The Mazed Earth (2020): Sonata for Piano — Doug Buist (United Kingdom)
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, scene 1)
I’ve realised that I am old enough to have noticed that the world has changed. That there are things (plants, animals, weather patterns) I remember that are not the same or no longer there. The first movement, Preludes, is an elegy for the places we’ve lost and our memories of them. It was actually another line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my mind as I started this movement: ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows’. The movement is built from bits of ‘recycled’ Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin nocturnes, combined with what I think of as the ‘wild thyme theme’, a melody that oscillates between modality and atonality.
Scherzos, the second movement, represents our destructive impact on the planet. Musically in this movement we start to notice fragmentation, the sense of the piece starting to pull itself apart despite the thrilling rush. In October 2019, our family visited my wife’s home state of South Australia. Standing in the Barossa Valley one day we both said how unusually dry the ground felt, with some nervousness. A few weeks later enormous bushfires ripped across the east of the country burning 18 million hectares of land, destroying communities with the cost of 450 human lives, and a still unknown devastating impact on billions of Australia’s unique wildlife. These fires are a direct result of human interventions on the ecosystem.
The last movement, Passacaglias, is designed to be (approximately) 58% the length of the first movement; this is the extent to which, according to NASA, the Arctic ice cap has shrunk since 1979. It is broken down into eight short sub-sections, as if each is simultaneously floating off and frozen in time. There is a small note of hope. Much of the piece was written during ‘lockdown’ in 2020 – not in itself a cause of hope – when in our cities we started to see air pollution fall and bees flourish again. It demonstrates that we could reclaim our planet if we wanted, and we hear the ‘wild thyme theme’ tentatively start to regrow.
Doug Buist was born in Chelmsford, Essex, UK in 1975. He studied music at Oxford University and Reading University. He now lives in London, UK. He continues to compose alongside a career working for leading arts organisations, political activism and bringing up his two young sons.
His compositions have been performed by Capricorn, New Noise (Janey Miller and Joby Burgess) and others, as well as creating a number of soundtracks for theatre and film projects.
Ann DuHamel 