Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Wednesday May 28, 2008
journeys of exploration - of the world and of the soul.
Programme Notes
by Andrea Budgey
Gavin Bryars: The Adnan Songbook, text by Etel Adnan
Derek Holman: Daybreak and a Candle-End, (premiere) text by W.B. Yeats
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel, text by Robert Louis Stevenson
Travel in the physical world is, perhaps, less arduous now than it has ever been, and a modern traveller following Robert Louis Stevenson's tracks through Great Britain, Europe, North America, and the South Pacific would have, perhaps, less occasion for self-discovery in the process than the writer of a century ago. Exploration of the inner world of the soul remains, however, a risky and challenging business – potentially as much a “voyage out” to alienation and strangeness as it is a “voyage in” to peace and certainty.
Two of the poets represented on this programme can certainly be considered great travellers. Stevenson (1850-1894), spent most of his adult life searching for a home which would suit his fragile health, meeting in the process many of the important literary figures of his day, refining his own style and craft, and encountering extremes of happiness and depression. In his last years he settled in Samoa, geographically and culturally at a great remove from his Scottish birthplace.
Etel Adnan's life has been called “a study in displacement and alienation.” She was born in 1925 of Christian Greek and Muslim Syrian parents, spoke Greek and Turkish as a child (in a society where most spoke Arabic), and was educated in French, the language of her early work, and in English, in which most of her later work has been written. She studied at the Sorbonne, at Berkeley, and Harvard, has taught and lectured throughout the U.S., and still divides her life among California, France, and Lebanon. These varied influences have produced a writer of mobile and fluid expression, in whose work language is often startlingly malleable.
In contrast, the great Irish writer William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) travelled primarily in his native land and to London, with brief excursions to European destinations. His work took him, however, through great personal and political transformations; he was at various times in his life an exuberant, almost romantic nationalist, a classical, austerely Augustan liberal, a conservative reactionary, and an apocalyptic nihilist. The theme of voyage, or odyssey, is a strong one throughout his literary life, echoing initially the strong current of “voyage” literature in Irish tradition, but expanding through Yeats' exploration of the literary culture of the world – from modernism to Hindu mysticism – to encompass universal themes of migration and transfiguration.
All three works featured on this programme make use of music's function as an art unfolding its meaning in time to intensify our movement through the poets' journeyings. There is no stasis in music: sound travels to meet us, and we must also move toward it, transforming ourselves into receptive hearers of the new, and even of the familiar – we cannot stand twice in the same river.
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Gavin Bryars (1943 -): The Adnan Songbook for voice, 2 violas, cello, bass, clarinet and guitar (1996)
The eight songs of this cycle are settings of texts by the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, who has collaborated with Bryars on a number of projects. The complete set, assembled from three separate commissions, was first performed by Canadian soprano Valdine Anderson.
Of the tonal palette and structure of the work, Gavin Bryars has written,
The instrumentation is a restrained one using only six players but with a combination of instrumental sonorities that characterise my ensemble: two violas, cello, double bass, electric guitar (doubling acoustic guitar) and bass clarinet (doubling clarinet)... in all cases the music is written with my own performers in mind. The bass-clarinet, for example, has long been one of my favourite instruments and I enjoy the possibility of its extreme ranges. With the electric guitar I generally prefer it to be played without attack, allowing sustained chords or melodic lines to complement those of the strings. . . The formation of the strings here provides in effect a kind of string quartet, transposed substantially downwards. For the last three songs the bass-clarinet moves to B flat clarinet, and the electric guitar changes to the classical acoustic instrument. There are many cross-references between the songs, as there are between the poems, and three of them are extended by instrumental epilogues - viola for numbers 2 and 8, clarinet for number 6. The Adnan Songbook is dedicated to my friends Jane Quinn and Martin Duignan.
There is some “outward” journeying in these songs, but the primary voyage of discovery is interior, through the territory of a love affair, with its moments of exaltation and pain. Stillness poised upon an invisible point alternates not only with the simple movements of travel and brief evocations of widely separated parts of the globe, but also with a careless hurtling through unexplored realms of inner space: “...we are travelling at some infinite speed... we are not scared.”
While the instrumental textures of these settings are, on the whole, rather sparse, the harmonic language is more lush, even romantic in its inspiration, than much of Bryars' work. Even when the instrumental parts are fairly active, however, as in the fourth song, the accompaniment is resolutely the servant of the extraordinary text.
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Derek Holman (1931- ): Daybreak and a Candle-End for voice and string quintet (2008) – World premiere
This cycle of songs on selected poems of Yeats (from five separate collections published between 1893 and 1928) was commissioned by the Talisker Players, with the assistance of a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. The composer writes:
I believe that I discovered the magic of music before that of poetry; certain it is that I composed my first songs soon after I had learned to read music, and therefore how to put my musical ideas down on paper. This happened about sixty-five years ago, and I have been wedding words to music as best I can, ever since.
When the Talisker Players invited me to compose a cycle for Alexander Dobson and the Talisker Players, I suggested “Journeying” as the general theme: journeying through the world, and more importantly, through life. Of course, “Daybreak and a Candle-end”, a quotation from a poem by Yeats, suggests the beginning and end of such a journey.
In the first song, “Old, old men...” declare, “All that's beautiful drifts away, Like the waters.” The singer “Wondering Aengus” recalls a moment of magic, when he catches a little trout in the stream, and it is transformed into “a glimmering girl”, who calls him by his name, and then fades away. He will continue his search, until together they find “the silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.” “Running to Paradise” is a wild, half-crazy song, sung by a wandering beggar. He mocks his brother, with his dog, his gun, his serving maid, and his loutish son; his best friend is the wind “that nobody can buy or bind”. (“And there the king is but as the beggar”). In the fourth song I have dared to set that most exquisite, and most beloved of Yeats' poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. I have dedicated it to my three children, each of whom harbours a deep and constant affection for a certain beautiful island in the Saint Lawrence River. In setting “Sailing to Byzantium”, I have omitted Yeats' final verse, since to me the poem reaches a compelling conclusion in the third verse, “O sages, standing in God's holy fire... gather me into the artifice of eternity.”
Throughout the cycle, quicksilver shifts of tonality and consistent use of irregular metres establish an air of restless motion and searching. In contrast, the final section, with its steady triple metre and recitativo declamation, achieves a magnificent sense of stability and arrival.
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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958): Songs of Travel for voice, string quartet and piano, arr. Harold Birston
Vaughan Williams began work on what would eventually become the Songs of Travel in 1901, with "Whither must I wander?" The cycle was first performed in 1904, but was originally published piecemeal and out of sequence over the next few years. Only in 1960 was the brief epilogue "I have trod the upward and the downward slope" discovered among the composer's papers, with an indication that it was never to be performed separately from the first eight songs. The cycle, which some have seen as a characteristically English response to such collections as Schubert's Die Winterreise and Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, had a considerable impact on a new generation of composers: Arthur Bliss, who was studying at Cambridge between 1910 and 1913, wrote “To us musicians in Cambridge Vaughan Williams was the magical name; his Songs of Travel were on all pianos”.
The complex emotional palette of the Songs of Travel ranges, without any explicit narrative framework, from the vagabond's robust pleasure in the freedom of the road, through the memory of departed love, the loss of home, the imperishability of beauty, and the resolute acceptance of finality. The energetic tramping rhythms of "The vagabond", the rapturous arpeggios of "Let Beauty awake", and the playfulness of "The roadside fire" reflect the carefree romanticism of Robert Louis Stevenson's texts. The tension between tenderness and separation, however, is set out in "Youth and Love" and "In dreams", the first light and fluid, full of the delight of exploration, the second static, bound by memories both happy and unhappy. "The infinite shining heavens" offers the timeless consolation of nature's beauty in arioso lines over hushed chords in the strings and piano, but the sweeping lines and rhythmic restlessness of "Whither must I wander?" underline the pain of the traveller's exile. "Bright is the ring of words" returns to the theme of beauty; a declaratory opening chord prepares the assertion that art has a life of its own: words and songs outlive their makers. "I have trod the upward and the downward slope" provides, in twenty-five measures, an extraordinary conclusion to the cycle. It quotes "The vagabond", "Whither must I wander?" and "Bright is the ring of words", encapsulating and summarising the wanderer's journey as it draws to its close.
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