I'm in
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The score is attached and here is a
Link to the audio file.
Link
Well here it is. It's based off of this poem. I found the text to be extremely provocative both aesthetically and theatrically. It's been alot of fun working with it's ideas and story.
If this piece was to be preformed I would have the text placed on a overhead projection and have the piece played beneath it.
My ideas around the piece were to take the main events and forces of the poem and represent them.
The intro follows the intro of the poem.
The repeating ostinato is representative to the truth.
The A theme represents the people of Uriel and their dynamic fall from grace.
The B theme represents the gods in all their splendor.
Other things that went into the writing of this piece was the tonal center of Eb which I changed only once from into F dorian to emphasize the experiance of truth and its pessimistic realisim with the change from the first A to B.
Another thing was my phrasing which was pushed to its limits with all of the odd time meters and the quirks that go with writing lyrical melodies within them. Writing in odd-time is not new to me and is a stand-by of my style but this piece pushed me into new territories with it.
There is rampant modal keys throughout it. The main one featured is dorian which is present in all of the B's of the gods minus the transition between the last B and Locrian A.
Well here's the poem and I hope for the best.
URIEL
by: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
It fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once among the Pleiads walking,
Said overheard the young gods talking,
And the treason too long pent
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirred the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a line:
"Line in nature is not found,
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return,
Evil will bless, and ice will burn."
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads,
The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival,
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bonds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.
A sad self-knowledge withering fell
On the beauty of Uriel.
In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew that hour into his cloud,
Whether doomed to long gyration
In the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.
Straightway a forgetting wind
Stole over the Celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fibre-seed slept.
But now and then truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings,
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn;
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.