clouds that veil
Voice (mezzo soprano), accordion, trombone, electronics [7′ 20″]
Commissioned by New Music Now for Dag van de Componist (Amsterdam) 2024. Premiere 15th June 2024, Amsterdam Central Station. Performed by Aurelie Lierman, Claudio Jacomucci and Sebastiaan Kemner.
This work is a setting of the poem Mutability (1885) by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was one of the inspirations behind the larger scale multimedia piece with the name mutabilty that will be performed later in the month in the Holland Festival.
For this piece, I set the text and music against field recordings made in Amsterdam on several nights in May. These recordings are sped up by 60 times (so that hours are relative to minutes). Hours of different nights with 7 different resonant pitches are triggered at the points given in the score.
Mutability (1885) by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—
II.
Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
III.
We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:—
IV.
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.