Urdance - Part 1. A Dialogue

I was in my early thirties and clearing out my father’s study. Dad had a bibliographer’s sensibility, and although there appeared to be no structure to his dusty, ephemeral chaos, discernible patterns —-- which must have been crystal clear to him —- began to reveal themselves as my sorting and sifting deepened.

Dad’s study (post tidying!)

As I worked and started to discover the syntax behind his disorder, a dialogue developed between us, my dead father and me, one quite unlike any previous conversation we’d had, at times illuminating, often frustrating, and strangely, sometimes disquietingly, intimate.

Last year, faced with my brother’s belongings, I found no such ordering behind the teetering piles of paper he left behind and no distinction between an unopened shrink-wrapped catalogue, a similarly sealed royalty cheque, or anything more valuable. Fragments of scores, handwritten thoughts on performance technique and family photographs appeared randomly scattered between National Trust magazines and bank statements.

Francis had died days before, his death forming an interval between two acts of house cleaning and clearing: the first a hurried attempt to repurpose a cluttered downstairs room stuffed full of harpsichords, clavichords and synthesisers into a bedroom so that he could spend his final days (it was only one night as it happened) at home; the other; a sadder, less hurried attempt to sift through the remaining clutter, but one that, over several months and helped by his friends, proved increasingly cathartic.

Amongst all the trivial questions that arose as we sifted —- "What on earth is this?", "Why did he keep that?" —- there were moments of genuine levity, too. Five vacuums, plus a robotic one, as well as a colossal steam cleaner, unopened in its original Amazon box (postmarked 2012), pointed towards Francis’s unfulfilled desire to impose cleanliness, if not order, on his environment. The material reality he left behind him spoke eloquently of a man whose efforts lay elsewhere, and it was towards one of these accomplishments that my attention was primarily focused.

A detectorist’s sense of hope developed in me as I looked for the glint of gold amidst the detritus, but the prospect of success appeared slim. I knew that the cache I was searching for would manifest either as a series of dusty floppy disks or a bundle of dog-eared papers and so would be almost indistinguishable amongst the chaotic jumble. As the days wore on and order and floorspace began to emerge, I acknowledged that one central question I had for my dead brother would have to remain unanswered: 'What ever happened to Urdance?'

Two years ago, Francis and I had sat together in my small garden in Coxwold and talked about resurrecting the work, a four-movement piece he’d composed for synthesiser and orchestra. First performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 8 March 1987 by the Schoenberg Symphony Orchestra (conductor, Richard Gonski), Urdance had subsequently been performed a handful of times, but no studio recording had ever been made. We both felt that it was one of his most compelling works and deserved to be resurrected.

Francis Monkman c 1982

The piece had always had a particular emotional resonance for me. My teenage years in North Yorkshire were punctuated by brief forays to London, where I'd spend time with Francis. He had a studio in the basement of his house in Narcissus Road, dominated by a Synclavier, an early —- and wonderful sounding —- digital synthesiser on which, in 1982, he made a demo of a short sequence from what would become the fourth movement of Urdance. Sitting in the dark of his studio, it was one of the most extraordinary things my young ears had ever heard. It excited a sense of otherwordly possibility in me. In many ways, it still does.

Francis had always described the piece as ‘an internal ballet’ or a ‘ballet of the mind’, and I suspect, in his head, there was never a simple sonic distinction between the synthesiser parts and the orchestral ones. Referring back to the original demo, we discussed bringing Urdance back to life as a purely electronic work. Whatever the eventual form that conversation might have led to had he lived, Urdance’s renaissance would clearly have been an act of creative revision, reworking and rethinking.

Francis believed that the only trace of the work, beyond an uneven live recording from a performance at The Guildhall School of Music, might lie in old sequenced files on Atari floppy disks from the 1980s. He was going to look them out, and I was going to try and find a working Atari ST to read them from, but time passed, and neither of us ever got around to moving the idea forward.

He didn’t mention that a handwritten score might still exist somewhere, so I had little reason to expect to find the work in manuscript form. As his friends and I sorted through the household junk, we did find numerous scores and parts for works as eclectic as a reworking of Sky's FIFO for organ, a 2012 arrangement of Antonio de Cabezón’s Tiento de Cuatro for orchestra, and an old photocopied ‘score’ for Terry Riley's in C, which a teenage Francis had performed in its first UK performance on 18 May 1968 at the Royal Institute Galleries by the Music Now Ensemble, directed by Cornelius Cardew.

We also found innumerable floppy disks, but none contained files relating to Urdance. The house had been almost entirely cleared by the time we moved our attention to the garage, which, piled floor to ceiling with detritus, had, despite its considerable size, never had room left over to house Francis’s car.

It was there, in a partially mouse-eaten plastic carrier bag, nestled between discarded car tyres and the skeletons of half-assembled synthesisers, that I found it. Or rather, found them. First, a full score, photocopied from an original manuscript and annotated by hand and then, a cup or two of celebratory tea later, another complete unannotated version.

A page from the handwritten Urdance score

Fittingly, Richard Gonski, the piece’s original conductor, was on hand that day; he’d been helping with the sifting and shifting when the discovery was made. That evening, as we wearily reviewed our day’s work, the adrenalin of the search reconstituted itself as a series of questions, each of us with our ideas about what Francis might want us to do with the piece in his absence. Whatever the detail, we shared a commitment to exploring the possibility of bringing Urdance back to life.

Now, several months on, we've begun working together in earnest to make this happen, but many questions remain unanswered. I plan to use this space to raise some of those, to chart our progress and to invite collaborative voices from those who either knew Francis and/or experienced one of the few performances of Urdance. Richard and I instinctively knew that working together on this would be a pleasure, and it's already proving so. The problem is Francis. Or rather his absence. How does one even begin to collaborate with the dead?