For my contribution to the 2019/20 CoDI Text pathway, Gone, I chose to set words from Kaite O’Reilly’s play, Persians, a retelling of Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy. Kaite provided the composers with a variety of texts to choose to work with, but this particular scene stood out to me above all others. It is drawn from Xerxes’ closing lament over catastrophic Persian military losses, but it does not try to describe details of the violence it is responding to. Rather, and why I found this text so interesting, is that it is an extraordinary study in emotion across time, mapping Xerxes’ wild surges from internalised (almost selfish) despair to outbursts of anger, and back again to pragmatic resignation. I did not wish to create a direct dramatic setting of the story, but approach it in a wider sense; the music never tries to directly evoke the subject of the text itself, but rather is an helpless reflection of what has been.
I felt strongly that any attempt to geographically locate the music to the Aeschylus’ original setting (Persia/Ancient Greece, depending on how you interpret the narration), would not only edge dangerously towards cliché (not to mention run contrary to the staging of Kaite’s reimagining of the text, set in a fictional European-esque dictatorship), but fundamentally misread the text. Rather, the true power of the words comes from their metaphorical capacity, transcending their initial context to reach a more universal emotional resonance, applicable to a variety of contexts, from national disaster (as in the original) to personal despair.
As I contemplated ways of effectively highlighting this idea in my music, I found myself returning to one of my key musical interests: British folk music, and the semiotic potential of the relationship between words and music. Interwoven between the original music in my setting of Kaite’s text – a superficially gentle but naggingly anxious harp riff, and shrill chromatic outbursts – are musical quotations from a folk song, The Three Ravens {RN5}; this ballad (and its more cynical Scottish counterpart, The Twa Corbies), first published in Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata of 1611, imagines a group of ravens, overlooking a battlefield which is slowly filling with mourners, commenting to each other how no amount of grief will change what has happened and only destroys those left behind. In the context of my own piece, its innocuous melody anempathetically narrates the singer’s struggle to come to terms with disaster, paralleling the two stories and creating a sense of uneasy calm which, like the passage of time, drifts on indifferent to the tragedy now receding into the past.
You can hear Gone, along with pieces from all of this year’s CoDI composers, in concert on March 29th at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.