Next week
is the annual Unyazi Electronic Music Festival at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
This is a fantastic event that attracts the musically adventurous of South
Africa. The line-up is amazing, featuring incredible talents such as pianist Jill
Richards, composer Lukas Ligeti and a wide range of experimental artists from
Europe. The event is a series of concerts and workshops for the greater Durban community. As my penultimate concert in
this country, I am thrilled to be performing Cameron Harris’s work Lullabies
for Philomel for solo oboe and electronics. It is a beautiful piece and is particularly well written for the oboe, though not surprising since Harris is an oboist himself. It may be a brief moment, but the work does delve
into the Loboe range. I have included the program notes and bio for Cameron Harris:
Lullabies for Philomel
for solo oboe and electronics
1) Prelude: Inside a metal cage, a solitary lovebird laments and
dwells on the time when there were two
2) Philomel's cry
3) A serpentine question
4) Metamorphosis: bells and birds
Philomel, for soprano, recorded soprano and synthesized sound was a
pioneering electronic work by Milton Babbitt, who died last year. Composed in
1964 using a very early RCA synthesizer, the emotional power and effectiveness
of the piece is remarkable. The music tells the tale of one of Ovid’s Metamorphosis: Philomela
is the victim of incredible brutality at the hands of her brother-in law, the
King of Greece, who cuts out her tongue to prevent her revealing the crimes that
have been perpetrated against her. The gods intervene and turn her into a bird
so she can be free and sing once more. She then sings her story with great
intensity.
Lullabies for Philomel is a homage to Babbitt in this, our first electronic
festival since his death. In the piece I mirror elements of the story but also
offer Philomela music that I hope provides her with some comfort after the
trauma she has suffered. There are certain parallels between the two pieces: both
works focus on E, the madrigalists’ symbolic pitch for a cry of anguish.
Also, inPhilomel the interplay between the live voice
and its manipulated version is key, whereas in Lullabies I
have retained this idea but have metamorphosed solo soprano voice into a solo
oboist. All the sounds of the piece are created from oboe samples and therefore
the entire texture emanates from the sound of the instrument. In the choice of
oboe soloist I pay a further homage, this time to Benjamin Britten, whose
haunting and energetic Metamorphosis after Ovid for
unaccompanied oboe has become a central piece of repertoire for the instrument
and is also a great source of inspiration for me.
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Dr Cameron Harris - Bio
Cameron Harris is a
British composer and oboist who has lived in South Africa since 2006. He is
the chair of NewMusicSA,
the South African section of the International Society for Contemporary Music
and from 2007-2009 he coordinated the New Music Indaba festival, which
combines workshops for emerging composers with performances of South African
and international contemporary music. (www.newmusicsa.org.za)
Cameron studied at the
Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Pennsylvania with composers
including Nigel Osborne, John Casken, James Primosch and Jay Reise. In
America he was the recipient of a Thouron and a Benjamin Franklin fellowship.
He also won the Network for New Music Composition Competition in Philadelphia
and the David Halstead Composition Prize. In 2007 he performed at the Ostrava
festival (Czech Republic), which included works by Stockhausen and
Ustvolskaya and the premiere of Quodlibet by Christian Wolf. His orchestral work, Three Night Pieces , was also read at the festival. Cameron
coordinates the first- and second-year Music Literacies and Skills courses,
and teaches music theory and a fourth-year module on electro-acoustic
composition.
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