Output details

Maiden in the Moor: for tenor and percussion

The specification from NMC for the pieces which were to make up the NMC Songbook was explicit – one singer and one accompanying instrument. It took a long time before I found a poetic text which was intriguingly ambiguous enough to allow for some enhancement of the poem through a musical presentation – the last thing I wanted to do was set a Thomas Hardy-style piece of English pastoralism (and I have always felt that the English language, with its clunky narrative rhythms, never works terribly well within music). ‘Maiden in the Moor’, an anonymous medieval poem, was, as a text, puzzling yet also potentially very dramatic and, in order to accentuate this drama within a concert-environment, I require the tenor to play the woodblock, whilst the marimba player also plays an 'archaic' bell. The varied setting of each verse – especially the slightly demented quality of the ‘red rose’ passage - further draws out this dramatic quality. In sum, the piece aims to achieve more than might be expected from its limited resources.

Commissioned by NMC Records. Recorded and released on CD by Benjamin Hulett (tenor), Owen Gunnell (percussion), NMC Songbook D150 (2009).