Hilltop is back in the symphony business! Below, you can hear the long-delayed completion of the last (fourth) movement of my new third symphony. Scroll down or read your way there. This mockup is virtual but sounds pretty realistic and is paired with some images, by request, but for me it seems better just to listen, since the only images I found feel a bit random with the music. The recording with live orchestra, set for this September 7 and 8, will of course sound better on the album to be released in early 2025.

But first, the dust is still settling from the ballet. There have been more lovely reviews, including one in the Wall Street Journal, (pdf of article: wsj.com-Raffaella Review An Enchanted Elegy) and more beautiful photos emerging. The one directly below was taken when snow came down on the stage; zoom in if you can’t see the snow. It seems from the continuing posts and messages I’m seeing that many of our ballet cast and production family are going through the same nostalgia or maybe even something like a post-holiday let-down that I have been feeling. No one wanted it to end! Or maybe it was all a dream.

Wow, there’s a lot of flying through the air in this ballet! But how can there already be a whole new massive symphony for 92-piece orchestra from the ballet’s composer? I should explain that around a year ago, during the time I was composing the ballet, I was getting a bit too far ahead on it. Our choreographer had not even been hired. So our ballet producer asked me to take a break from composing until a choreographer was on board, in order for that person to work together with me on the story outline.

A wonderful choreographer, Claire Kretzschmar, renowned from the New York City Ballet, was eventually engaged. Over the course of many very enjoyable phone calls, we hashed the story and my music out into fifteen scenes in two acts. Voilà.

But that break from ballet composing turned out to be around six months or more, and I could not sit idle from composing for so long. I had previously been planning to write a new four-movement symphony, my third. (I had written other orchestral music, just not pieces with “symphony” in the title.)

See, more flying! And just during this break, symphony music seemed to be flooding uncontrollably into my mind. That six-month break from the ballet left me with time to write three movements of my new symphony. I eventually posted all three of those, and will put all four of them on a web page soon, with a link here.

Then, somehow between the last ballet pieces, I wrote most of the symphony’s fourth movement. The first thing I did upon returning home from the ballet premiere was dive into finishing that movement, and I finally finished it yesterday! As for the ballet music, my hope is also to find funding CLICK HERE to record it as an album with the same orchestra in the future.

So, below is the completed fourth movement, lasting fifteen minutes. All four movements together will be over fifty minutes long. This is longer than any symphony by Beethoven, Brahms, or Sibelius and a little bit longer than almost all symphonies by Dvorak and Vaughan-Williams. But it is shorter than any symphony by the late Romantics Mahler and Bruckner. Fifteen minutes may feel much longer than fifteen to those who do not listen to symphonies regularly. Ironically, time will seem to pass faster and the music will be much more enjoyable if you do not try to multitask while listening and just let yourself get caught up in the music’s own story.

This symphony as a whole is subtitled “English,” and this new fourth movement is titled “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest.” That is a real and very famous tree in Sherwood Forest, the largest tree in England, dating around a thousand years old with a trunk thirty-three feet wide. I have used some photos of it in the video below, but as I said above, you’ll get more emotion from the music alone.

Like the other movements, this music does sound more emotional than its merely scenic title and these photos might suggest. But just think — What sadness, love, and joy this ancient tree must have witnessed for centuries in the conversations of passers by! What songs of wandering English minstrels it may have heard! And, fancifully, since this tree is in the real Sherwood Forest, how can it not contain a few whiffs of Robin Hood and Maid Marian? Yet, all of these are only fragrances and hints of fleeting moments of music. In the end, this music is “absolute,” not “programmatic,” meaning it does not attempt to tell any specific non-musical story. But it does have a musical narrative in its form that I believe can take you on a journey of the mind, without words.

For those familiar with my second symphony, subtitled “Tales from the Realm of Faerie,” we are still in Merrie England here and still in the land of imagination, but no longer in fairyland. This symphony mostly has what musicians call bread-and-butter (straightforward melodic) playing, such as you might hear in a symphony by Brahms, Sibelius, or Vaughan Williams. Composing, for me, is still a mysterious thing – I hear it playing in my head from who knows where. Sometimes I sing along and somehow lose myself in it and lose myself in my early-childhood sense of wonder. Then, when I’m done, I really don’t know where that music came from. I’m sure I will go to my grave never knowing. I do hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and please do pre-order my Symphony No. 3: English album on Amazon around December. (Pre-orders can help an album make the Billboard charts.)