Spectre: Three Attempts to summon her (2023)
Spectre: three attempts to summon her was composed for flautist Lamorna Nightingale, and was commissioned by Ensemble Offspring with the generous support of Kim Williams AM, as part of their Lone Hemispheres initiative. Works commissioned in this series are composed for solo instrumentalist and are written either in response to, or to be paired with, an existing work for that same instrument. Lamorna proposed Noanoa by Kaija Saariaho.
I had begun work on the piece when, to my shock and sadness, Saariaho died. This altered my approach; it seemed I couldn’t write it without acknowledging her death and composing a work in memoriam. It is a more static and meditative piece than I had originally planned to write and refers directly to sonic and conceptual aspects of her music. A theme that recurs throughout Saariaho’s oeuvre is the way that memory and longing are full of distortion and fragmentation. Noanoa’s fragmented and distorted text is about attempting to capture the memory of a fragrance. In filling my own piece with distorted and bleached out fragments of Saariaho’s language, I am, likewise, trying to capture my memory of her.
The title will naturally bring to mind Saariaho’s association with the French Spectral school, but it is really a reference to an imagined apparition. This piece is intended as a gentle ritual, undertaken to lovingly conjure Saariaho’s ghost (whatever that might mean). The most present object from her music is a multiphonic from Noanoa, recorded for me by Lamorna.
In the first attempt to summon Saariaho, that multiphonic is transformed and distorted and the live flute part is largely intended to gently refract and colour the harmonic terrain implied by the multiphonic, while doing not very much at all. The live flute pitches almost all come from the melody of the opening movement of Saariaho’s Quatre instants, a melody that can be almost entirely derived from Noanoa’s multiphonic.
In the second attempt, the texture thins out for a recitation, ornamented by flute sound, of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Il pleut, which was set by Saariaho in 1986. This poem is itself about memory and women’s voices. Here it appears in English translation.
In the third attempt, Noanoa’s multiphonic is repeated like a refrain or a mantra of some kind, with the thought that repetition might render it a lure; her ghost might recognize something essentially hers tolling in the music, and be beckoned by it.
I’d never thought much about ghosts before.
I’m grateful to Lamorna Nightingale for our discussions, experiments, and recordings during the development of the piece.
—————————
The fixed media electronics should be produced in stereo. The tape part can be cued in measure 2 and played as a single file, or, if it is the performer’s preference, a Q-lab file can be provided, in which individual cues can be controlled by the player. (App available here: https://qlab.app/)