Output details

Candlebird : for baritone and 18 players

Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta

First Performance: London Sinfonietta / Leigh Melrose / Nicholas Collon: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 31/05/11

Broadcast BBCR3 10/09/2011

CD: London Sinfonietta Label: ‘New Music Show’ B0094G5JLQ

The five songs of 'Candlebird' are settings of texts by Don Paterson. The selection and ordering are my own, creating a new narrative independent from Paterson’s original sequences; four songs are taken from 'Rain' (2009) and the final song is from Paterson’s earlier collection 'God’s Gift to Women' (1997).

Only the central song is a Paterson ‘original’: the others are his versions of texts by Robert Desnos, Antonio Machado, and Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf. Paterson has described this ‘versioning’ as a remaking, a process in which he remains faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of the text; not an attempt to capture the original author’s voice but an independent poem of his own, albeit one based on a earlier work. This is very similar to the process of setting text to music, and the result in 'Candlebird' is a deeper nesting of versions, from untexted music at one extreme, to my musical versions of Paterson’s versions of pre-existing poetry at the other.

Each song is intended to be a distinct and independent musical world, yet a key aim was to write a song _cycle_ of cumulative impact. As well as sharing material (songs 1 and 5, 3 and 4), a recurring concern was to incorporate vernacular music (both real and imagined) within an art music context (songs 2, 4, and 5). Further creative questions were centred on the use of microtonal environments: as colour (song 2), as a defining characteristic of a polyphonic voice (song 4), and as the foundation for freely modulating melodic and harmonic textures (song 5 as an expansion of song 1).