Quiet Songs

I’ve been writing some songs for the Hermes Experiment – who have been making some very interesting music with their unusual combination of soprano, clarinet, double bass and harp, and their imaginative and open-minded programmes. It was a hard combination to write for, at first; in particular, it took a while to find a way to integrate the bass into the overall sonority. Uncertainty about what words I would set added to the confusion, too, as I dabbled tentatively with various different texts.  In the end I found things took off the quieter I got, the more I explored delicate, translucent sounds. And finding that delicacy, a kind of musical water-colour, coincided with trying to set a wonderful little poem by Yves Bonnefoy.  Once I had sketched out this song I felt that the character of the music was coming into focus.  But I also felt that the song was too little and fragile on its own, and it needed to be part of a little group.  In the end I found two other short poems from the same collection, and in ways that I couldn’t predict, even after I had chosen the poems, the other two songs found quite different ways to compliment the mood of the one I wrote first (which ended up going second).

I’ve mentioned Bonnefoy before, a couple of years ago, when I discovered a long, searching poem which wouldn’t let me go, and I ended up writing a ‘setting’ of it, but just for instruments (flute and piano).  The music was very closely entangled with the words, line by line, but there was no singing or even speaking so the poetry remained ‘invisible’, but there was no singing (or even speaking) so the poetry remained ‘invisible’, unheard, even while it shaped the music at every moment.

These new songs felt very different from that.  The three short poems date from nearly thirty years later, and are both modest and breathtaking in the way they evoke the trace of touch and thought through the slightest and most innocuous of impressions.  The instruments were all different, now (and therefore, the basic texture of the music, too) but even more importantly, the words here are actually sung, literally present in the performance of the music.  -Which is normal when poetry is set to music, but after working with Bonnefoy’s poetry as a kind of unspoken spirit, hearing it sung out loud felt strangely vivid and unexpectedly larger than life. Last week I heard a rehearsal, and it was fascinating hearing both the sounds and the words take on a real ‘live’ presence.  I’m very much looking forward to the premiere, in Limewharf, London, on November 15, where there will also be new pieces by Giles Swayne, Kim Ashton and Aleksandr Brusentsev. [ see Sound and Music blog ]