John Young

Lieu-Temps contains two works that John Young composed in 2005 at De Montfort University in Leicester, both in 5.1 surround and both rooted in Forlì, the northern Italian city where his mother was born. There, in 1944, she met his father, a soldier of the New Zealand Division of the 8th Army. Young first visited Forlì in 2002 with his father, and the bells heard from Piazza Aurelio Saffi struck him as voices from the past, a sound others had heard with the same immediacy through dark times.

Ricordiamo Forlì, 53 minutes long, tells the family story: his parents meeting in a farmhouse at Malmissole, and the day his mother asked to see “the New Zealand soldier” instead of visiting her sister, whose apartment block was bombed at that hour. Young calls it part documentary, part radiophony and part electroacoustic drama. It combines his own recordings from three trips to Forlì, war correspondence reports from Radio New Zealand and the BBC archives, an interview with his father Alex Young, the narration of Franco Bianchini, his mother Tarcisia Young reciting Giosuè Carducci’s Pianto Antico, and the kiss theme from Verdi’s Otello on an out-of-tune upright piano. It won first prize for programme music at the 34th Bourges competition in 2007.

Arrivederci, in memory of his mother, takes a 15th-century bell of the Forlì Duomo as its core sound, filtered and convolved so that it can be retuned to the harmony of seven instruments. The flutist intones E E Cummings’s poem n// OthI across the mouthpiece. The ensemble Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich, premiered it in Wellington in 2006 and recorded it there in 2007.

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1962, John Young studied with John Cousins and then with Denis Smalley, taught at Victoria University of Wellington and joined De Montfort University in 2000, where he is Professor of Composition.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0787, 2007.