James Weeks: Mala Punica

EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble; Hortus Ensemble

With its roots in Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry and fertility rites, the Song of Songs is the greatest pæan to human love in ancient literature. Its verses describe a love song from man to woman to man, flitting between lover and beloved in a mosaic of iridescent, enigmatic imagery familiar from its co-option into Judaeo-Christian religious traditions and a millennium of European musical settings. Re-reading teh Songs as literature today seems only to emphasize its sharpness and extremity: the inexhaustible overabundance of metaphor and its patchwork construction give it a decidedly modern edge. I designed a set of pieces with a variety of vocal orchestrations, each channelling the canon's intrinsic momentum in different ways: creating proliferating, growing textures, or shifting densities of sound like passing clouds, or folding the canon back on itself into more static or circling formations. I collated the texts from all over the poem, often bringing together related phrases that appear in different chapters of the Song. Each piece takes a nature-image from its text as a basis for its structure and overall character. I imagine each piece as taking place in real-time, like an unedited film. In that time the steady-state textures change gradually: the sun increasingly catches the leaves of teh plans over the eight minutes of the first piece; the wind rises and falls across the span of the second piece, and in the last there are slight, unpredictable fluctuations of gently rustling foliage. - James Weeks

Price: $27.98

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