails between the composers ensued. They checked their newly written guitar parts against what they had played on the recordings years before.
Anthony’s guitar transcriptions were eventually posted to Harry 12,000 miles away. The two old friends were able to compare the music bar by bar and rewrite small sections via the internet.
Copies of Anthony’s original scores finally arrived in February 2009, in several huge packages.
Harry took several months to transcribe the 1031 bars of Tarka into Sibelius. This is a marvellous scoring program. He created a digital master score which he used to generate performance scores for all the instruments.
The master score is up to 32 staves. Below is a brief excerpt of just 4 bars, 9 staves deep. This might give you an insight into the complexity of the work.
Tarka World Premiere rehearsals
In August Gerald Keuneman, conductor of The Whitehorse Orchestra took the scores and rehearsals began. The preparations generated much excitement amongst various Melbourne musicians. For many weeks we met in a community hall and gradually the scores became familiar as musicians became more accustomed to their parts. The contrast with the original orchestral recording, which had taken just one day in London with a couple of rehearsals for the most difficult sections, could not be overstated.
Concert + guest musicians
Internationally renowned guitarist Doug De Vries took the challenge of learning Anthony Philips’ parts for the Tarka World Premiere. Since these were written in obscure altered tunings, the work became intense and very detailed.
Anthony was unable to travel to Australia for the concert and so Harry and Doug became soloists with The Whitehorse Orchestra for the performance.
The music feast did not end there! – in the second half of the concert we featured other fine local artists.
- Kavisha Mazzella – acclaimed singer
- Invention In Time – Vibraphone and Marimba Duo
- Michael Johnson – Solo harpist
- Doug De Vries – Solo guitar
- Northern Voice Choir
Mary Crooks presented excerpts from the Watermark Book in between acts.
The Tarka World Premiere took place at The Melbourne Town Hall on Saturday 27th February 2010 at 2pm and again at 7.30pm. It was a long and eventful day, in the end Harry was both exhausted and exhilarated to finally perform the music that he and Anthony had so carefully crafted so many years earlier.
Two Open Tunings
Doug was an absolute champion, taking on the challenge of learning complex guitar parts using a rare and unusual open tuning, C# minor. Any experienced guitarist will tell you is a sort of exquisite torture – the process is very painful but the result is wonderful. Against that contrast my open tuning which is in G major. That is a tritone away.
There is something about two instruments working in two different open tunings, together, that confounds the mind but simultaneously creates organic complexity that no individual player can approach. We often created sections that sounded wonderful but neither of us had any real idea of why, until we painstakingly transcribed the notes one by one and analysed the actual counterpoint and harmony.
Tarka World Premiere Concert Film
We visited Tarka Country in 2009 in order to make a DVD of the places featured in the Book ‘Tarka the Otter’. Maribel projected the edited video during the concert.
I played second trumpet in that world premiere and it was the most wonderful experience in my thirty-plus years with the Whitehorse Orchestra.