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Everlasting Voices : for bass clarinet, actor and fixed media

In the early 1890s William Butler Yeats began a lifelong pursuit of the proper method for declaiming his—and others’—poetry. His quest would become deeply entangled with other threads of his life: mysticism, Irish nationalism, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and—above all—his complex, tortured relationship with the Irish patriot Maud Gonne.

Yeats’s experiments with “chaunting,” as he originally termed it, were associated with the theatre from the beginning; he had gained an early ally in the actress Florence Farr, for whom he commissioned Arnold Dolmetsch, the early-music pioneer, to make a “psaltery,” a kind of lyre (sometimes in quarter-tones) to which the voice would be “tuned.” The idea never was to write “music” or to “sing” the texts; rather, the natural inflections of the voice were to be captured by practice or through notation, and these were to be enhanced and clarified by the use of single tones picked out on the psaltery.

_Everlasting Voices_ was written after three years’ study of Yeats’ and Farr’s practices; in part, it is an attempt to recreate their work using present-day materials and methods. It employs a retuned autoharp in lieu of a psaltery, and the electroacoustic tapestry is constructed from samples of the autoharp and clarinet, fragments recorded by a dozen vocalists, and recordings of Yeats’ poetry and prose read by the Denis Dennehy, modeled after recordings by Yeats and his associates. The seven performances of the work thus far (in America, England, Belgium and Ireland) have each been preceded by an hour-long lecture that summarizes the background research. The lecture has been expanded into a chapter for a book scheduled for publication in February 2014; a shorter version of that publication, appended as a ‘Postface’ to the score, supplies interested performers with the necessary background.