Unforgetting Justin Connolly

Tesserae C, for solo cello, op. 15/3 (1971)

Triad V, for violin, clarinet and cello, op. 19 (1971)

Ceilidh, for four violins, op. 29/1 (1976)

Celebratio super Ter in lyris Leo, for three violas and accordion, op. 29/2 (1994-5)

Collana, for solo cello, op. 29/3 (1995)

Gymel-B, for clarinet and cello, op. 39/2 (1995)

Celebratio per viola sola, op. 29/4 (2005)

String Trio, op. 43 (2009-10)

In connection with the first performances of Collana, Justin wrote me an unusually lengthy letter exploring elements of the creative process that would normally have been ‘lost’ to the rehearsal room. Although the piece had been written in close conversation, with the cello actively in play through much of it, the final ‘assembly’ before the premiere took place when it was impossible to meet in person for a run through. The letter ‘idealises’ what that rehearsal might have been from Justin’s perspective, exploring the psychology and choreography of performance in detail as it relates to the specific features of the piece (and more broadly) and the limits and possibilities of notation. It will be the subject of a journal article, to be assembled at the end of the project, exploring specific dimensions of the composer-performer relationship and ramifications through time.

In a 1988 interview Pierre Boulez spoke about the British music that interested him during what he described as ‘golden years’ in London. He named only five composers (with Britten and Tippett notable for their absence). Justin Connolly’s place in that list is striking given the almost complete absence of his music from the public stage in recent years. This double disc recording project aims to provide a point of reference for performers, audiences and musicologists for Connolly’s conceptually rigorous, highly lyrical, deeply virtuosic, and sometimes curiously playful music (I can’t yet show you the cover image…).

The recordings for this project took place during 2024 and will be released in 2025. Justin died in 2020, and Nicolas Hodges (dedicatee of Connolly’s Piano Concerto and Professor at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart) has been a driving force behind work with Novello to publish properly set scores of all of Connolly’s music. His advocacy has been an inspiration for the project and his editorial work formed an essential component in preparing the material. Several of the pieces were performed and recorded in side-by-side projects with Academy students, with the aim of introducing a new generation to detailed engagement with high modernism and strategies for performer-led recording.

Connolly was an inspirational teacher at the Academy from 1989-1996, and a deeply curious and collaborative colleague. His knowledge of and enthusiasm for repertoire well outside the mainstream was legendary, and his sharp intellectual engagement with every dimension of music making, from the most abstruse to the most pragmatic, was matched with a wonderfully generous and open spirit. My colleagues and I have enjoyed capturing his special sensibility by recording the following pieces for the first time.

Despite their difficulty – or perhaps because of it – many of these pieces were written for performers early in their careers. The music is often virtuosic in both senses of the word – demanding intense intellectual engagement to internalize the complex and constantly evolving materials, and also great physical dexterity and fluency. Collana (1995) was written for me, and Tesserae C (1971) for Ralph Kirshbaum, when we were in our 20s. But the most striking story in this respect is Ceilidh (1976), a commission from the Menuhin School, which Connolly chose to dedicate to its first performers (in their late teens) rather than the commissioner. It was premiered at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC (and also performed in the US for President Gerald Ford and Queen Elizabeth II).

Although the project does not explicitly seek to answer the question of why this extraordinary music slipped from public consciousness, it aims to address that problem directly, and to offer to musicians of the future a ‘way in’ to understanding the special attributes of Connolly’s music (and more widely, some of the aspirations of the modernism of that period).