A Matter Of Darkness
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Poet: Marianne Burton
Composer: Alastair Putt
Violin I: Maria Milstein
Violin II: Katie Stone
Viola: Ga Young Lee
Cello: Joanne Keithley
Listen to A Matter Of Darkness
Having no experience of using electro-acoustic material in my music, I was keen to make my first foray into that world, but aware that I did not want any electronic element to be gratuitous, merely a superficial sheen to the texture, but rather to have some rationale for being, both musical and conceptual. I was also conscious of my own technical limitations, and therefore the importance of any electro-acoustic element not becoming overwrought.
A Matter of Darkness was the product of another collaboration, this time with Marianne Burton of Birkbeck College. Among other topics, we discovered a shared interest in astronomy and science fiction, and, having brainstormed potential subject matters, resolved to create a work based on Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Nine Billion Names of God. This 1953 genre classic tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all the possible names of God, in the belief that when this task is completed, the universe will come to an end. Marianne then provided two poems, which became fused: the first (ending with 'in dimensions we do not know') describes the peculiarities of this universe, and the second (beginning with 'when all the names are uttered') relates directly to Clarke's story, forming a devastating coda. Punctuating this are some of the 'names of God', chanted as a refrain to the main body of poetry.
I chose to score the piece for string quartet, since I felt that high string harmonics adequately represented a cold, desolate environment, and because of the variety of string techniques that could be sampled for electronic manipulation (and indeed the harmonic complexity of a reverberating string itself). I decided upon a source hexachord
which would form the basis of my material, melodically as well as harmonically.
Throughout the score, electronically modified string sounds weave themselves in and out of the texture, as a kind of 'background radiation', often engaging in interplay with the live quartet, and sometimes blurring the boundaries between 'what is perceived and what takes place'. To effect these sounds, a number of chords and phrases were recorded by the quartet, and then modified in Logic Pro using the Michael Norris set of spectral plug-ins, primarily by filtering out certain bands of harmonic spectra from individual chords, thus changing their colour.
The opening section outlines the hexachord, and sets up a texture of free-floating sounds, each beginning at its own point in time, drifting through space. The first tape 'event' is a recording of the quartet's source chord with the lower partials removed, creating a wispy, ethereal sound. To blur the transition between the live and the recorded, the players are instructed to move towards the bridge and 'overbow' the strings to achieve a crackly, harmonically distorted tone. In the next, the upper partials are removed, imparting a sinusoidal purity of tone.
Just as the electronic intrusions represent a world removed from the main string texture, so the accompaniment to the chanting of the names (e.g., bar 27) inhabits a parallel spacetime to the rest of the piece; when it breaks off abruptly, it should be thought of as continuing beneath the surface, processing the myriad theonyms, until it next seeps into our dimension.
As the fate of the cosmos is finally revealed, the string quartet provides a quiet threnody. Here, the hexachord is employed both harmonically and melodically, so that, in each six-chord phrase, each instrument sounds each of the six notes once, and no note is doubled within any given chord, lending the phrases a quasi-serial completeness and satisfaction of part-writing.
At certain points, the quartet mime the playing of their parts as the tape bleeds into their music, the theatricality of the gesture re-emphasising the notion of illusion. At the conclusion, what appears to be a stereotypically apocalyptic organ in the electronic tape is actually a trompe l'oreille, built up of a large cluster of individual string tones. From this agglomeration of sound, the constituent notes are then 'squeezed out, one by one', giving the aural impression of zooming in on a smaller body. A solitary note remains, which itself is subjected to the same process, as we descend to the level of 'entangled photons'.
Draft versions of A Matter Of Darkness score
Score for A Matter Of Darkness
Song text:
Poet's notes:
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