thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg [2013]

eight lyrics for cello and high voice

duration :: 8’

Written for the ELISION Ensemble

First performance :: ELISION — Melbourne Conservatory (Melbourne, Australia), 17 March 2014

 [ ELISION (Séverine Ballon, vc; Carl Rosman, voice) :: Melbourne Conservatory, 17 March 2014 ]

Very little happens in this constrained environment: the cello embroiders an intensely intricate, virtuosically physical, but almost completely still language around a slow-moving, looping, microtonal cantus firmus, pianississimo; the voice accompanies it with a repeating pair of atomized phrases, or collections of micro-phrases, on the same melodic source.  In other words, a study in boundaries: formal, physical, harmonic, instrumental, rhetorical.

This passage was initially intended as a prelude to a larger work, but it serves here as an introduction to its own brief coda.

The title is also the only text: thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg, “that passed over, this can too,” in Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Old English, itself an incantatory refrain to a mournful lyric the meaning of which has become obscure.