Output details

Closing Time: settings of six poems by Eva Salzman, for tenor and 11 players. Cadenza Music,

Eva Salzman's poems have a directness of emotion combined with subtlety of feeling and acute observational sensibility. The common thread in these songs is ‘time’ as a snapshot of feeling (all six poems are set actually or by implication in the evening or night time), relationships, weather and the moon. A pervasive sensuality underlies each text, although there is a strongly numinous undertow that is mirrored both in the imagistic tracery and the passing references to the world of the spirit and the occult. In setting them, I chose a slightly oblique instrumental combination, eschewing the use of brass and keyboard/plucked instruments in favour of a generally mellifluous combination, featuring a significant saxophone part, mirroring the largely nocturnal and penumbral implications of the subject matter, which are explored via a number of referential and responsive musical devices that often work in counterpoint to our received notions, e.g., ‘Coffee’ – a song more about coffee as an artifact than a social symbol for example – is very much associated here with the ‘night’ rather than ‘morning’. Salzman’s expression is also intentionally abstruse and opaque: the composer had to tease out and support not only her substance, but the myriad subtleties of her imagery, underpinning meaning in a way that does not undermine the density of her thought. The inclusion of a steel pan to destabilize elements of intonation was one strategy employed to parallel Salzman’s complexity; baritone saxophone is a non-canonical guest in an otherwise relatively conventional instrumental line-up plays a similar role.

Commissioned by Liverpool European Capital of Culture.

Première: Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool. 8 October 2008. Jeffery Lloyd Roberts (tenor), Ensemble 10/10, Clark Rundell, conductor: broadcast, BBC Radio 3: 29 November 2008. Subsequent performance: 21 November 2010, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Tom Raskin (tenor), Ensemble 10/10, Clark Rundell.