Output details

In the Silence of the Turned Earth. Composition for soprano, solo violin & string orchestra. Commissioned by the Bulgarian Festival of Culture, 2010. Premiere: Bulgaria National Hall, Sofia, 16 September, 2010. Score and CD recording. URLs and hard copies evidence date of dissemination (Festival of Bulgarian Culture 2010, Sofia and London)

The commissioners determined the instrumentation and duration (c.10 minutes); they also hoped the text might reflect a legend concerning Sophia’s patron saint, or matters relating to Bulgaria in general. Unwilling to write a specifically religious work, poetess Imogen Robertson was approached to write a text that would be effectively a meditation upon concepts underlying the legend, whilst also being relevant to Bulgaria’s predominantly agrarian past. After much discussion and redrafting she produced a text which offered appropriate compositional potential. Much time was spent analysing Bulgaria’s highly distinctive folk music: its irregular rhythms, bagpipe drones, and idiosyncratic, ornamented vocal style. However, this piece does not exploit these devices overtly, only referencing traditional Bulgarian music non-specifically: drones, ornamented vocal contours within a relatively static environment, dialogue between soloists, etc. In short the project was not to compose a ‘folk-music-influenced’ work, but to research and then allow underlying features of traditional Bulgarian music to permeate compositional thinking and procedures.To intensify the work’s reflective character, and continue past research into vocal writing, the music avoids enunciation of the text, in favour of exploring its sonic characteristics, thereby corresponding with its semantic features, not dramatising them; hence the unusual style of word setting, often sustaining consonants (l, m, n, ng), which necessitated unconventional alignment of text below the music. Experimentation with singers resulted in rejecting use of the phonetic alphabet, which confuses singers who want to focus on the specific sounds to be articulated within words.