We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.
/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      €5 EUR

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Digipak

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Song of Songs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days
    edition of 100 

      €7 EUR or more 

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    Get all 17 Louth Contemporary Music Society releases available on Bandcamp and save 35%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of FOLKS' MUSIC, Terry Riley IN C Irish, Wall of Athanasius, Bára Gísladóttir & Skúli Sverrisson Live from the Spirit Store, Flow, I Listened to the Wind Again, Lenguas de Fuego, Cantares de la Frontera, and 9 more. , and , .

    Purchasable with gift card

      €45.50 EUR or more (35% OFF)

     

1.
2.
3.

about

Paul Griffiths Songs of Songs

The Song of Songs is the dancer in the temple, the sensualist’s page tucked into the holy book, a love song accepted as scriptural in Jewish and Christian traditions from times before reckoning. It is a song of mutual adoration, voiced by two people – though their voices are not distinguished in the text, perhaps because, in the ecstasy of this shining, blazing regard that each fixes on the other, that holds them face to face, they are one. Certainly their language is one, a rich language of metaphor in which the human body is the universe and the beloved’s qualities and possessions are all elevated. God is nowhere – unless God is everywhere, the apogee and source of the love in which the words dwell. ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!’ the song begins, ‘For your love is better than wine; your anointing oils are fragrant; your name is oil poured out.’

Reading on, David Lang observed how the two people ‘have attributes, they notice things about each other, they own things, they have features that are desirable’. Accordingly, he filtered the text for possessive pronouns, and for the things those pronouns possess: ‘his mouth…your love…your anointing oils…your name’, and so on, using the English Standard Version. Where the pronoun is ‘your’ or ‘his’ (which he changed to ‘your’) he added ‘just’, which – besides giving a sense of brimming ampleness, of the whole present in every part – adds a more emphatic start to each phrase and also raises the minimum syllable count to three. (The maximum turns out to be seven, which makes an early appearance, because ‘oils’, like ‘veil’ later, is registered as a two-syllable word.) Where the pronoun is ‘my’ he added ‘and’, which, through the ampleness, gently proposes there is always more. There is no ‘her’ in the original text, because the man seems to lack the conscious interiority that allows the woman to speak of ‘him’ and ‘his’.

Since, in the text, ‘you’ and ‘me’ are wonderfully confused, we cannot generally be sure of the ownership conveyed by ‘your’ and ‘my’. Lang’s setting, however, makes that decision. Because we hear the words conveyed by women, in the ease and warmth of a comfortable middle register, the ‘your’ things are immediately understood as male and the ‘my’ as female. There are, as Lang notes, remarkably few joint possessions, just seven.

The totally syllabic setting begins each ‘just’ phrase on an E minor chord and then applies a simple rule for scalewise descent: the top voice goes down on the second syllable, the middle voice on the third, and the lowest voice on the fourth, if there is one. If there is a fifth, the top voice goes down again, and so on. The harmony thus bounces down, like a ball on a flight of stairs, and always it is back up again at the start of the next phrase. Fittingly, the ‘and’ phrases provide a mirror image, starting on a B minor chord and bouncing up in the same way. The rare ‘our’ phrases are radically different, being sustained by all three voices (the middle one pulsing) in cadences that sit in the text like illuminated capitals.

This is not all. Incrementally, instruments are drawn in to accompany the voices – accompany in the sense that they go along with the voices, not that they lend support, for the effect is more that they are listening. First to arrive is the occasional soft thump of bass drum and pizzicato strings. The first ‘our’ stops them, but after that they continue, soon joined by a vibraphone (no pedal or motor) and a glockenspiel, its chiming E at changing points in the silence after each phrase. Soon again, magically, the viola begins a vastly slow melody, and then, equally magically, the cello does the same, both of them in the voices’ register, more or less, and sometimes in unison. Whatever happens, though, the voices continue their litany, and the close harmony we might have thought worn out by so many female backing groups become fresh, a prayer of caresses.

The viola alone goes on into Naturale: natural, naturally. Of course no human music can be quite that, free from artifice, and Luciano Berio’s title is partly ironic. What is most obviously ‘natural’ in his piece – folk song, to be contrasted with, approached, converged with by music of his own devising – is brought in only by artificial means: recording and replay.

Berio had a particular liking for the viola, to which he devoted not only one of his solo Sequenzas but also two concertos arising from it and a third concerto, Voci (Voices, 1984), based on Sicilian folksongs. Naturale is a derivative of this last piece, composed the next year for a performance by the Italian dance company Aterballetto -- though, as so often with Berio, the theatre is implicit in how the music acts, and the composition creates its own stage.

On this stage, within the echo of a tam-tam stroke, two characters enter: a viola player, live, and a singer, Peppino Celano, heard from recordings. Visible and invisible, these two also come from different cultural worlds: folk music, such as anyone (Sicilian) might sing, and highly determined, highly indivdualized virtuosity – the raw and the cooked. Their relationship is ambiguous. Does the singer challenge the viola player or encourage? Is he the viola’s starting point or its destination? And to which world does the percussionist belong, if to either? As the piece unfolds, we may feel voice and viola coming closer, to a point of crisis.

‘My links with folk music are often of an emotional character’, Berio once said. ‘When I work with that music I am always caught by the thrill of discovery. I return again and again to folk music because I try to establish contact between that and my own ideas about music. I have a utopian dream, though I know it cannot be realised: I would like to create a unity between folk music and our music – a real, perceptible, understandable conduit between ancient music-making, which is so close to everyday work, and our music.’

It is a dream that has been shared by one of Berio’s pupils, Betty Olivero, in several pieces based on ancient melodies, including En la mar hai una torre (In the Sea there is a Tower). Where Lang has the singers of Trio Mediaeval always in harmony, in Olivero’s piece they interweave, echoing one another as they follow lines closely allied in contour and modality, like three mingling reflections in a rippled pool – a pool provided, perhaps, by the harp, which is often echoing them further.

Not only do these fluid musical images mirror one another – with variations, as when one follows another up a fourth but takes a different descent – they also, through such similarities and differences, bring diverse traditions into a confluence. ‘Most of the melodic material’, Olivero has said, ‘is based on traditional melodies from prayers or folk Ladino, Yemenite and Arabic songs.’ Sephardi Jews (of the Ladino-speaking cultural stream to which Olivero belongs), Yemenite Jews and Palestinian Muslims are all here singing the same songs.

The title comes from the first line of a Sephardi folk song, recalling, as the composer has also said, how deeply influenced these songs were by the Song of Songs. ‘Give me your hand, my dove’, the second stanza of this one begins, ‘I want to climb up to your nest.’ The words the singers sing, however, are taken once again from the Song of Songs, this time in the original Hebrew and in Ladino.

‘Yishakeni mineshikot pihu’, the piece begins, in a realization of the text’s opening very different from Lang’s, the singer entering the performance space as she sings, and at the same time shakes sleigh bells, closely followd by her two companions, joining her in similar manner. A little way into the piece the instrumental group enters: harp with viola and cello, and percussion, the harp adding to the heterophony of voices while the viola and cello sustain the harmony, until they too commit themselves to the flow of melody, further reflections.

A long cadence falls onto the work’s waiting keynote, D, but there is then a coda, ‘A garden locked is my sister’, towards the end of which the three singers, now together and with crotales, depart whence they came, visitors from history.

credits

released August 7, 2015

Performed by Trio Mediaeval and Garth Knox, viola, Agnès Vesterman, cello, Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion and Cliona Doris, Harp

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Louth Contemporary Music Society Dundalk, Ireland

I would say the Louth CMS is particularly significant because of the dedication, love and devotion that drives Eamonn Quinn to seek out special musicians to bring to his corner of the world. These choices are made on musical worth regardless of their commercial potential. It is these kind of risks that keep music alive. Composer – Terry Riley ... more

contact / help

Contact Louth Contemporary Music Society

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like The Song of Songs, you may also like: