Mark Isaacs: Songs Of The Universal (1995): Songs Of The Universal: From Imperfection's Murkiest Cloud

Abstract

"This piece was inspired by Walt Whitman's 1874 poem, 'Song of the Universal' (given below), and is in many ways a dialogue with the poem. The piece is in five movements. The first four proceed from each other without a break. Each movement is annotated with a segment of the poem: the first movement with the poem's opening lines and the last movement with the poem's closing line. The musical soundworld explored by the piece is, as one would imagine, a mystical and introspective vista. The current trend in contemporary music seems to be to let the evocation of the mystical take its musical shape in the form of a continuously diatonic harmonic language, drawing from the antecedents of Western pre-Baroque ecclesiastical musical forms (for example plainchant) and non-Western religious/ mystical musical forms (again mostly diatonic). This piece, however, has its antecedents in the rich stream of highly chromaticised Western mystery music explored in the early part of this century by such composers as Scriabin, Delius and Charles Ives amongst others." -- Mark Isaacs Show more