| Background: English scholar Maria Johnston contacted me in the summer of 2005 about a project she was working on, she asked if I'd be interested in setting some of Brian Coffey's work to music. On principle I would have declined the offer but that she knew me and my aversion to poetry yet still bothered to ask, there must be a twist, so I agreed to look over the set entitled Third Person. Previous to this, the only poetry I really warmed to was E.E.Cummings and I fell in love with that, so I was surprised to enjoy Coffey's poems, there's something shared between both these writers in their instinctive command of ambiguity (if that's not a tautology...), just enough to draw us in without revealing anything concrete. Perhaps this comes from the same level of thinking which imbues both their work with such wonderful sonorous qualities also. Aesthetics: The project undertaken by Johnston was to demonstrate the inherent musicality in Coffey's work and as a proof of concept she wanted a composer to use the poems as the basis of a musical work. I imagine that I was considered partly because of my dislike of poetry, I wouldn't let semantics get in the way of the sound. While there are many excellent examples of musical word setting from all the musical traditions, this is not an approach that I am comfortable with (although I succumbed a little in one poem...). As a composer I try to work with pure sound, uncluttered by romantic notions of association and meaning; I consider these to be constructs of the receiving mind and as such I leave them up to the listener to create for themselves. In the first poem I looked at was Dedication. The patterns of both word repetition and sound (assonance and alliteration) were used as the basis for the piece. Vowel sounds were the most prominent and the violin register was mapped straight onto the vowel register u-o-a-i-e (where the frequency components of the vowels go from low to high): after deciding the register, the specific pitches used were chosen to allow more variation in the specific timbre of the word/syllable. In the first line of Dedication, the text '...then and...' has two syllables which occupy a very similar vowel register and so the pitches given are E-flat and F, 'then' is slightly raised in the transition from the vowel to the final consonant 'n', a gesture reflected in the slight pitch bend up from the E-flat and repeated for the same gesture in 'a-nd': the musical gesture of the pitch bend allows me to highlight this tiny change in mouth shape which we perform unconsciously a million times a day and make a structural musical gesture. In some places, consonants were also used as agents which colour the attack or decay of the word/syllable. The violin allows for a large range of possible sounds: while in most cases the violin plays in standard position, sul-ponticello and su-tasto are used to highlight vowel timbres, especially in places where they function as structural dissonances. Again, in the first line of Dedication, the word 'before' is coloured by using a pizzicato note for the plosive 'b' (as it is the first plosive of the poem it deserves to stand out) while '-fore' is coloured with a brief tremolando to articulate the fricative. Note that the treatment of '-fore' and the poem's opening 'For' are practically the same except that '-fore' is played sul tasto for a slightly darker sound, if the two had been side by side I would have highlighted the difference in stress and mouth shape but I felt the distance in time meant that the similarity should be allowed to the fore. |
| Scores |
| Audio clips Dedication - Performed by Nick Williams (some overdubs required for physically impossible double stops) One Way - Performed by Jennifer Haggart (speaker) and Scott Mc Laughlin (piano)
White - Both parts performed by Jennifer Haggart |