Output details

Night Love Song. Concerto for Viola and Chamber Orchestra. Premiere: 24th November 2012, Glenn Gould Studio, Toronto, Canadian Sinfonietta, Rivka Golani (viola), Tak-Ng Lai (conductor). CD recording plus score. URL and hard copy evidence date of dissemination.

The piece was first suggested by violist Rivka Golani, and the Fort McLeod Festival, Alberta, with the brief to write a piece thematically connected to the Blood Tribe of the Blackfoot Nation. The musical catalyst was a historical recording of “Night Love Song” by Chief Bull (Montana Blackfoot) from 1909. The piece’s extra-musical sources are the story of the Blood Tribe’s outlaw Charcoal (Si’k-okskitsis, “Black Wood Ashes”) and the bleak landscape, ritual and ancestral spiritualism that surround his story, as explored in Hugh Dempsey’s Charcoal’s World (University of Nebraska Press, 1978). The source melody is atypical of Native American music in its structural complexity (seven-note scale using both major and minor third). The central research question actualised through the composition was the question of how to compose something with ethnic influences, but that wasn't in itself situated in a 'crossover' type aesthetic. To solve this problem, I abstract the idiomatic scale linearly and vertically in pentatonic subsets that extend the normally octave-based scale into a larger tonal field. This becomes a kind of harmonic landscape which is varied yet essentially static (non-modulatory), with modal colour shifts replacing tonal modulation. The combination of this harmonic palate with rhythm based on the shifting syncopation of ‘drumming music’ is used to create a sound world that is more imaginary/mythical than ethnologically explicit. However, the original melody appears recognisably at key points in both movements, taking on lamenting, keening qualities in the first and dance-like energy in the second. Throughout I tried to empathise with aspects of the native music and culture and treat it as one might a foreign language or element in a piece of literature - using it to evoke more intense feelings through an artistic process of ‘defamiliarization’ (Schklovsky), or the casting of the familiar through art into a new light.