At the beginning of the first English Civil War in 1642, the city of Worcester declared its allegiance to the crown, and requisitioned its cathedral to store arms for royalist forces. While the long-time organist at Worcester, Thomas Tomkins, was a royalist and supported the city’s politics, this particular move put him out of a job by ending cathedral services during the conflict, and attracted the ire of Parliamentarian forces to the cathedral. As a 70-year old widower he was in no position to uproot his life, so for the next twelve years he stayed in his apartments on the College Green next to the cathedral. The conflict would eventually lead to the destruction of his house (which would be rebuilt) and his beloved organ for which he oversaw fundraising and construction forty years prior. Confined to his immediate surroundings and later when his second wife died, to his thoughts, Tomkins produced a steady stream of keyboard and consort music, some of the finest we’ve inherited from this time. This music is of a much earlier style, the style that was in vogue in his 20s when he studied with William Byrd, a time which for Tomkins must have seemed infinitely more secure and hopeful than his precarious situation later in life. Pining for a time and place to which he could never return, he manifested his desires through music.

For obvious reasons I was, until very recently and for quite a while, prevented from returning home to America. ‘Swell’ is the last music I wrote before heading back. I was excited, to see my friends and family, to reconnect with my old teachers and favourite restaurants, and to see my city again. On the final leg of the trip, a train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, the nostalgia was almost overwhelming at times. When I arrived, I saw all the familiar things but with a new sinister tint: the racism that I witnessed but didn’t notice, the homophobia that I experienced but didn’t mention, the nationalism which had since spilled over into a socially acceptable politics of hate, and a particular unwillingness to sacrifice anything for the sake of the future of the planet that I associate with white suburbia. But it’s still home, and even now I find myself yearning for the nights I spent driving through back roads with my friends listening to Mika and wishing I could get out of there.

Gabriella Smith imagines a world in which the organum of Pérotin tessellates freely with American fiddling, with rock, with pop, with Bach, and maybe, just maybe, with the sound of a carrot being grated. Her fascination with ‘intersecting planes of sound’ and the magic of drawing unexpected connections between different places and times encourages us to see the potential connections between anything, and to understand the implicit connections between everything.

Much as Tomkins’s music looks back toward a happier past, Bohuslav Martinů’s Madrigals look forward to a happier future. In September 1945, Martinů received an invitation to become a professor of composition at the Prague Conservatoire, a job he eagerly accepted. He’d come to America a few years previously to avoid World War II, but was keen to return home to Czechoslovakia. No confirmation came from Prague. Increasingly impatient with America, he decided to go to Paris without confirmation of his position in Prague, but a week before leaving, Serge Koussevitzky asked him to delay his departure to teach a course at Tanglewood that summer. He obliged once he saw the pay, and his wife left for Europe, planning to meet him when he finished at Tanglewood. But on July 25th 1946, he fell off the balcony of his accommodation, cracking his skull and falling into a coma. Bedridden, forbidden by his doctors from travelling, and beset with medical bills, he urgently needed the stability of the Prague professorship to tide him over. Confirmation of his position finally came in November of 1946, and now relieved of the stress of financial insecurity and recovering his health, Martinů began to write again, beginning with the sunny Madrigals for violin and viola in anticipation of his return to his native Prague.

Tonight’s music was written imagining a time before, or a time to come, or a time whose borders redefine the conventional order of things. We invite you join the composers and performers in taking part in that visit to another place or time.