Between Scylla and the Deep Blue Sea (2016) – Duration: ca. 11:30 Dedicated to Clay Zeller-Townson, he who doth bendeth it beste Program Notes Sailing round a rocky isle, a lone sailor, long from home, encounters a cruel beast of the deep that surfaces and taunts him. Cornered, the sea monster speaks to the solitary navigator about his loneliness, how sailors have learned to avoid his lair. Flattered, yet still anxious to leave, the sailor agrees to sing songs with the sea monster, occasionally dancing. The sailor attempts to teach the sea monster a song of his native land (Aria I), though the sea monster doesn’t quite get it. Agitated, the sea monster unleashes a torrent of high waves, buffeting the sailor’s boat, tossing him and the vessel about like toys in the hands of an impudent red-haired child. Knocking his head against something, the sailor drifts in and out of consciousness, hearing a part of a dance tune repeating in his ear. He dreams of his partner, his family, his distant home. He awakes dizzied, on dry land, overhearing the sea monster making a clumsy and dissonant plea for forgiveness. Touched by the monster’s newfound remorse, yet annoyed and no longer afraid, the sailor interrupts and takes over, singing a distraught, emotionally-charged song as a plea for his release. Finally, the sea monster relents, only upon the condition that the sailor returns every so often to visit, a condition the sailor only ambivalently agrees to.
Composer’s Notes Conceived as a series of recitatives and arias and some intercessory dance-inspired music, this odd little piece – somewhat outside my normal vocabulary and approach– materialized as a sort of living mash-up of a secular cantata and a later-Baroque paean to Bach/Corelli/Scarlatti (name ‘em, they’re here, lurking). Though one continuous movement with clearly alternating fast and slow tempos, the piece is just almost (but not quite) a number of alternating movements with thinly-veiled references to Baroque dance forms. (Clay wanted to steer me away from that, but I fear I got too close…) I never really set out to write a neo-Baroque piece, but how could I resist all those luscious sequences, blatant cadences, and dangling dominants? Of course, the piece steps out of time throughout, not least because of the crunchy harmonies scattered throughout, irregular and quirky phrases, and the bald-faced I-IV-bVII-IV chord progression within the first 90 seconds, but in places where there is some improvisation and breaking-of-time and the rampant microtones in the final third of the piece. So, no: the work isn’t meant to be cast as a Baroque work composed in the 21st Century: it’s really a late-20th Century work dipped in Baroque gold, not fully reaching the core. As I giddily described it in part in correspondence, it’s really more of a multiple-exposure homage to Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso, Poulenc’s Concert Champetre, Buxtehude’s harmonically striking works for harpsichord, particularly those for two harpsichords, and all sorts of Baroque ideals (Greek/Roman myths, making the dulcian act as a sea monster, pushing the boundaries of intonation and tuning’s good taste, and on).
Composed in West Columbia, SC, November 2015 through January 2016.