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The Spirits of Sabate

The commissioning brief from a festival director to a composer can, in itself, be a significant challenge. In this case The Spirits of Sabate was to be based on the legend of an underwater creature in Lake Bracciano (Italy) that dragged fisherman to their deaths. Unfortunately, and despite intense investigation, no evidence of this story could be found.Thus an original narrative was devised based upon the Etruscan city that was flooded when the lake was formed.

In the first movement, ‘The Spirist of Sabate’, there is the musical imagining of ‘deluge and descent’ which describes, through fast contrapuntal writing, the inundation caused by the creation of the volcanic lake. And then in a slow, contrasting, middle section the spirit voices of the citizens are heard through extended instrumental/vocal techniques set against an impression of an ancient Etruscan melod. There is no original melody used, just the composer’s imagining of what it might have been. The melody is buried in highly chromatic piano writing.

In the second movement, ‘Cortege’, imagines a public parade through the sunken city and, once again, embeds imagined Etruscan music within contemporary harmonic and contrapuntal writing. The rhythm of the parade is articulated throughout by percussion writing that uses timbres one might imagine were common in the Etruscan period for example simple drum patterns.

The third movement, ‘Celebration’, has a complex rhythmic profile and a dance-like quality that is designed to place the legend of the sunken city in the contemporary context of the festival for which it has been commissioned. Much of the vocal writing employs vocalisation rather than coherent text as it too is an imagined impression of the ancient voices.