A servant to the text…
It is a thrill to write for the Glasgow School of Art Choir. The ensemble’s community spirit, its passion and dedication to choral singing and to the commissioning and enjoyment of new music is truly inspirational. Writing for many voices gives an opportunity to have rich harmony, with voices full, balanced, and with voice parts coming in and out of the texture to give different colours. In my piece for Composeher I’ve remained true to my harmonic style (essentially tonal but with chromatic and bitonal elements) but thought about the numbers in each vocal part and how to divide and sound chords effectively. I’ve played around with spoken voice effects and, at one point, an aleatoric passage gives a hypnotic ‘wash’ of harmony underneath the main musical line. The six movements in my work have different tempi, textures and moods, yet there are thematic, melodic and harmonic elements which unify the whole. I’ve thought about the artistic sensibilities of the singers and hope they find the words and the music meaningful – challenging but accessible and exciting.
I love writing for voices, either for a soloist or a choir. Perhaps the thrill comes from being able to explore and utilise a passion for poetry and literature, and from the opportunity to share a beloved text with others, hoping it will illuminate and inspire them just as it did me. How to convey moods, feelings, atmosphere through the choice of words… It’s fascinating to see how any art form can express these things, but when two or more art forms are combined, it can be incredibly powerful. I love multi-media or interdisciplinary work. It’s all about connecting and communicating, with our world, with each other… ‘Only connect…’
Some texts will instantly leave an impression, and images spring to mind immediately. I see colours, textures, gestures which can be given musical interpretation. I can hear harmonies and phrases, rhythms of words, inflections. A blending of music and words can be a very powerful, immediate way to convey a sentiment or idea. The challenge for the composer is not to get in the way of the words; to choose carefully how much to reveal, to explain, and how much to allow, instead, the listener and performer to interpret, shape and colour the text and its meaning.
You are a servant to the text really, a conduit, and you have to be sensitive to the intention of the poet, in getting across your musical sense of what is being said.
Despite how we might love certain poems, they don’t all lend themselves to musical interpretation. I adore the poetry of Philip Larkin but, many years ago, realised instantly that it was difficult to set musically: to put his bleak, isolated voice in a musical context would be giving it too much ‘society’. Performers, audience, people who will then discuss it afterwards…it would have peopled his world, allowed the implication of more human contact. Better left for the reader, sitting alone, to hear Larkin’s lonely voice internally, amidst silence.
Kathleen Raine is a poet whose poetry and life’s work has always fascinated me. It is no surprise that other composers have set her words. I thought she would be perfect for the GSA Choir, given the strong visual element to her writing and her particular themes, which also inspire artists, designers, the whole range of the creative community.
Having studied psychology and natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, Kathleen Raine’s poetic and scholarly career was similarly occupied with themes of ecology, our landscape, the cosmos, spirituality and humanity. She captured the wonder of, and reverence for, the natural world and was forever concerned, in her poems, with our universe, our planet and of humanity’s relationship with it. With close ties to Scotland, having a Scottish mother, she spent a lot of her time in Wester Ross as well as Cumbria and Northumberland.
A William Blake scholar, her poems share with his a mysticism and a yearning to celebrate the ‘divine vision’. They are to an extent spiritual, with a great depth of feeling. There’s a space for reflection, the poems having a certain meditative quality about them. Coupled with her deftness of writing and evocative language and vivid imagery depicting our environment, they have long struck me as being suitable for musical interpretation.
Writing in 1990, about the launch of her Temenos Academy, a teaching institution which rejected ‘secular materialism’ evident in society, Raine said: ‘Our purpose is to study the learning of the Imagination, both in the arts but also in such metaphysical teachings as are likewise the expression of traditional spiritual knowledge’.
In Raine’s obituary in 2003, Guardian columnist, Janet Watts, wrote about her: ‘She stood as a witness to spiritual values in a society that rejected them’.
So, how to select which poem(s)? Should it be one long one, for a ten minute work? Or shorter ones, for a choral song-cycle, which share and explore a theme? For those unfamiliar with Raine’s work, it’s an opportunity to celebrate it. I’ve chosen six poems of differing lengths, which form what I hope is a representative group spanning her volumes of poetry over forty years. The earliest is a poem from her first collection, Stone and Flower, published in 1943 which, incidentally, had illustrations by Barbara Hepworth. I would have loved to have seen those.
When I began this commission for Composeher, I could never have foreseen how the world would be suffering from a devastating global pandemic by the time I was due to complete the finished composition.
Though I never set out to have the current situation influence the writing of this piece, I couldn’t help but notice how Raine’s beautiful and important words took on a deeper resonance and a heightened relevance in the current context of global catastrophe. Since countries have been in lockdown there are fewer cars on the roads, wildlife is emerging into quiet lands and clear skies, and there is improved air quality through a reduction in damaging air travel. People are taking more walks and paying attention to their surroundings. We have the chance to see our natural environment as it should be when not threatened by pollution, waste and wanton consumerism. It is heartening to read of a deep desire, amongst many, to see that our ecology and our society remain properly balanced in the future.
So, in the process of writing this, I was already thinking about these things but the ideas, and Raine’s texts, are vindicated. Put the planet first, appreciate wildlife, respect and protect nature and people. If poetry and music can help others see these things too, then that’s another very good thing to come out of this wonderful project. I sign off, looking forward with great anticipation to discovering how the choir likes the music, these words and all the other diverse and exciting compositions for Composeher.