Still Morning
ENS.078 | 3.29.07-4.2.07 | 7’
Soprano or Tenor, Bb Clarinet, Horn, Viola
or Alto or Bass, Bb Clarinet, English Horn, Violin
Midi Rendition of “Still Morning”, version for Soprano or Tenor
Still Morning
Poems by Yvor Winters, “The Magpie’s Shadow”
- In Winter
- In Spring
- In Summer and Autumn
Still Morning represents a breakthrough in my work, whose deliberate brevity belies its importance; it was in this piece I discovered a way to fuse my earlier interest in cellular composition with the freer approach I had been taking in the vocal compositions which had come to dominate my output. At the time I was listening to a lot of Webern, whose music I love but whose harmonic and melodic approach is foreign to my own sensibilities. As something of a miniaturist myself I wondered, can there be a tiny minimalism? Can Webern and Glass be made to coexist?
In my then most recently completed work, Wideawake, I had composed a cycle of very short songs, each consisting basically of a single vocal line over a repeating, unharmonized accompaniment cell. Suddenly I realized that given a group of very short texts—haiku, for instance, or a poem with several small sections—each individual text could be set to a single short vocal melody over a repeating musical phrase which would change each time I came to a new poem. In this way the sequence of settings would be musically continuous yet each consist essentially of a single gesture in itself.
I knew that if I were to attempt something like this I would need to find just the right text, and immediately had one in mind. In his brief tenure as an imagist poet before turning to rhyming, metered verse, Yvor Winters wrote a shockingly brief second book, The Magpie’s Shadow, comprised entirely of wonderfully evocative six-syllable poems arranged into three parts following the seasons (with summer and autumn elided), allowing for a nicely proportioned three movement work; additionally, the syllabic restriction would result in poetic settings roughly equal in size, allowing for a continuity of musical cells similar in length and affect.
I began by composing a vocal melodies over a single line of repeating cells unified by the predominance of certain intervals and general similarity of shape. I then thought hard about what instrumentation I wanted to use; I wanted more than one instrument and I wanted them to play in unison to create a kind of meta-instrument. At first I chose the obscure and rough combination of bass oboe, electric organ, and viola, but cooler heads prevailed and I settled on the more autumnal clarinet, horn and viola (there is another version for lower voices with english horn, clarinet and violin).
In the first movement the instruments play entirely in unison; the second has them playing in unison but alternatively, while the third is more orchestrated and elaborate. Nevertheless, the accompaniment is always in melodic and rhythmic unison. Still Morning was immediately followed by Breathcrystal, which takes this cellular technique further, and they may be paired in concert.