Output details

Rumpelstiltskin

First performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Martyn Brabbins (conductor), CBSO Centre, Birmingham, 14 November 2009.

Written in the wake of operatic projects, this work was an attempt to get back to the basics of narrative through musical and pantomimic gesture, and was conceived in the tradition of expressionist dance in which movement is very precisely coordinated with musical gestures. To emphasise the equal footing of dance and music, the piece was conceived to be performed in a concert hall with the musicians in costume and on stage with the dancers.

The musical invention of the piece stemmed from the ideas of transformation (turning straw into gold) and revelation (the enunciation of the protagonist’s name). The narrative is structured around a series of musical and spatial transformations in which separate groups, each with three instruments, reposition themselves on the stage to form a quartet with the harp. Each of the resulting quartets defines a textural signature for a domestic scene in the drama.

One of the main issues of the narrative was how to portray the moment of revelation where, in the source tale, Rumpelstiltskin’s name is enunciated. The solution was to encode the name rhythmically throughout the score, thereby setting up a series of gestural expectations which could be satisfied at the moment of revelation.