Compositions

A voice Is heard In Ramah

Love; an ever fixed mark (Sonnet 116)

Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott is a novella written to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture. The book depicts a two-dimensional world filled with two-dimensional people and because of this has been used, notably by Carl Sagan, as an allegory for examining and explaining extra dimensions.

In Sagan’s metaphor an anthropomorphic square who lives in Flatland is visited by a three-dimensional creature that proceeds to knock the square out of two-dimensional Flatland and into the three-dimensional world of ‘up-down’. The square later floats back down to flatland, affected by his experience, but not quite sure about the place he was just in.
 
twodimensional replicates this idea of being confined to a limited number of dimensions by restricting the use of all but one pitch class, and instead exploring the different ‘dimensions’ of timbre and articulation.


twodimensional

Shine out, fair sun

Charles Baudelaire’s Châtiment de l’Orgueil was the inspiration for this piece. The text comes from his well-known Les Fleurs du Mal and tells the story of a person of high standing who, after grasping too high in a prideful manner, fell from grace to become the lowest of the low. The music attempts to mirror and enhance this sense of culmination of effort followed by collapse. In the opening the strings build a texture of interweaving harmonics that increase in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, this is followed by a brief moment of implied respite, which turns sour and marks the beginning of the chaotic descent. From this moment the strings and percussion break off into a fast paced contrapuntal web culminating in a repetition of the initial material, this time somewhat faulty and with less precision than before, this fades, leaving the voice to finish alone.

Throughout this piece I have made use of the Infinity Series. This was discovered by Per Nørgård in 1959 and is in essence a method of creating an infinite, non-repeating series based off of the skeleton of any mode or scale

Like one who has clambered too high

A setting of Eli Carvajal's Willow-dreams at dawn for vocal trio 'III'.

Willow-dreams at dawn

Piece for Violin, Cello, Contrabass, Piano and Percussion (Xylophone and Vibraphone)

failed-points-of-symmetry

This piece is formed out of three poems written by Eli Carvajal: ‘urban breakdown’, ‘Down by the brook’, and ‘Here I am again’. The two outer poems talk of the business of inner city life, but have a sense of yearning for more peaceful, countryside scenes, while the middle poem evokes a rural reverie of times past. I have tried to mirror this escape from hectic life in the music. The piece begins with cars passing in the dead of night; this develops gradually into the sound of sirens with the uncertainty of the bustling streets reflected in the lopsided rhythms. As the sirens fade, the protagonist sinks into a dream of calmer pastures. After the distant sentiments of ‘Down by the brook’ pass, the protagonist is then forced back to reality by the returning sound of sirens only to realise their isolation: ‘a carriage crash through sunsets gold, a passenger alone…’

Soprano soloist – Chloe Jackson


Compositions

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