Anna, Aren't You Listening?

...Anna, Aren't you scared?

Hello!

I’m jumping straight in with the blatant plug, which is that, on Thursday, I will have three French music premieres at the Abbey of Bon Repos in Brittany, France. The performers will be Anikó Tóth (soprano) and Marine Lombard (piano).

The concert will be called The Night Bride, because the most substantial piece of the night is the music theatre/mini opera of the same name that I wrote with Mike Sizemore, drawing inspiration from the gorgeous artwork of David Kennedy.

Poster for the French Premiere of The Night Bride

The Night Bride started life as a short story that I wrote for an anthology called New Writings in the Fantastic a billion years ago.

New Writings in the Fantastic

Mike then adapted it as a comic script, which was, in turn, brought to life by Dave’s art.

The front cover of The Night Bride comic adaptation

If you want to read the whole thing, you can find it on my blog here.

The origin of the story has its roots in my obsession with all things Hungary, and, in particular, the music of Béla Bartók (I think this may have come up, again, last week).

Before I’d ever even visited Hungay, let alone lived there, I had been obsessed with Bartók’s string quartets, and, for my final year undergraduate thesis, I decided to tackle Bartók’s 1911 opera A kékszakállú herceg vára, or, as we would call it, Bluebeard’s Castle.

Bartók’s version of the Bluebeard story was quite different to the version you might know, and is - I’m grotesquely simplifying here - a symbolist drama exploring ‘“man’s” and “woman’s”’ inability to truly know one another.

Bartók’s Bluebeard is only an hour long and very accessible. A good place to start for people who don’t really like opera. It’s also got some real horror movie vibes.

During my research, I stumbled on a Székely folk tale that shared many parallels with the Bluebeard story called Anna Molnár. Years later, Anna Molnár became the basis for my short story The Night Bride.

After the comic adaptation, Mike, Dave, Anikó Tóth and myself teamed up with Mike’s collaborators for his theatre adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, with the intentions of bringing it to life with music, dance, animation and projections. Despite the enthusiasm of all involved, the project never survived the cursèd process of finding funding. You can get a vague idea of how it may have turned out by taking a look at this trailer for the theatre version of Howl’s Moving Castle.

In 2012, just as I was wrapping up my PhD, my good friend and supervisor, Prof. Alan Williams and I both got the opportunity to compose some music for cimbalom - a sort of great, big hammered dulcimer - to be performed by Tim Williams for a concert in Vienna. What better way, we decided, to get the creative juices flowing than to head off on a field recording trip to Transylvania? The region around Homoródszentmárton and Székelyudvarhely to be precise.

On getting to Budapest by plane, the biggest part of the journey was the 12-hour train ride through the Carpathian Mountains and into the heart of the Székelyföld. From there, we had plenty of adventures, including running for our lives down a mountain pursued by huge dogs guarding the sheep from wolves, getting lost in the stygian forest and helping a bumbling cow find its way home in the evening, after grazing on the mountainside. All the while, we had our trusty field recorders in hand, documenting it all and recording the sounds of the Transylvanian forests and villages.

Upon returning home from this trip, I wrote a music theatre version of The Night Bride for soprano, cimbalom, quadrophonic audio and narrator. Of course, I needed a libretto, so who better to ask than Mike Sizemore, who, through his comic adaptation, had a better understanding of the character and story than anyone?

So far, we’ve yet to make a proper audio recording of The Night Bride, but I do have this rough demo we made as a pitch for a Halloween festival.

As an important aside, this region of Transylvania is very important to me. On a previous visit, I had travelled with Anikó Tóth, who would later become my wife. At the time though, we were just travelling companions, as we had both been invited separately to spend Easter with a mutual friend in Székelyudvarhely. Now, there are some stories to tell about that trip, but they’ll have to wait for another time.

One indelible memory of that trip with Anikó is of her singing the Hungarian folk song Túl a vízen zörög a jég on a road trip with our friend’s parents. It’s still one of my favourite songs, and I never tire of hearing Anikó’s interpretation of it, which, in my opinion, is the definitive version.

Túl a vízen zörög a jég went on to to be incorporated into The Night Bride as a direct musical quotation, but with new lyrics by Mike. Anikó’s melodic decorations of the simple melody, as particular to a Hungarian folk singer as their fingerprint, went into my musical melting pot as cellular material, and reemerged in new and grossly contorted forms.

When it comes down to it, The Night Bride is a truly collaborative work. Without Anikó’s voice and encyclopaedic knowledge of Hungarian folk song, Mike’s powerful and concise lyrics or Dave’s incredible art, the piece would not exist.

Take a bow, everyone!

What Else?

Well, there will be two arias from my own opera, Flight Paths, from 2011 (Gee, wizz! 2010 to 2012 was a crazy productive time for me!). This time, the libretto was by poet Adam Strickson, who was also the producer, and the piece was composed as a flagship art project for the 2012 London Olympics.

There will also be a performance by Marine Lombard of my solo piano piece Extrapolations III. It’s quite a daunting piece, so I’m immensely grateful to Marine for putting in the enormous effort and dedication needed to perform it.

Why’s it called Extrapolations III? Where are Extrapolations I and II? I explain (sort of) in my programme notes.

Sometimes, musical material takes time to find its form, and that was the case with Extrapolations III. There were actually four pieces, entitled Extrapolations I-IV, and each one dealt with the same material. Eventually, I decided IIIwas the most successful, and, therefore, I, II, and IV have since been banished to a hard drive somewhere with my other ugly children. 

Around the time I began exploring Extrapolations III, I was listening to a lot of early music by John Cage, in particular Music of Changes. I was fascinated by how melodies and phrases would seem to emerge from the chaos and then trail off, like unfinished sentences. 

In Extrapolations, I wanted to do the opposite. Melodies tentatively emerge from silence, but, before they can establish a safe foothold, the ideas run away with themselves and accelerate downhill, seemingly out of control… but are they?

Also, I just like the word Extrapolation. Yorkshireman and jazz god John McLaughlin got there first, though.

Who Else?

Anikó will be performing Elegeia (for Anna), which is a work she co-composed with Nikos Stavropoulos for soprano and tape. It’s a wonderful piece inspired my mourning and keening in Greek and Hungarian traditions. It’s a harrowing journey, at times, but ultimately cathartic.

There’s also some settings of poems by János Arany and Sándor Weöres for soprano and piano by György Ligeti. “Who’s this bloke Ligeti?”, you cry. This bloke.

Phew! That was all a bit la di da. Time for a quick ear rinse before I sign off.

Right, I’m off. Thanks to anyone who got this far.

See you next week!

Stay noisy!

Steve