à un quart de voix [2010]

for E-flat clarinet, oboe, and prepared cello

duration :: 2’15”

First performance :: ELISION Ensemble — Kings Place, London, 6 December 2010

[ ELISION :: Live, Kings Place (London), 6 December 2010 ]

"à un quart de voix" - a particularly evocative and punishing performance indication from Hector Berlioz's Nuits d'été (the fifth song, "Au cimetière"): "with a quarter of the voice," not merely (as most translations of this phrase take it) "to be sung very softly," but with a fierce sense of restraint, a strenuous physical effort towards the abdication of projective power.

This is a pair of movements of equal length, each comprising collections of approximately corresponding, approximately repetitive, approximately canonic melodic detritus in the winds over a faint grounding echo in a droning, staticky cello. It may be too much to imagine this piece as an homage to Berlioz's ubiquitous, painfully expressive linear awkwardnesses...