Thrice-shelled trickster with a threadbare gown
November 20th 2024
Magic, rude phrases, drinking alcohol and dancing. It doesn't get much better. These are the true highlights of the Renaissance period, for me at least. When I was first asked by Jeanette to write a piece for Valette Ensemble and Ventis Vocal's crossover Renaissance reimagined concert, I had no idea where to begin. Was I going to have to write a pastiche of Renaissance music?
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For the first movement, Stone Soup, I imagined a scenario in which a bard is telling a cryptic story about magic to their fellow pub dwellers through the recipe for a soup, stone soup. This story almost acts like an incantation which leads us to the next movement, Pneuma.
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Pneuma means breath or spirit in Ancient Greek, and it played a significant role in magic in the Renaissance period. The following piece of text inspired this movement: 'Hermeticism, like Neoplatonism, had an animistic view of the universe. Nature was animate, teeming with spirits. The sky was filled with angels and devils. The stars and planets were animate beings. The whole universe was animated, filled with the divine spiritus or pneuma, the celestial matter that connected all beings. This animate universe was filled with symbols, secret messages and hidden correspondences. Images, words musical notes and objects here on Earth held mysterious connections to planets, demons and angels in Heaven. 'As above, so below,' as the alchemical saying put it.'
With each movement, a different type of musical notation is unlocked, and for this movement, it is text score notation that is unlocked. Everything in this movement is either whispered or spoken to further feed into the incantation feel of the piece.
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violin I - Georgie Bloomfield
violin II - Rachel Stonham
viola - Jeanette Szeto
cello - Elena Edwards
double bass - Joana Izabelle
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The final movement, unlocked, has many inspirations, with the forefront of them being the following text: 'The Gnostic magic of the Corpus promises to free man from his material prison. For example, it asserted that humans are imprisoned by the determinism of the planets, which emanated their good and bad influences through the spiritus mundi. But with Hermetic magic, the magus could escape this determinism, could “break through the envelopes” of the stars.'
This movement is the culmination of the previous incantations, with all the scores being fully opened, thus unlocked. I also researched things which were invented in the Renaissance period, one of which was the compass, so the entire text used in this movement is North, South, East and West (Észak, Dél, Kellet, Nyugat in Hungarian). The last section of this movement is inspired by the Renaissance Hungarian dance, the Karikázó (the maiden's round dance). This dance is traditionally danced by women only, and they go around in a circle whilst singing and gradually speed up throughout.
