Symphony No 1 for Orchestra and Turntables

Symphony No.1 is A three movement piece for Orchestra and Turntables by Jeremy Mayall. This piece is the first orchestral symphony to use the techniques of turntablism.

Notes from composer

This is taken from the intro to the score for the piece:

The idea behind this piece came to me about 3 years ago. I had always wanted to write a symphony, but I wanted to do something different. I had been dj-ing for about a year at this point and thought that it would be a novel idea to put together an orchestra with a turntablist. I kept thinking about this idea, running through in my mind how the two quite different musical sounds could work together as a cohesive unit. The idea to create a symphony with a hip hop flavour seemed to be the most logical idea, being that it is within Hip Hop that the idea of turntablism (as a musical art form) has developed.

So this piece attempts to look at the beginning of Hip Hop. The opening of the piece is with drums. The reason for this is that a lot of hip hop is rooted in the drum beat. That is where the essence of the music comes from (in fact some of the more recent hip hop releases have just been a drum beat and a rapper). The drums then are replaced by the brass family. The reason for giving the brass section such a key part in this piece, is that the musical styles from which hip hop draws its inspiration are jazz, soul and funk – all of which use a lot of brass instruments.

The other key part to this whole piece is the turntable. When writing for this instrument, I didn’t want to merely have it sound as though there is a turntable scratching over top of an orchestra. I wanted the turntable part to weave in and around the orchestra so as to merge musically with them, through the use of rhythm, and extended instrument techniques with the turntable and orchestra trying to imitate the sounds of each other – in particular the violin, because it is capable of playing microtones easily, and the ability to achieve a ‘scratchy’ type sound.

The second movement looks at the ability of the turntable to play melodically. So through out this movement the turntable is playing along with the other instruments within the same harmonic and melodic structure. This is achieved by using the tempo slider to speed up or slow down the speed of the turntable, and thus adjust the pitch of the sound. This movement also looks at the smoother more melodic parts of hip hop.

The 3rd Movement opens with the Turntable scratching up a phrase “this is a journey into sound”. I chose this phrase because the turntable plays with sound, and also because the 3rd movement looks at the newest era of hip hop, with the using of more different sounds as well as pitched notes to create the instrumentals. This movement again has a large amount of percussion – particularly drums, because of their importance in terms of the modern hip hop sound (there have been a number of new releases which are mainly drums, noises and voice)

Instrumentation

*"Piccolo"
*"2 Flutes"
*"2 Oboes"
*"Cor Anglais"
*"2 Clarinets (Bb)"
*"Bass Clarinet"
*"2 Bassoons"
*"Contrabassoon"
*"4 Horns (F)"
*"3 Trumpets (C)"
*"2 Trombones"
*"Bass Trombone"
*"Tuba"
*"Timpani"
*"Percussion:-"
**"Mvt1: (Bass Drum, 5 RotoToms, Tam-Tam, 3 Tomtoms, Triangle)"
**"Mvt2: (Suspended Cymbal, Tam-Tam, Triangle, Tubular Bells, Glockenspiel)"
**"Mvt3: (Bass Drum, 5 RotoToms, Snare Drum, Tam-Tam, 3 Tomtoms, Woodblock)"
*"Turntables"
*"Strings"

Duration:
*"Mvt1: c. 6’30”"
*"Mvt2: c. 5’00”"
*"Mvt3: c. 4’20”"