IAIN GRANDAGE - COMPOSITIONS

WORKS FOR THE CONCERT HALL

Sleep (2004) Text : Kenneth Slessor

Birth. Love. Time. Death.

These are some of the ideas behind Kenneth Slessor’s poem Sleep – an exploration of the narcotic power of words – their sound, their rhythms, their alliterative lulling qualities. The themes of the poem make an easy argument for its inclusion in a programme containing a requiem, which launches a season whose unifying motif is shadows.

At the core of my setting of Sleep is a quote from Mozart - not as heard by us - an attentive concert audience, but perhaps as we might hear him through the veils of sleep, or as a child might in the womb.

The passage in question is from the development section of the slow movement of Mozart 40, where a progression derived from the opening theme is superimposed with descending woodwind scales of utmost simplicity.

A problem inherent in the poem is the presence of two separate voices in the opening stanza. By conceiving of the orchestra as the second voice - a petulant toddler, if you will (the less said about orchestral temperament the better…) – I have freed the soloist to act as Slessor’s principal voice, who then engages in a dialogue with the orchestra which ends in the latter’s ultimate surrender to sleep with an implied “Yes, utterly”.

Throughout the central stanzas of the poem, this surrender to the lush vagaries of sleep is complete - the warm, muted, assonant, watery qualities of the text are highlighted and both singer and orchestra indulge in a more opulent, shadowy sound world.

In contrast to these, the outer stanzas of the poem are intended as characterisations of the daylight world, where the uncompromising nature of reality and time deny the selflessness of sleep. They are dominated by brighter and sharper textures than the central sections and contain the descending scale passages that find their genesis in the Mozart quote, but which are transposed now into the more regimented Octatonic scale. These bookends are dominated by expanding and contracting vocal phrases and additive rhythmic processes amongst the accompaniment, building a rhythmically vital but oddly mechanistic sound world. But, and somewhat contrary to Slessor’s conception, this is a world with more than a hint of celebration, because it is at this moment, in the here and now, that we feel truly alive.

Sleep was first performed by the WA Symphony Orchestra under Matthias Bamert with soloist Sally-Anne Russell on the 12th March 2003 in the Perth Concert Hall. It was part of a program that began with Mozart Symphony No. 40 and ended with Mozart Requiem.

INSTRUMENTATION : *3.*3.*3.*3 – 4.4.3.1 – 3 perc timp hp strings 16.14.12.10.8 - mezzo soprano
DURATION : 8 Minutes