Output details

Kubla Khan : for Soprano, Mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble

Kubla Khan, for soprano, mezzo and ensemble, on text of Coleridge, was commissioned

by the Istanbul Music Festival, and premièred by Christie Finn, Arlene Rolph, and

Hezarfen Ensemble at Santral Istanbul in 2011.

This work researches the deconstruction and reconstruction of musical and textual meanings. Kubla Khan uses a well-known English Romantic poem as a starting point to thoroughly splinter the poetry into fragments of song, speech, whispers and other vocal utterances in a way that stretches the limits of vocal possibilities, while attempting nevertheless to stay faithful to the spirit of that text. With his ‘opium dream’ as an excuse for poetic flights of imagination, Coleridge has already brought his verse in the original Kubla Khan about as close to pure form—and music—as is possible in literature. In this music, too, sounds and rhythms from the text become their own object, delighting in the ‘Pleasure Dome’ of creative activity Kubla has decreed, while its vocal writing decidedly tends towards the use of sound ‘for its own sake’. The volatile imagery, sounds and meanings of the poem suggest rarely accessible inner landscapes, mellifluous currents of free cantabile passages and explosive instrumental detours. Towards the end, the ‘dulcimer’ of the Abysinnian maid is transliterated into a harp, providing a languid accompaniment for the ‘symphony and song’ rising above it. This is one of two real ‘tunes’ that emerge over the course of the work: the first being the ‘river’ whose ‘mazy motion’ through the volatile abysses of the dome is suggested by its polyrhythmic setting, a secondary strand of the research that explores pitting complex proportions of speeds against one another—in this case seven against six--even as the familiar flavour of the melody perhaps evokes the European Coleridge in the midst of his wilfully distorting, orientalist fantasies.