Camera Obscura
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Poet: Nancy Jones
Composer: Marcus Barcham-Stevens
Soprano: Kezia Bienek
Flute: Pavel Mansurov
Oboe: Anna Durance
Bass clarinet: Anne Morris
Cello: Timothy Lowe
Harp: Manson Hughes
Conductor: Edward Nesbitt
Listen to Camera Obscura
From my collaboration with the poet Nancy Jones, many subjects were discussed in the creation of our piece: astronomy, eclipse, light, perspective, landscape, human interraction and coincidence. Of these, I concentrated perhaps the most on light, though this clearly was also an important theme arising from Nancy's visit to the camera obscura in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, which inspired the text. Light is expressed in the music in many contrasting forms: sudden and explosive, still or shimmering, dark and ominous, transforming itself from grey to brilliant gold, thin and transparent as winter light, cloudy daylight masking the dark cosmos, mysterious and infinite like a space-time singularity, or earthy and tangible as represented by a bed of white crocusses. The soprano is the centre of gravity, though the five players which surround her, are also treated as soloists in a colouristic interplay of different wind and string sonorities.
And this is how Nancy summed up her experience of the collaboration with me:
My initial thoughts for the collaboration with Marcus centred on the concept of seeing and being seen. I have been fascinated with camera obscura for a long time and wanted to explore different ways of seeing a landscape mediated through a camera obscura. After visiting the camera obscura in Greenwich my research for the project turned to the 17th century and the first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, his contemporary at the Royal Society Robert Hooke, and 18th century visual aesthetics. The inspiration from this research lead me to write a selection of phrases that I presented to Marcus who then chose some key phrases for me to build the poem around.
A web-page about the camera obscura which we used in our collaboration can be found here.
I got to know Nancy's work through her poems, initially "Queue", "In Transit", "Greve", "San Gabriel", but then especially though her poem "Empty" beginning with the line "Sound suspended,..." in November 2008. In the process of the collaboration, she then wrote a collection of lines entitled "Random phrases from notes on a Camera Obscura"(which she refers to at the end of her paragraph), some lines of which were finally included, though in a different order, in her poem "Camera Obscura".
Ideas/themes that we explored in Camera Obscura:
Layers of seeing and perception.
Vision as both physical and metaphysical.
The role of the onlooker and different sides of the perception process.
Different perspectives, real and illusory.
Lines of sight.
That which is seen or hidden (as in an eclipse).
Inside the Camera Obscura versus outside in the landscape/the real image.
The relationship, or contrast, of stasis and movement.
Transformation of an object, either through itself or through external forces.
Physical change in relation to emotional change.
Vision of the landscape and sky.
Landscape being transfomed, especially through light.
Human elements projected onto the landscape, and feeding into something more abstract.
Ambiguity of final lines: looking at the earth from the sky (with the star field representing a bed of crocusses) or lying on the earth looking at the stars:
"pressed deep into moist earth
a star field visible by day
cloaked in folded green"
Astronomy; influence of the Greenwich Observatory, Robert Hook, John Flamsteed.
The spiritual power and metaphor of visionary light, which I used as the inspiration for much of the actual music, and which resonates with my aesthetic generally in my composition.
The relationship of light and dark, or of one thing shielding another, as in:
"inside the dark chamber
the moment of contact stretches to infinity"
not representing darkness but a spiritual connection to an intangible reality which we are aware of but cannot directly perceive.
This is however set against a modernist ethos of "showing and not telling" in poetry or music.
Song text:
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