Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Cambridge
Dark Processional, for small orchestra (duration 5 minutes). Co-commissioned and premiered by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Nicholas Collon; recording streamed on London Sinfonietta website.
Like Twenty-Seven Heavens, Dark Processional uses solo strings to articulate a discrete stratum of musical material against a prevailing tutti, although here the technique is utilised to quite different expressive ends. This piece was commissioned as a prelude to Stravinsky's Pulcinella, with the brief that it must draw on original material by Pergolesi.
Accordingly, my principal research questions were how to re-invent the Pulcinella ensemble within the framework of a standard orchestra and establish convincing, meaningful and distinctive relationships with the source material without encroaching on Stravinsky’s territory. My solution to these problems was threefold:
• the choice of a sacred work as starting point (the first movement of Pergolesi’s celebrated Stabat Mater) immediately distanced the work in character and aesthetic from Pulcinella.
• The omission from the ensemble of flutes favoured a darker timbral palette than Stravinky’s, an effect heightened by the use of muted brass combined with practice mutes and a non vibrato direction for the tutti strings: it is as if the colour is bleached out of the sound.
• The use of spatial separation in performance to aid perception of the solo string quintet’s music as a layer clearly distinct from the tutti.
Through analysis of the source material, I realised that Pergolesi’s characteristic, affective ‘sighing’ gesture had a direct correlate in some of the sound-worlds of contemporary music. As a result, Dark Processional crystallised into a palimpsest in which the solo quintet offers a simultaneous translation of Pergolesi’s music into a contemporary idiom. The ‘sighing’ gestures are freed from both their measured pulse and tempered tuning: they are a reflection of our relative musical values against the taken for granted practice of Pergolesi’s time.
