After Babel

I received an e-mail from conductor Eduardo Portal at the beginning of last July outlining the possibility of a commission of a piece for the Burgos Summer Festival (Spain), which would eventually be premiered during the Festival by the Antares Ensemble under his baton. I found out in the course of the ensuing correspondence with the chap in question that the piece, if I was to write it, was going to receive its premiere on the 11^th of September, 2009, and not 2010. This, effectively, was going to leave me with four weeks to produce a finished score and parts, which by any standards is not very much at all.

Nevertheless, the brief was captivating: to write a ten minute string orchestra piece to be premiered alongside H. Purcell’s suite Abdelazar. Apart from the actual line-up (string orchestra is, possibly, my favourite medium), the whole idea of relating the piece somehow to the Purcell was extremely appealing to me, definitely falling into the area of my compositional research and interests and so, despite the shortness of time given to write it, I accepted.

My first compositional impulse was (and this links the birth of this piece with Birtwhistle’s premiere of Semper dolens, semper Dowland at the Southbank some weeks earlier) to try and write a whole piece that would ‘write in’ the Purcell suite. That is, to incorporate the whole of the Purcell into a larger work’s fabric, connecting all the dances with my own music and adding other layers while the original Purcell was being performed. In other words, my idea was to try and turn the whole listening to the Purcell into an act of musical memory, almost like a palimpsest: traces of the Purcell would be ‘allowed’ to come to the foreground at times, but would form together with my music a larger, and longer, narrative. In a way, and to be fair to my critic of the Birtwhistle which you can find in one of the prior posts, I was trying to undertake the whole venture in the spirit I boldly put forward in that text.

Unfortunately, I soon realised that this compositional approach would require a long and careful undertaking to really make all the choices regarding adding layers to the Purcell, writing the linking music, choosing the way of allowing it to come to the foreground etc, a long and careful compositional process for which I did not have the time in the four weeks I was being given. Much to my regret, I had to abandon this promising idea.

So I looked elsewhere. I was fascinated by the centenary tradition of writing incidental music for the scene (of which the Purcell is a wonderful example) but also by other musics that had been written for the scene with another purpose other than being sung. It was under this last category that the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes by Britten and Berg’s instrumental suite from Lulu came to my mind. Then, Apollon musagète by Stravinsky (which was also written for yet another stage purpose –ballet- and also written for string orchestra) gave me the idea of the mythical subject for my piece.

In a strange combination of the two sources, I had the idea of writing the piece based on the mythical subject of Echo and Narcissus (a myth that in its Roman version seems to me frightfully contemporary and close to our times) and rather than writing incidental music, I chose to endeavour and write orchestral interludes for it, and so my instrumental suite would be like an incomplete torso of a non-existing operatic work: the interludes for a musical drama that does not exist yet, hoping that maybe one day these interludes will find their place within a larger work. Compositionally, I created different material for each character -and  related musical identities for the different characters- as if this had been a full opera undertaking. So the incomplete torso was written as the first sections of the full work, so to speak, but keeping the whole in sight.

Then, if a closer integration of Purcell’s material in my piece was not going to be feasible due to lack of time I decided to have the two pieces interspersed and allow them to be boldly contrasting with each other, and in true Post-Modern spirit, make them the living proof of the contemporaneity of traditions that Post-Modernity embodies.

In the end, and furthering those ideas even more, it was decided that the Purcell would be played by a quartet with a tiorba, and my Echo and Narcissus by the rest of the Antares Ensemble. I wrote Echo and Narcissus knowing this and therefore taking into account the tonal centres of the Purcell, and also the duration of its movements in order to create a juxtaposed ordering that would fit each piece like a glove. The stage disposition was orchestra on the left, quartet on the right, and all the movements were played as a continuum on the night. This really brought out the best out of the two narratives, as the different styles refreshed each other, and the different sizes, spatial relation and character of the ensembles really turned the whole experience into a sort of musical zapping of two pieces, of two narratives designed for similar purposes, but in totally different contexts.

A true exercise in the actualisation of Archetypes.

Play Echo and Narcissus (2009)

(rehearsal recording, unfortunately without the Purcell movements!)

I. Liriope and Cephissus

II. Tiresias

III. Echo and Narcissus

IV. Death of Echo

V. Death of Narcissus

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