Alphabet IV-V

Audio
Added by
Composed by
Instrument(s)
clarinet, contrabass, harp, soprano (voice)
With electronics
no
Work premiered
April 2019
Venue of the premiere
United Kingdom
Duration
7 minutes

Danish poet Inger Christensen was concerned with two things while writing her book of poetry Alfabet: alliteration and the Fibonacci Sequence. The volume contains poems of increasing length, from a single line to over twenty pages, which delight in the sound of words.

In my setting of Susanna Nied’s English translation of these poems, I sought to do something similar. I structured the musical materials from pitches to durations, even the length of the two movements, on Fibonacci proportions, and I delighted in the sibilant sounds the instruments can make. The mercurial onset of attack in a high clarinet part; the blurring of pitch and noise in double bass multiphonics; the gradations between speaking and singing.

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