Output details

Melismas of Beginning

How do we give the invitation: "Listen"? Every composer wants to catch the listener's ear in the first moments of their music. Melismas of Beginning explores music's phatic function – its ability to signal that communicative and expressive channels are open (regardless of the message to be conveyed) – embedded in the musical discourse. The first movement elaborates a single pitch (D5) , a trope sometimes implying stasis or suspended time (for instance in examples by Scelsi, Ligeti, Grisey), but here accumulating momentum through constantly varied re-articulation. The second movement opens attention to harmony and durational occupation of spectrum. The final movement asserts pulse, counterpoint, call and response. The texts (see programme note included in score) are chosen from Shakespeare because of the widespread familiarity of the Shakespearian canon. In the first movement, that recognition is only potential, the openings of the complete cycle of sonnets being reduced to syllabic utterances. In the second movement, the voice extends to melismatic lines, but with the textual meaning partially masked. In the final movement, the text becomes an explicit invocation. The opening lines of the two plays may be recognized as Shakespearian excerpts, suggesting a wider world of expressive possibilities; or more specifically as the openings of The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV Part 2, suggesting dramatic complexities to follow. Melismas of Beginning seeks, at the same time as being a tautly argued musical whole, to send signals about, and to invite, varied ways of listening.

Melismas of Beginning was commissioned by Gemini, and first performed by them at the Victoria Rooms, Bristol, on 14 January 2009.