Choral

I Lie Alone

I Lie Alone

FOR SATB Unaccompanied (3’30)

Programme Note

Sappho – The Moon is Down (fragment) 
The silver moon is set;

The Pleiades are gone;

Half the long night is spent, and yet

I lie alone.

(Translation by J. H. Merivale, 1883. Referenced in The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sappho, by Henry Thornton Wharton).

This four line fragment, commonly attributed to Sappho, describes a woman alone at night. The text has a distinct sense of immediacy, with its simple but direct imagery; the poem describes a ‘silver moon’ and the visibility of the constellation Pleiades, an important cluster in Greek mythology that symbolized the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. There is a sense of waiting through the long hours of the night, and a melancholic but intimate sensibility. As Odysseus Tsagarakis wrote “the feeling of loneliness is most beautifully expressed by Sappho” in this fragment.

Ghostly, dissonant harmony evoking an image of the ‘silver moon’ emerges at the opening, increasing in density and rhythmic intensity. The observation of the constellation Pleiades being ‘gone’ from the night sky is explored through a kind of melancholic polyphony, before a development of the close, cluster harmony of the opening returns for the poem’s final, mournful line ‘I lie alone’. The woman’s drifting thoughts continue into the night, through eerie, mysterious humming at the very end.

*World premiere performance given  by the Marian Consort at Music at Malling Festival, West Malling on Friday 26th September 2025.

In Its Light

In Its Light

FOR SSAATTBB Unaccompanied (6′)

 

Programme Note

‘In Its Light’ is a setting of Du Fu’s poem ‘Full Moon’, in the English translation by David Hinton. The poem describes with wonder and reverence the majesty of the moon and how its light interacts with earth’s landscape, through much colourful and sensuous imagery. In this piece, I wanted to explore the interesting relationship humans have with the moon, in some ways unchanged since Du Fu’s time. On the one hand, it is eerie and other-worldly; uninhabitable and cold. At the same time, however, it is part of our landscape every day, and all across the world. It connects us, and is inherently interconnected with Earth’s nature and atmosphere, and therefore with us as people.

 

The piece begins with ghostly harmony, that gradually builds in intensity. This gives way to a more emotive melodic idea that sets the first half of each verse, before drifting into a wave-like rhythmic sequence to convey the movement of the moon, its gravitational pull on our oceans, and its shifting light on earth. The piece is rather harmonically fluid, and culminates in a final bell-like coda that conveys gradually expanding drops of moonlight in a joyful and emphatic setting of the poem’s final line, ‘All ten thousand miles at once in its light!’ 

* First performed by The Carice Singers, directed by George Parris, at College Hall, Worcester on Tuesday 30th July 2024 as part of the New Voices Composer Academy at Three Choirs Festival 2024.