Chris Swithinbank

June Un­fold­ing was writ­ten for a con­cert mark­ing the 750th An­niver­sary of Mac­cles­field’s Royal Char­ter given by King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety in June 2011. Faced with the length of time in ques­tion — an unimag­in­able du­ra­tion, the change dur­ing which is dif­fi­cult to fathom — it was a chal­lenge to re­spond in a mean­ing­ful way. As time passes we for­get and our mem­o­ries are more and more like eroded stones or frag­mented ta­pes­tries where the weave has come un­done. What we read in a sin­gle thread be­comes its own imag­i­nary world that seems con­nected to the past. At var­i­ous points in June Un­fold­ing we come across frag­ments of and al­lu­sions to other music, each time ab­stracted and trans­formed, in a nod to the idea of eroded mem­ory.

Fol­low­ing two work­shops with the or­ches­tra in Jan­u­ary 2011 play­ing with open scor­ing meth­ods using graphic no­ta­tion and di­rected im­pro­vi­sa­tion, the fin­ished work plays with the idea of ‘un­fold­ing’ as a way of or­gan­is­ing the sound. Maps are a way to lay out in­for­ma­tion about enor­mous spaces in a way that is quickly un­der­stood. As we un­fold a map we un­cover fields, forests, cities, streets and the strangely rit­u­alised shapes of human habi­ta­tion, bit by bit, piece by piece. With time we can grad­u­ally delve into sound, un­fold­ing and un­rav­el­ling its parts to find the threads that had been woven tightly. In music we map out time with sound, plac­ing land­marks to lead us through a land­scape we are often only dimly aware of.

Above all, ‘un­fold­ing’ sug­gests a process of the now. Music ex­ists in time, and it is as the work un­folds that we ap­pre­hend it, re­mem­ber it, for­get it and play with it in our minds. In a sense, all music is a play of re­mem­ber­ing and for­get­ting, so per­haps there is no bet­ter com­mem­o­ra­tive medium than that which over the du­ra­tion of its ex­is­tence com­mem­o­rates it­self.

June Un­fold­ing was de­vel­oped for King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety as part of the Adopt-a-Com­poser scheme, funded by the PRS for Music Foun­da­tion and run by Sound and Music in as­so­ci­a­tion with Mak­ing Music. Thank you to all the play­ers of the or­ches­tra of King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety and es­pe­cially to con­duc­tor Tony Houghton and chair­man Tim Ward who were im­mensely sup­port­ive through­out the process.

June Un­fold­ing was first per­formed on 18 June 2011 and recorded by BBC Radio 3.