The text I'm setting right now has this really cool line about the reflection of fire ("reflet du feu" in French) and so I got this sound-image in my mind of sitting around a campfire having a conversation. No matter what's being said in that situation, there's always this constant underpinning of the crackle of the fire. The musical device that came to represent this is the constant back-and-forth of a C-minor triad in either the piano or harp which vacillates from start to finish between a single 'C' and an 'Eb-G' double stop.
Unfortunately for my not-so-good-at-math brain, the music that surrounds that triad switches from 4/4 to 6/8 to 2/2 and all sorts of stuff in between with the crackle of that fire never changing tempo. What that means is I've got a math problem on my hands. How do I notate that in all those different meters so it never, ever changes?
So that's the challenge for this week of writing. It's going to take me forever. Well, probably not that long but it's going to feel extremely tedious and un-creative.
For obvious reasons I've also been listening to a lot of French music lately. My current pièce du moment is Berlioz's song cycle, Les Nuits d'Eté. I've been listening to the orchestrated version of it in a recording by the Argentinian mezzo, Bernarda Fink and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. I'm completely mystified by how Berlioz makes the vocal line sound totally spontaneous but still perfect. And the opening to the fourth movement, "L'Absence," is simple but incredible. He makes this serene moment out of nothing more than a few suspensions.
And what do you suppose he's looking at in that picture?
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