The First Noel

Sublime Songs is a 35 minute multi-movement, six-channel work for live-processed soprano, live-processed baritone, electric violin, electric cello, electronic mallets, and two synthesizers. The piece also requires a conductor. The voices, the electric violin and electric cello have an audio feedback and are fed into the computer system through an interface. The electronic mallets and two synthesizers use MIDI to send instructions computer, and use computer-derived patches. An audio engineer using a controller, also has a musical line in the work, making changes to the sound or to initiate sound clips. Techniques such as panning, reverberation, flanging, and filter sweep are also used. 
The first movement, “Death,” uses poetry from World War I. This section explores the world of departed souls, premature death, war, remembrance, and peace. “The Tortoise and the Hare,” movement 2, turns a classic Aesop’s fable into a surreal moral lesson teaching that slow and steady does not win the race. To paint the opposite of the text in the music, the tortoise is portrayed as fast, and the hare as slow. The hare wins. Patches create sonorities in both synthesizers that would be impossible for a human being to perform otherwise.  In movement 3, “Sunset and Night,” the music follows the setting of the sun and subsequent darkness that follows, symbolizing perhaps the end of life and the accounting of all deeds done therein. A harmonically active sound being flanged characterizes the beginning of the work.  The “Love Song” that is the fourth movement portrays a broken relationship, and each voice is put through a filter that makes each sound as if they are on the phone. Both of the third and fourth movements use panning automation that is played in a loop for each instrument. Finally, the fifth movement “Childhood,” uses a similar layout as the first. This section uses a short fragment of the poem, “Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old,” and another text about seeing an unidentified person’s face again. A manipulated filter cutoff makes subtle changes to the sound. The work ends with the words “all Sufficient.”
Sublime Songs often combines texts from poems into single musical entities. The effect of assimilating different texts together ultimately provides context and meaning to each movement. The text was written by the composer, A.E. Murray, John Galsworthy, Robert Ernest Vernéde, A.T. Nankivell, George Fyler Townsend, Ina Coolbrith, and William Wordsworth.

The First Noel

Robert Anton Strobel

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