O Dreamland

for piano and percussion. 8'
2024

first performed by the GBSR Duo on 28 July 2024 in Worcester Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival

2024 marks the year Steve Martland would have been seventy years old but also thirty years since the death of the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson. Such was Martland’s affection for Anderson’s realist cinema that he wrote a commemorative Pavane after the filmmaker died in 1994. When thinking about these two figures, I could not help see the tension between Anderson’s cinematic critique of the Southern seaside resort of Margate in O Dreamland of 1953 and the fact that Martland was born in the very contrasting industrial maritime city of Liverpool just a year later. The theme of the sea arose again for me when considering that Martland’s final work – Sea Songs (2011) – was based on sea shanties.

To draw these ideas together, I found the earliest recording of the sea song ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ (sung by Capt. Patrick Tayleur, 1942) and made a detailed transcription of this performance. Intriguing, however, is that the song exists in two different versions – both collected by William M. Doerflinger in New York City within a few years of each other – and so the other, better-known version as sung by a certain Richard Maitland is used in my piece as well. The final elements of the work are samples of Martland himself speaking in an interview from 2011. Recorded not long before his death, he speaks of his frustrations with the world, the value of Grade 5 music theory, and his hopes for the future.