w18553
| Title | Autour de la Chambre de Sarah |
| Contributors |
Derek Ball (composer) |
| Composition date | 2010 |
| Duration (mins) | 20 |
| Category | accompanied vocal |
| Instrumentation | Spkr / Cl Vn Vc |
| Commissioned by | |
| Key signature | |
| First line | |
| First performed | |
| Notes | Dedicated to Carol McGonnell |
| Programme Note | In 2007 I wrote a little piece for Carol McGonnell, called La chambre de Sarah. She premièred it in Carnegie Hall the same year. Since then I have been unable to resist the temptation now and then of adding more pieces in the same emotionally direct style, and using - as in the original piece - words or ideas from the writing of Andrè Gide, specifically his extraordinary novel Les Faux-Monnayeuers. Without Carol McGonnell's encouragement the work would probably have remained nothing more than a vague idea in my mind, and I gratefully dedicate it to her. Six of the twelve pieces include a speaker, and most of the time the spoken material is kept separate : the music echoes and adumbrates it instead of accompanying it. The words describe moments of special emotional intensity in the action of the novel. Bear in mind, though, that the sentiments Gide's characters express are not necessarily those he would endorse himself; what I'm saying is, read the novel! The third movement treats the character of Alfred Jarry, a real person to whom Gide, innovatively for the early 1920s, gave a cameo part in his novel alonside the fictional ones. Sarah herself is a relatively minor character in the novel. So is her brother Armand, recently prey to an uncharacteristic access of bitterness related to a realisation that, perhaps, his nascent literary career may come to nothing. The unexpected and epiphanic emotion which somehow redeems him as he witnesses the brief affair between Sarah and his friend Bernard is the subject of the second movement (the original short piece, then called La Chambre de Sarah. The work contains a memorial to the life of an old friend, Michael Battle, in that some of the serene music of the opening and closing instrumental sections is borrowed from a clarinet & piano piece that I wrote on the occasion of his untimely death. |
This work is associated with the following collection items:
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