Time Out Of Joint

Instrumentation: Brass Septet - 2 Bb trumpets; Eb Trumpet; 2 Tenor Trombones; Bass Trombone; Tuba

Composition date: 2020

Duration: 14 minutes

First performance: 25 October 2022 – University of Georgia Performing Arts Center, Athens, GA, USA

Time Out Of Joint, Sketches From Hamlet, was written during the 2020 lockdown. There are themes that represent Shakespeare's characters - Hamlet, Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude and Laertes - but my main focus was to give a feeling of the edginess, manoeuvring, lying and corruption that are woven into this extraordinary play. For me, these underlying feelings - "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" - suggested elements of what we lived through in lockdown. The first movement is mainly concerned with Hamlet (a four note ascending whole tone scale), his relationship with Claudius (usually a slyly scheming trill or a decending fifth), and how that relates to Polonius, Gertrude and Ophelia (a three quaver major third motif). The second movement brings to the fore Ophelia's theme, a sometimes gentle, sometimes nervous addition or juxtaposition to Hamlet's theme. The third movement has plenty of bold, aggressive posturing but utimately ends in desolation, the final trumpet note fading away to nothing.

Peter Walton, August 2020