Edward Dudley Hughes - Sun, new moon and women shouting
In the North Alaskan wilderness for over fifteen hundred years, the people of Tikigaq evolved an intricate system of rites to accompany their hunting. The poet Tom Lowenstein captured the astonishingly rich detail of ancient life in his book ‘Ancient Land: Sacred Whale’ (Bloomsbury, 1993). ‘Sun, New Moon and Women Shouting’ is a setting for six solo voices of a poetic sequence from that book (used by kind permission) concerning the cataclysmic moment after the winter solstice when the people greet the first sunrise of the year. In this ritual the men are joined by the women on the roofs of their iglus and compete to "catch" the sun. The music reflects the narrative structure of the verse, the arrival of the women with their children, and the recounting of myths by the storytellers.
David Matthews - Hurrahing in Harvest op.71
‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ is one of ten sonnets that Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1877 while studying for the priesthood at St Bueno’s Jesuit College in North Wales. He was ordained in September that year. The ecstatic nature of this and other well-known sonnets, including The Windhover and God’s Grandeur, testify to the fact that this was probably the happiest period of Hopkins’s life. Hopkins has always been one of my favourite poets. He was a musician as well as a poet, and he set some of his poetry to music himself. No other poet’s words, I think, make quite such a musical sound. For that reason he is hard to set; there sometimes seems nothing to add. This sonnet, however, has always suggested music to me, and I was glad to have the opportunity to write a setting for I Fagiolini in 1997. It is for six voices: two sopranos, alto, tenor, baritone and bass. The writing is richly harmonic and quite florid in places. ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ was commissioned by I Fagiolini with financial help from the Britten-Pears Foundation and was first performed by them at the Dartington International Summer School on 26 July 1997. Hurrahing in Harvest
(Gerald Manley Hopkins) I walk, I lift up, I
lift up heart, eyes, And the azurous hung hills
are his world-wielding shoulder Wanting; which two when
they once meet,
Music: Roderick Williams, Text & Concept: Timothy Knapman – Una parola nell’orrechio
Reconstructed from an anonymous Italian manuscript c.1590 I can’t speak for Roddy, but my own interest in reconstructing this curious piece – for many years known only from contemporary accounts and by its listing in the Codex of Proscribed Texts in the Vatican - was first piqued by the description I read by the English traveller Sir Thomas Hoby of a performance he witnessed in Venice in the late summer of 1597. The madrigal, on the face of it a conventional enough treatment of the theme of an ostler surprised in the act of persiflage, was famous in its day for the overpoweringly erotic effect it had on all who heard it, and Hoby (an avowed sensualist whose travels had already taken him from the infamous hen-fondlers of Newcastle-under-Lyme to the battery-operated seraglios of Azzi Guddah-Bi’gharz, the black-hearted highway chiropodist and by common consent the naughtiest man in Khartoum) was eager to experience it for himself. He was not to be disappointed. As he recorded in his journal the same night, the piece began quietly enough, but before long a very definite effect was making itself felt among his fellow audience members: “There’s no augury can tell upon whose breast the lecherous charm will light. Sith, nor the chastest Maid, nor the most uprighteous Justice, but at the pricking of its infernal measure feels the hornčd fingers of Satan himself pluck at her britches, and all the infernal combustions of aphrodisia teem within his codpiece.” Nor were the performers any less moved. Contemporary church court records list a number of singers convicted of “improper use of a thurible” - and one had gone so far as to “splay an apothecary” - during a rendition of “Una parola...” in Siena the very next month. Within five years the situation had got quite out of hand, and after a particularly riotous recital – during which the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan complained that he had been “goosed raw” - ignominy settled upon the piece and it was finally banned by the Papacy. It was thought lost forever until Professor Roberto Guano, the famous musicologist, turned up the remains of an unexpurgated copy of the text while cataloguing the private library of Father Enzo Norti. Norti was a noted antiquarian who had briefly served as a missionary to the notoriously libertine Bonki people of the Brazilian rainforest until a double hip-dislocation forced him to leave the church and pursue his second love, Mitzi Gaynor (who was too fast for him on both occasions). Though partially eaten by gnats, there was clearly enough of the manuscript extant to allow for a reconstruction that stood some chance of fealty to the original and Roddy and I set about this task with a will (which was later confiscated). The work was as enjoyable a collaboration as I have yet undertaken and the resulting edition has, we hope, restored one of the great lost masterpieces of late Renaissance music to its rightful place – on the concert platform. We cannot, alas, vouch for the piece’s continuing aphrodisiac effect, though there is some anecdotal evidence from the members of I Fagiolini who have performed it (one Tenor boasted of “a hormonal resurgence that’d make your eyes water”). Perhaps all one can say for certain is that “Una parola nell’orecchio...” is best enjoyed with the one you love and some reinforced posturepedic underwear. Timothy
Knapman
Daryl Runswick - LOBY
‘LOBY!’ (Look Out Behind You!) involves 5 groups of children led by Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini. It’s about a fly which gets eaten by a spider, which gets eaten by a bird.... all the way up to a Dragon. The children are required to make a series of sound effects, noises and screams, as well as to sing in canon. I Fagiolini support the children and intersperse a commentary of their own.
Daryl Runswick – Sarabande
Sarabande is one of a series of 6 works commissioned by The King of Hearts as a response to the Sarabande from Bach’s D minor Suite for cello: a piece I played as a boy. It takes the form of an improvised meditation on the nature of time. The text is a sonnet of my own which looks from today’s viewpoint at certain matters which must have concerned Bach as he wrote his Suites: for in one sense the dance, musically speaking, can be described as formalised time. For the first 12 lines of the sonnet I have composed everything except the melodies, which the singers improvise: but they may only sing the notes used by Bach in the first 8 bars of his Sarabande, and even these I often limit to just a few. Everything else I prescribe: the dynamics (loud or soft) the density of the texture, the tempo, the style, how long to spend on each line of text: even which particular singers perform each line. It is not intended that the singers ‘deliver the text’ in the traditional sense: rather, the piece is intended as an abstract musical meditation using the words of the poem as building blocks. The final couplet of the sonnet is composed in the traditional way. sarabande the hum, the tick, the
whirr, the turn, the stop, the bow: how to break free? - to
step an improvised sarabande impossible: Forever
retreats before Now, always one step ahead; Adrian Williams - Longing Songs (1989)
Commissioned for I Fagiolini by the Hereford Concert Society through West Midland Arts for a concert in Hereford, January 1989. Performed on numerous occasions, including BBC Radio’s Tuning Up programme in 1990 and a live Radio 3 recital in 1991. (Published by Eschig)
Ivan Moody - El Amor y la Sierra
‘El Amor y la Sierra’ is a suite of four Spanish poems, from various periods, dealing with love. The first, anonymous, is a lament speaking of the lover’s incurable sorrow and the cruelty of the loved one. Lorca’s ‘Gacela del Amor imprevisto’ (ghazel is an Arabic poetic form) is a potent distillation of a mystical Mozarabic vision connecting love and death, full of extraordinary, fantastic images. Gil Vicente’s poem is a more conventional praise of a lady, asking whether her beauty is not greater than the waves or the stars, and, indeed, any other thing on the earth. Machado’s ‘El Amor y la Sierra’, also ends with a vision of death in love: the mysterious apotheosis of this sequence in which the spiritual and the profane are fused.
Gabriel Jackson - Enjoyment (A Modern Madrigal)
‘Enjoyment (A Modern Madrigal)’ takes one of the most common subjects of 16th and 17th century madrigal literature - that of the innocent, suffering lover, an abject victim in thrall to the object of his love, the cruel, disdainful lady - and re-examines it from the perspective of the late 20th century. The combination of 16th and 17th century imagery and modern sentiment in the text is matched by music which employs various madrigalian techniques within a contemporary (post-modern?) tonal language. Gentle Angel, Gentle Child, Gentle Angel, Gentle Child, Tormentor, I have blamed you and loathed you. I have laughed at your misery. You, to whom judgement and mercy belong,
Ivan Moody - Darkness - The legend of Bluebeard
Though I have chosen to give this work a Hungarian orientation, in that it draws upon a Transylvanian (Székely) folk ballad and the libretto written by Béla Balász for Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. There are various sources for the Bluebeard legend from a number of countries. It first became famous through Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé of 1697, but its constituent elements may be found in a number of legends and tales, some with historical basis, as far back as those of ancient Greece. One need look no further than the Book of Genesis to find a parallel for the results of the tasting of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Though the subsequent history of Anna Molnár is not recounted in the Transylvanian ballad, Eve’s action in Genesis is the fulcrum for the fall of mankind and the subsequent search for the way back to Paradise. We can in a sense say that Anna Molnár is in an unfallen state, until, like Pandora, she opens the box and becomes aware of the knowledge of good and evil. There are other parallels in mythology and folklore from all over the world from this story, and the symbolists’ interest in these various retellings of the eternal struggle between light and darkness took many of them into account. Balász’s libretto, A kékszakállú herceg vára, ends with a darkness into which even Bluebeard disappears. It is not the external war (the prologue to the libretto makes reference to the First World War which was ending when Bartók’s opera received its première) that will bring darkness, but internal death, the death of the spirit. Béla Balász wrote: “I wanted to magnify the dramatic fluidity of the Székely folk ballad for the stage. And I wanted to depict a modern soul in the primary colours of folksong.” I have here in a sense tried to reverse the process, emphasizing the ritual aspects of the drama, returning the stage drama to the ballad. The soul in question is eternal. The narrative structure essentially follows that of Balász’s libretto for Bartók, but once more I have extrapolated backwards to include elements (and the names) of the original ballad. The folk-religious elements in all the versions of the tale are strong. It is the spiritual death of Bluebeard interwoven with Anna Molnár’s acquisition of knowledge, the expulsion of man from Paradise as a consequence of Eve’s action, that is the core of this tale. I have emphasized this in the piece with frequent repetition of the word “darkness”, or in Magyar, “éjjel”. The spoken opening phrase, “Where did it happen? Where did it not happen?”, is the traditional opening of Hungarian folktales, corresponding to “Once upon a time”: the question suitably suggests that the events of the ballad do not happen in front of the audience, but within the mind. ‘Darkness’ was commissioned by the Thaxted Festival for I Fagiolini, and is dedicated to Robert Hollingworth.
Adrian Williams - A smile and ashes
It takes fire as its starting point, but uses a poem by Williams’ wife, Tijana Miletic, which is more concerned with inner burning, the frustration and anger at the mass-madness of others, and sense of personal loss in the wake of the fire of war.
Paul Spicer - Dies natalis
I was commissioned to write a consort piece for I Fagiolini by Robert Hollingworth. As he and several of his singers also work with me in my own Finzi Singers I am fortunate to know the quality of their voices and the depth and breadth of their musicianship well. I have long been a devotee of the poetry of that rugged Welsh poet-priest (or priest-poet?) R.S.Thomas, and it seemed to me to be an ideal opportunity to set one of his poems. A number of Thomas’s poems inevitably deal with Christian subject matter. I respond deeply to his imagery, the almost celtic mysticism, and his fundamental feeling that there is always hope (wonderful examples are Pilgrimages’ and ‘The Moon at Lleyn’). In the poem ‘Once’ which I have used for this setting, Thomas uses the birth of the world as an allegory for growth to maturity in a similar way to Thomas Traherne in his wonderful ‘Centuries of Meditation’. In other words he uses the ‘innocent eye’ of a child but informs it with maturity of understanding and vision of an adult, thereby giving it power of articulation and a radiant halo of wonder. Tying these strands together gave me the title ‘Dies Natalis’ which, as many will know, is the title of Gerald Finzi’s most popular work (settings of Traherne). Quite by coincidence, my own work was written in Finzi’s house at Ashmansworth with the aid of his piano during a weekend in January when I was staying with his eldest son Christopher and his wife. The music responds unashamedly to the pictorial nature of the poetry and attempts to convey a sense of wonder, of the intimacy of God (so that when the text says ‘God Spoke’ there is not a clap of thunder but a gentle rhythmical repetition of the words), and of the warmth of being led on and encouraged into life (‘I took your hand, remembering you and together... we went forth’ etc). There is therefore a sense of optimism and yet also, at the end, some sense of apprehension at the thought of the unknown. Once (R. S. Thomas) |