1. Night music
2. Song for Voice
3. Song for Crotales
4. Song for Piano
5. Pandemonium
Whispers and Cries was first performed by
Astra Choir, conducted by John McCaughey with Speak Percussion, on September
28, 2008, at Gasworks Theatre, Melbourne, Australia
Excerpts from the Astra Program Note:
New ways of writing for percussion and for voices have provided vital
building blocks of the last century of music. Percussion had a special
role in exploring the novel domains of sound-colour and rhythm unleashed
from traditional tonal patterns. It also opened the doors of western classical
music to other traditions and cultures, and still remains (along with
electro-acoustic music) the most dynamic department of music, where instruments
are invented, and new sound manipulations result. Through the medium of
the voice, new expressions and images of human behaviour have also emerged.
At some special moments vocal and percussive music fused – into
a narrative of colours and rhythms far removed from the traditional phrasing
of a text. Stravinsky’s wholly original The
Wedding (1919-23) created a ritualized fabric of percussion and
keyboards, solo and choral singing – the part-ancestor of the new
work composed for this concert by Andrew Byrne. In Whispers and Cries
the valued cooperation between the Astra Choir and the excellent Melbourne-based
ensemble Speak Percussion is given a special expression, through a series
of a series of independent but ‘cooperative’ pieces that form
musical landscapes of interlinked and overlaid materials.
Australian composer Andrew Byrne lives in New York, where his recent work
has extended his characteristic polyrhythmic techniques into open modular
structures for variable performers. The textless Whispers
and Cries is designed as a kind of mobile: players and singers
creating changing expressive and spatial configurations across five movements.
A shadowy opening environment introduces three scenic ‘songs’
for voice, crotales, and piano, leading to a final pandemonium around
nine solo singers.
--John McCaughey
Duration: 30 minutes