The Hunt by Night

A Book of Etudes, Quire 7, No. 3

The Hunt by Night has two points of origin: Paulo Uccello’s 1470 painting (sometimes referred to as The Hunt in the Forest) and Derek Mahon’s eponymous 1970 poem.

Uccello plays with symmetry and flatness in representing hunters, horses, dogs, and horns; their chaotic yet directed energy dances before the forest's cold, rigid lines, soon to envelop them. The painting presents for us the anticipatory moment, the instant before the start of the chase as the forest lays before the hunters (as does their prey), while their dogs, mounts, and partners gambol, play and rough-house, with only a few seemingly paused in consideration of the pursuit's likely lethal culmination.

Mahon’s poetic exegesis of the painting considers the historicality of the chase, moving from its origin as a brutal necessity to the mythic space of cave-art, then to a privileged pastime of nobility, and then again to games of childhood. He sees all this in the pageantry and play of the foreground to the dark interior of the forest. “Crazed no more by foetid / Bestial howls,” the hunt is transformed, “horses to rocking-horses / Tamed and framed to courtly uses.” Not a re-presentation of a particular hunt, this is a poetic exegesis of the multiple significations of this strange and fatal pleasure.

In my musical rendering of this scene, the sprezzatura of counter)induction’s performers echo the energy of the crowded foreground of the painting. The piece is part of a set of 21 pieces for combinations of clarinet, cello, and piano (A Book of Etudes), each work pushing players outside of the standard towards a virtuosity of expression. The historical caccia is a wegmarke, as the three players shift roles from pursuer to pursued, and back again.