Until Unbidden Go
Dr Tom Hall, REF 2014, item 4
Until Unbidden Go (2009), for violin and laptop with 4-channel sound. Commissioned by the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre for the 2009 Beckett and Music Symposium, University of Sussex.
Audio
Live recording of Until Unbidden Go
Mifune Tsuji, violin;
Tom Hall, laptop and 4-channel sound.
First performed 2009–02–27 at the Beckett and Music Symposium, University of Sussex.
Score
REF Statement
Until Unbidden Go brings together a number of research imperatives and constraints, including:
- an engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett and his interest in Romantic music (since commissioned by the Beckett Conference);
- making an electronic real-time algorithmic part using only SuperCollider software for synthesis and sequencing (relating to my other research, e.g. REF Item 1);
- writing a piece for a known performer (Mifune Tsuji), that was idiomatic to her musical interests and ‘dramatic’ playing style.
Samuel Beckett’s strong interest in the music of Franz Schubert is a focal point of this composition, in particular the settings of Der Erlkönig and Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden).
The sectional form of the composition follows the dialectical one of Der Tod und das Mädchen and the Schubert setting of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig: alternating death/maiden; father/child. Until Unbidden Go has short contrasting sections (loud/dramatic, soft/undramatic), to which prerecorded violin material is also heard via the live algorithmic electronic part–composed using the same processes as the primary score.
In performance, the four–channel electronic part surrounds the audience, comprising two strands: playback of violin fragments as described above, and recordings of natural and human activity. The latter aim to evoke an atmosphere in harmony with the German texts, and also references their narrative, especially of Die Erlkönig—a continuous sound of rain, and foreboding footsteps. The opening sequence of electronic elements also pays homage to opening structure of sounds in Beckett’s radio play, All That Fall.
Programme Note
Until Unbidden Go (2008–2011), for violin and electronics, takes as its starting point Samuel Beckett’s interest in the music of Franz Schubert, in particular his settings of Der Erlkönig and Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden). Beckett used a segment of a recording of the string quartet version of the latter piece in his first radio play, All That Fall. Both Schubert’s music and the play have death (“Freund Hain”) as a central subject; both lieder are structured in dialogue form: death/maiden; father/child in Erlkönig. Until Unbidden Go adopts this kind of structure, in which short musical sections are juxtaposed sequentially, and also—via live electronics—simultaneously. The musical language of the composition, which takes its title from a line in Beckett’s poem Roundelay, is in some ways an imagining of Romanticism via the modernist filter of some of Beckett’s approaches to natural language, including that of the apparent formalism found in some works. The live electronic part of composition (realised in SuperCollider) is presented in a 4-channel quadraphonic sound, into which persistent sounds from natural environments—such as the sound of rain and footsteps—are juxtaposed against ‘doubles’ of the violin part.