Doublemain
Notes
Doublemain was composed in 1989 and is dedicated to Dave Smith. It exists in six versions to date:
- violin and guitar (premiered by "Gemini" (Peter Hanson, vln., Adrian Lee, guit.) at the Old Bull Arts Centre, Barnet, 1989)
- violin and piano
- piano solo (made in 1992)
- clarinet and piano (broadcast BBC Radio 3, 9.12.94, Ed Pillinger, cl., Suzanne Cheetham, pno.)
- clarinet, viola, cello, piano (premiered by 'Perihelion', Brisbane, Australia,1996)
- clarinet, violin, cello, piano (premiered by 'Burdocks', Vancouver, Canada, 1998)
The idea for the piece came from my work on John Harman's translation of Alfred Jarry's 'The Other Alcestis'. From an admixture of myths, Jarry spins a complex of yarns around the five characters mentioned above. Doublemain is the most Jarryific - his version of Charon (the ferryman of the dead in Greek mythology). The text describes him thus:
"His back appeared to be plated with bronze, or covered with scales similar to myrtle leaves, like those of a snake. His long arms reached over the side and were lost in the water as if the great beetle of the marshes, whose carapace was our conveyance, were rowing with its hairy, median pair of legs."
and, later
"...Doublemain's arms had two elbows, since an extra arm sprang from each wrist..."
Just as Jarry's story interweaves fact and myth, contemporary reference and ancient history, near-quotation and original writing; so the musical content of Doublemain mixes original material with occasional reference to other musics, both real and imaginary.
The five sections of the composition are connected only by falsehood:
1) Vizier Asaf (pseudo-Islamic) mimics a Mediterranean folk-player
influenced by music from
further East, and should be played in that idiom.
2) Doublemain (cod Ancient Greek) is a wholly inaccurate attempted realisation of fragments of
musical notations from ancient Greece surrounding a brief altered quotation from
Claude Terrasse's music for Jarry's poem 'Tatane'.
3) Balkis (mock Egyptian) contains music that appeared in a rather
old book on Egyptology. Having established that it is impossible to know how
ancient Egyptian music would have sounded, the writer proceeds to assert that this
rhythm was 'probably the sort of thing they would have used'. There is a mental picture
for this section: a bored archaeologist alternately whistling and tapping with
the hammer.
4) Solomon (plagiarist by anticipation) whose accompaniment includes
some direct musical
references to the "exotic" apparition of King Solomon to Faust in
Busoni's opera
Doktor Faust, a moment rich in symbolism and layering of imagination.
5) Rehoboam (false Solomon) was Solomon's son, but he lacked his
father's wisdom. Through
pointless extravagance he dissipated Solomon's vast wealth. The piano part
here takes
the figuration of the first of Chopin's Op.10 'Etudes', and passes it before
a harmonic
distorting-mirror. The instruction in the score reads "somewhat gratuitously".