Output details

Findetotenlieder, for soprano and large ensemble

_Findetotenlieder_ is the result of extensive research into the phenomenon of artistic intervention and Lacanian psychoanalysis, manifested in an extended song in six verses with a text taken from the visual artist Gabriel Orozco’s work entitled _Obit_, a collection of peculiar texts taken from obituaries found in the New York Times.

For Clancy, _Obit_ simultaneously served as a contemporary Memento Mori, with each individual life summed up in a pithy phrase, highlighted changing attitudes to death in its ambiguity between the comic and the intensely dark, and made manifest the media’s fascination with the Lacanian Death Drive. By intervening upon _Obit_, Clancy has offered an alternative existence (in an ontological sense) for it, one in which its function moves from a piece of art to be viewed in space, to one which should be listened to in time. Additionally, he has enhanced the ambiguity between the comic and the serious (thus highlighting a changing attitude to death). This is given further credence by the piece having its basis in popular music (_Someone Great_, by LCD Soundsystem) a song that also deals with death but in quite an upbeat and joyful way. By so doing he has drastically negated the treatment of death in the Requiems/death songs of Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms, Dvořák, Mahler, Britten, Ligeti, Grisey et al. Furthermore, he has emphasised the Lacanian Death Drive through the use of (quite literal) repetition.

By delivering such a setting, Clancy has questioned 21st-century attitudes to death, the media’s invasiveness into, and our own fascination with, the lives of others, whilst also highlighting the nature of artistic intervention.

The work was commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, while Clancy was Sound and Music/Birmingham Contemporary Music Group Apprentice Composer in Residence (2011).