Not finding what you're looking for? Just email us at hello@ficksmusic.com or call us at +1 215-592-1681!

Kaija Saariaho

Saariaho: From The Grammar of Dreams

Prix habituel $ 29.50

Expected to ship in 1-2 weeks.

Shipping Policy

Edition Wilhelm Hansen  |  SKU : KP00280  |  Code-barres: 9788759851951
  • Composer: Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)
  • Author: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
  • Instrumentation: Soprano, Mezzo Soprano
  • Work: From The Grammar of Dreams (1988)
  • Binding: Spiral Bound
  • Work Language: English
  • ISBN: 9788759851951
  • Size: 9.8 x 14.4 inches
  • Pages: 18

Description

A setting of texts by Sylvia Plath, this 1988 work is for Soprano and Mezzo Soprano voices. Commissioned for the 1988 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. A cycle of five duets, the texts originate from Plath's novel The Bell Jar and from the poem Paralytic from the Ariel collection.

Composer's note:

"The texts used in this piece come from two books by Sylvia Plath: there are excerpts of her only novel, The Bell Jar, and fragments of the poem "Paralytic" from the poetry collection Ariel. The texts are strong, dealing with life and death, escaping into madness, self-destruction and the fight against it. Never­theless, the piece includes an evolution: the painful nightmare ends in daylight and life.

The emotional context of these texts, powerful in the extreme, led me to look for strict rules of musical orga­ni­zation, to contrast the emotional power.

However, these rules do not always proceed in a rational or combi­na­to­r­ial thinking, but rather in the manner of our dreams, where thoughts are transformed into visual images with their colours, juxta­po­sitions, movements and directions. I have sought to operate in the same way by opening the text with two voices, and creating with them five different soundscapes."--Kaija Saariaho