Invocation began life as a Christmas work for SSA choir and commissioned by Sarah Poole, the composer's wife, for a concert in December 2016. The choral version is wordless and the slow moving harmonies and sound world lends itself well to the double bass trio, also playable by massed basses.
David Heyes writes: "The piece was for female voices only (SSA) and I decided to use recurring cells of melody, but with a hidden drone of the note 'A' held throughout but passed from voice to voice. Most bars were repeated to create a mesmeric and chant-like effect, the short musical motifs were shared and eventually the music drifted away to a unison 'A' which gradually faded away to silence. The piece has no text and was called 'A Christmas Garland' and is dedicated to Sarah. I knew that it would work for double bass trio and set about transcribing it a fifth lower. Now centered around D minor, but with a flattened 7th, it worked beautifully for basses and I was able to add an occasional open D string to ground the piece and also to use high octave D's to add height. Admittedly my students thought their bowing arms were about to drop off by the end of the first play-through, but I was so pleased with the new arrangement which has already been played in Britain, America and Spain. In February I conducted a massed bass orchestra performance, and the larger forces allow bassists to occasionally relax for a bar, and it was a great success with many wonderful comments about the performance and the piece afterwards. It was rechristened 'Invocation' and I quite liked the meaning as "an incantation used to invoke a deity or the supernatural".
Invocation was premiered on Sunday 13 November 2016 at Wells & Mendip Museum (Wells, Somerset) by Alex Heather, David Heyes and Jan Cowell, as part of the Wells Double Bass Academy workshop. It was also played at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester on the same day and received its US premiere in Los Angeles on 8 December 2016. The Spanish premiere was performed by massed basses, directed by the composer, at the Conservatorio de Culleredo (Galicia) on Sunday 19 February 2017.
"Invocation is gorgeous in its simplicity and promoted an interesting discussion about how to make a performance flow." [Gemma Ashcroft]
David has been Specialist Double Bass Tutor at Wells Cathedral School for 20 years and received a prestigious award from the David Walter Charitable Trust of New York for his pioneering activities as a soloist, teacher, publisher and commissioner of new music for double bass. He works with composers throughout the world and is particularly interested to expand the double bass repertoire, by commissioning new works and by rediscovering forgotten ones. Over the past 30 years he has commissioned more than 500 works, from beginner to virtuoso, and from one to twenty basses.
David has transcribed more than 200 works for double bass, many published by Recital Music, and in recent year has also composed a number of original works for double bass which have been performed in Britain, America, Venezuela, Turkey, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Ecuador and Czech Republic. David is self-taught as a composer and his music has been described as lyrical, evocative and accessible, but certainly of the 21st-century. He was Featured Composer at the 2017 Galicia Graves Double Bass Competition & Festival in Spain and recorded an entire CD of his own works [No Man's Land] for Prima Facie Records in January 2017.
