resonances
Directly, in itself, music signifies nothing, unless by convention or association. Music means nothing and yet means everything. One can make notes say what one will, grant them any power of analogy: they do not protest. In the very measure that one is inclined to attribute a metaphysical significant to music discourse, music (which expresses no communicable sense) lends itself, complaisant and docile, to the most complex dialectical interpretations. In the very measure that one tends to confer upon music the dimension of depth, music is, perhaps, the most superficial form of appearance.
Music has broad shoulders. In the hermeneutics of music, everything is possible, the most fabulous ideologies and unfathomable imputed meanings. Who will ever give us the lie?
Music and the Ineffable
Vladimir Jankelevitch
Some works seek to re-articulate concepts, people, poems, or narratives, transformed in their transition to the domain of music, a tendency I refer to as ekphrastic. A particularly clear manifestation of this is Alcyone, in which a string quartet re-presents (through music and speech) Ovid's narrative of transformation and loss. Analogously, Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind is a meditation on a poem by Derek Mahon, considering the persistent, perhaps eternal isolation of the artist from those dear to them. In addition, a few works are tide closely to particular works in the visual arts, such as Bird-like Things in Things Like Trees, a collaborative project with painter Rob Tarbell. The Hunt by Night (from 'A Book of Etudes') is a kind of double ekphrasis; in referring both to a poem of Mahon's, and to the 15th-century painting of Paolo Uccello that it reflects on, the music transforms the mortality of the hunt to child-like play and back again.
Bird-like Things in Things like Trees
A work for cello, clarinet, and piano, this is a multi-media work emerging from the collaborative work of composer Douglas Boyce and artist Rob Tarbell. An interlocking network of compositions and visual works derive from the songs and flights of the birds encountered amidst the landscape of Auvillar, France, observed by the artists while in residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts France.
Sails Knife-bright on a Season Wind
Written for for violin, guitar, and percussion, Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind continues this motion into a different space, of night and dream. The work is dedicated to my son, Tiernan, four at the time of the composition. The title comes from poet Derek Mahon’s Achill, a meditation on the connection and disconnection of artist and family, of father and son.
And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean
A sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind
And wish he were here
where currachs walk on the ocean
The piece is a passage through half-sleep to dream, and through dream into dance and energy, and finally from that playful dreamscape to the deep sleep of moon and stars.