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Another Heavenly Day (1990) |
E flat Clarinet, Electric Guitar and Contrabass - 7'
Another Heavenly Day was written in 1990, commissioned by ELISION with funds from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and is dedicated to Daryl Buckley. It presents possible relationships between instruments incommensurate in timbre, technique and/or register - by an "improvisatory" interchange of gestures in fleeting heterophony. This strategy collapses into alienation; one characteristic of virtually all of my compositions is the constant proposition, gradual degradation, negation and reformulation of structures in their doomed attempt to secure either continuation or closure - a music hovering on the brink of irreversible incoherence or irreversible extinction.
© Richard Barrett,1990.
Another Heavenly Day is the seventh part of the Fictions series. It takes its title (scarcely to be taken at face value!) from the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, where Winnie, the only speaking character, is buried up to her waist in sand, emitting endless platitudes as her situation gets worse and worse. Barrett’s piece is neither endless or platitudinous, but like Beckett’s play it is a study in progressive alienation: the three instruments’ parts each consist of 8 sub-pieces, which rise in register, and get out of synchronisation with those of the other players. At the end, each instrument is trapped in its top register, screeching in isolation. Another heavenly day is the first of several works Barrett has written for the ELISION ensemble.
© Richard Toop