O flower of fire
Hannah Kendall was born in 1984 in London and lives in New York City. In 2021 the London Symphony Orchestra and the Staatstheater Hannover commissioned the work that would become O flower of fire. She completed the orchestral score in 2023, and the piece was premiered by Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra on October 2, 2023, at Barbican Centre, London. First American performances: October 24-26, 2024, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Sir Antonio Pappano conducting.
The score for O flower of fire calls for 2 flutes, alto flute (doubling harmonicas—see below), 3 oboes (3rd doubling harmonicas), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet and harmonicas), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling harmonicas), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: glockenspiel, 10 tuned gongs, suspended cymbal, 2 ratchets, 2 tambourines, 2 side drums, cabasa, bass drum, 12 harmonicas, music boxes: 3 playing “Amazing Grace,” 3 playing the “Blue Danube” Waltz, 3 playing “Für Elise,” 3 playing “Ode to Joy,” 3 playing Swan Lake), 2 prepared harps, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
The Boston Symphony Orchestra first performed Hannah Kendall’s music in 2021, videorecording her Disillusioned Dreamer for the orchestra’s BSO Now streaming programs during the pandemic-altered 2020-2021 season. The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra performed it in July 2021. In October 2023, the BSO and Andris Nelsons performed her orchestral work The Spark Catchers in concerts surveying the five Beethoven piano concertos. In the U.S., her work has also been performed by such ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has worked with European ensembles including Klagforum Wien and Ensemble Modern, as well as having works performed at the Lucerne, Donaueschingen, and Berlin music festivals. Kendall’s work is performed frequently by major British ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Chineke! Orchestra, which premiered The Spark Catchers at the BBC Proms in 2017.
London, in particular the Wembley area in northwest London where Kendall grew up, figures deeply in the composer’s perspective on music, art, and communication. Her parents were Guyanese immigrants to England. She has described her mother, a primary school teacher, as her strongest influence in convincing her of her own capabilities, independent of her chosen life path. Her early musical training included piano and voice; she studied vocal performance as well as music composition as an undergraduate at the University of Exeter. She went on to the Royal College of Music for her master’s degree in composition. Her teachers included Joe Duddell at Exeter and Ken Hesketh at the RCM. She also holds a master’s degree in arts management from the Royal Welsh College of Music and has worked extensively in that field. As a teacher, she worked with young students at the Junior Royal Academy of Music. She earned her doctorate in composition from Columbia University.
Wembley is a culturally vibrant area known for its demographically diverse population embracing South Asian, East Asian, Caribbean, White European, Black African, and other heritages. Kendall’s work and collaborations reflect and explore this blending and dynamic interaction of cultures via “creolization,” which is manifest in music whose sonic sources and stylistic content reflect the wonderful possibilities of her own real and human world. Creolization in contemporary music, a concept fleshed out by one of Kendall’s mentors, George Lewis, aims for a balancing of both individual and collective voices to revitalize, enrich, and expand the possibilities of Eurocentric classical music.
Kendall’s immersion in broad narratives of the African diaspora are a powerful presence in her work. She has sought out similar creolized approaches in literature, visual art, and other cultural media, which provide the direct impulses for individual pieces. Her “Tuxedo” series of works takes its cues from imagery and texts in the Jean-Michel Basquiat print assemblage by that name, with its multilevel, coded iconography. Her 2018 orchestral work Verdala references the name of a ship carrying the British West Indian Regiment to the theater of battle in World War I. Her Spark Catchers was triggered by a poem by the poet Lemn Sissay about the women and conditions behind the 1888 Bow Matchwoman’s Strike—a dynamically physical subject steeped in matters of social inequity, the labor movement, and feminism, among many other things. The importance of visual and literary imagery as a partner to music is at the center of Kendall’s 2017 chamber opera The Knife of Dawn. Its single role is the Guyanese poet and activist Martin Carter (1927-1997), on a hunger strike while incarcerated by the British government during protests advocating for his country’s independence.
O flower of fire revisits Martin Carter’s poetry, specifically a text that touches on the complex political and religious fabric that makes up Guyanese culture, his poem “Voices.” In writing about her piece prior to the London world premiere, Kendall related,
The inspiration for O flower of fire comes from a poem called Voices by Martin Carter, a Guyanese Caribbean poet and political activist whose works I have come back to many, many times. That’s because a lot of my recent research has been on invocation in music and on the plantations, in particular, and the coming together of many different faiths in those situations. In the poem itself, Carter is exploring many different creation stories—Christianity, Yoruba, and other ancient and indigenous faiths of Guyana. There are substantial indigenous communities there. And so it worked really well with what I’ve been trying to do through my music recently. That is, trying to explore syncretic situations, which essentially means the transformative results of what happens when many different people, communities and faiths come together in one place.
Hannah Kendall’s instrumental music is already notable for its attention to color and sonority; even her solo piano works are distinctive in the transparency and luminosity of their textures and harmonies. In keeping with the symbolism and sonic realities of creolization, Kendall often also calls for expansion of the traditional European concert music sound-world, as is the case in O flower of fire. The piece requires fifteen music boxes playing excerpts from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Für Elise and “Ode to Joy,” Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube Waltz, plus the English hymn “Amazing Grace.” In context, these are scarcely identifiable individually, but create a texture simultaneously familiar and beyond our grasp; importantly, the sources are European “classics.”
Countering this is Kendall’s requirement of harmonicas, a sound central to the Afro-diasporic “blues,” though, again, by asking each player (a flute, a clarinet, and percussion) to play concurrently three harmonicas in different keys, specificity of gesture or figure is defeated, leaving just a hint of the world of the blues. Other players within the orchestra play non-standard sounds, e.g., multiphonics (more than one note at a time) in brass instruments, oboists playing two mouthpieces at once (without the oboes), the alto flutist playing just the head joint of a regular flute. Kendall also calls for dreadlock or locs cuffs—small, cylindrical, often ornamental hair restrictors—to modify (that is, “creolize”) the sound of the two harps. While any similar object could work as well, the symbolism of using artifacts associated with a primarily Black hairstyle resonates with the work’s underlying narrative. She also calls for mini claw-type plastic hair clips and recommends Afro combs for strumming the harp strings.
These harp sounds combine with gongs to create the slightly unfocused resonance of the opening of O flower of fire, to which Kendall appends a phrase from Carter’s poem, “the strange dissolution of shape into spirit.” Such quotations accompany many (but not all) of the work’s prominent changes of texture and intensity. The title of the piece as a whole is from the line, “O flower of fire in a wide vase of air / come back, come back to the house of the world” which occurs twice in the twenty-line, three-stanza poem. Although to link them too closely to any description of this music would be misleadingly restrictive, the other textual indicators Kendall cites provide a further sense of Carter’s striking imagery: “the whole sky is dying,” “Scarlet stone is the jewel of death / to be found in the sand when the ocean is dry.”
From O flower of fire’s harp-and-gong opening, the music expands to all corners of the orchestra in a long, varied passage appended with the phrase “oceans of memory sinking in sand.” Flickering high flutes, aggressive surges of low brass and strings bring dark, portentous energy. The harps, playing both pitched figures and unpitched percussive and buzzing sounds, recur in exposed passages at several points in the piece, acting as sonic signposts or triggers for changes of direction. Simultaneously disruptive and calming, Kendall’s use of the harmonicas in isolation—a wonderfully glistening sound—and of the layered music boxes also refocus the ear after the periods of particular intensity that mark various climaxes within the work’s several episodes. Kendall’s sonic landscape—intense though it may be on occasion—is luxuriant, multidimensional, and evocative, mirroring and amplifying Carter’s poetic language as a way of engaging with an evolving and nuanced world.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.