André Serra Map/Line/Axis

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Map/Line/Axis was written in reflection of my time in Vila Nova de Milfontes where I had gone to visit my mother for her birthday. The piece presents three short movements in the form of distinct memory-events: the indistinct background chatter of voices while in public; the strange familiarity of revisiting a place that feels both unchanged and irrevocably different; and fragments of music I listened to while I was there.
 

Beneath these moments lies a deep love for the people who live there, and for the feeling of memory tracing lines across places that continue to move without us.

 

 

Yuyang Li and which matures willynilly

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This piece takes its title from The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner:

“...it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time...”

The piece responds to a phenomenology of time in Faulkner’s work, in which the present dissolves into a saturated, kaleidoscopic landscape of love, sorrow, fear, and desire. It also engages with a distinctive pathos in the opening chapter that emerges through its detached, clinical narration devoid of sentimentality.

 

 

Lucy Holmes The Iridescence

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I think there is a divine magic to rain, in its cyclic nature and how it falls and rises from unseen places. It’s a bridge between worlds, connecting the sky with the underground, the singular with the collective, it’s moving and it’s still. The Iridescence is inspired by the idea of acid rain, or more specifically the process of pollution. It invites us into the journey of raindrops rising and falling, and through the process of changing from a pristine state to one of corruption and decay. 

 

 

Barbara Monk Feldman Voices, Viola

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I think of timbre (or color) as an elemental force in the music I compose.

 

The dissonant and consonant pitches have a timbral direction, similar to sharps and flats, that opens fields where I hear the instrumental color as dissonance and consonance. There is also a floating quality of the timbre in these fields that resists the directional tendency of pitch. Shading, or slight shifting in the registration is key.

 

Timbre is not an embellishment of musical structure: timbre is the structure.

 

Voices, Viola was composed for EXAUDI.

 

 

Michael Finnissy Collect for the second Sunday in Advent

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In the turmoil of the RE-FORMATION [of the Christian Estate, or Christian Liberty] that followed the 1517 publication of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, and following the death of King Henry VIII (1547), the English language was with much controversy introduced into the Mass as ‘the Holy Communion’ (1548). The first English ‘Book of Common Prayer’ appeared in 1549, and the key words in its title are ‘Common Prayer’ - intentionally available and intelligible to everyone in common, not in Latin and only intended for the clergy. A similar crisis of intelligibility currently affects the Church of England, where the ‘old language’ of Tyndale and the authorised ‘King James’ version of the Bible (1611 – five years before the death of Shakespeare) is now thought to be incomprehensible and irrelevant to the majority of people. ‘Historical’ choral settings of English religious texts (Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons, Purcell, Handel, Elgar, Tippett) are also spurned by contemporary Ministry Teams, and the church-organ frequently replaced by guitars and drums, or TV screened pre-recorded material.

 

The ‘Collect’ is (or was?) a prayer, one for each Sunday of the year and for feasts, solemnities of the Church, like Christmas, Easter and weddings and funerals. I have set Cranmer’s text of 1552. The Prayer Book was declared illegal the following year and Archbishop Cranmer burned-at-the-stake in 1556.

 

His text (below) focusses on ‘learning’ – in my setting it is preceded by an interpolated reference to the previous week’s Gospel-reading: And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and said, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. [Matthew XXI.]

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BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

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This work is the final part of a cycle of 3 Collects and 2 Psalms; I have troped the foregoing text with two short extracts from the Latin Psalm settings.

 

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Emily Pedersen Strange and Sacred Places

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Strange and Sacred Places sets black out poetry (originally the mass text). It explores the acoustics similarities between churches and caves, taking harmonies from the resonances that occurred when singing fragments of the piece in Stump Cross Caverns’ Cathedral Cavern.

 

 

Molly Arnuk Bug dance (requiem)

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Bug dance (requiem) places each singer in the role of an insect’s leg and traces the pattern of their gait. As their pace quickens, legs begin to overlap and synchronizations occur. The piece seeks to synthesize the scuttling source material with the sublime, often sacred associations of the choral music canon. Latin Requiem Mass text settings emerge from buzzing hums and whispers of pesticides.

 

 

Joanna Ward WALKING IN THE RAIN

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WALKING IN THE RAIN is my third piece for EXAUDI. It was originally conceived as a companion piece, a slow movement perhaps, to go alongside LIVING ON ICE-CREAM AND CHOCOLATE KISSES (2022) and (WE’VE GOT) HONEY LOVE (2020). Those two earlier works used fragments snatched from some of my favourite love songs (and, some of the singers’ favourites too) as their source material. I’ve revisited those songs to make use of what was left behind on my first looting mission – this time, using slowed, blurred chords and long, arcing lines instead of springy loops of melody as the jumping off points for the piece. 

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Another critical difference in approach with this new work is that, rather than using a range of non-text sounds, I wanted to work with words – a challenge for me, a composer who loves writing for the voice but has a relationship of suspicion with ‘setting text’. I asked my friend, poet Matilda Sykes, if she might be interested in writing something on the theme of love, borrowing, stealing. The poem I set – itself simply titled Love – was her response. I have greatly enjoyed working this tender poem (thank you, Matilda) into the world of my music. It has meant negotiating how the expressiveness and layers of meaning which come with such words can sit alongside my habitually oblique compositional language; I think perhaps it has even exposed a desire in me to be a bit more connected to, and straightforward about, how things might feel.

 

 

Pernille Faye Bryggensang

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Nestled amidst the wooden structures of Bryggen, a collection of over 670 runic inscriptions was unearthed following a fire in 1955. Etched into wooden sticks or pieces of bone, these carvings revealed the use of runes beyond formal inscriptions was prevalent up until the 14th century; far more recent in history than had previously been believed. Each message, label or promise allows us a direct glimpse into the life of its author in a distinctly personal fashion. The text that has been set is a stylised translation of a runic verse, written and then hidden away by one of these poets as a secret pledge of love to a woman he could not marry.