Output details

Poor Yorick

Commissioned by the Hilliard Ensemble. 8 voices (ATTB + TTTB). First performance Spitalfields Festival, London, December 11th 2013. Published by Peters Edition, London.

In this piece I aimed to present another long and famous narrative in a way which would enable an audience to derive musical pleasure whilst also being able to follow the detail of the text. In this case the text is in English: the death of Yorick from volume 1 of _Tristram Shandy_ by Laurence Sterne. Yorick, a country vicar, is a relatively minor character in the novel, although Sterne later adopted the name as his own alter ego, and wrote about him again in the later _Sentimental Journey_. This passage is one of two moving death scenes in the novel.

As with _Il Cor Tristo_, I challenged myself to remain within a restricted harmonic frame of reference, setting the words syllabically throughout, so that clarity remains paramount. The musical language here is perhaps derived more from Anglican chant than from Italian recitative. Its distinctive harmonic coherence arises from the use of nothing but minor triads throughout. The conversations of Yorick and his friend Eugenius are highly characterized (by tenor and bass respectively), while the narrative which forms the bulk of the chapter remains more uniform and impersonal.

Yorick’s death is framed by a chorus and its reprise, setting a much quoted passage from later in the novel: ‘Time wastes too fast’. These are scored for a different combination of voices (TTTBB rather than ATTB), because the piece was composed for a tour by the Hilliards together with former members of the ensemble to mark the 40th anniversary of the group. The ‘walking bass’ in Latin uses the line: 'De vanitate mundi et fuga saeculi' (‘on the vanity of the world and the swift passing of time’).