Noreen Stokes records for Radio Malaya in September 1957,
three years before migrating to Australia.
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My latest piece, How Slowly Dark, is a humble attempt at a musical tribute to my late mother Noreen Stokes O.A.M., retired concert pianist, accompanist, and piano teacher. Her tragic and inexorably increasing blindness, eventually almost total, ironically paralleled the deafness of her beloved Beethoven.
spacerConnect your device to a decent sound system, and click the orange PLAY button:
...or it can be accessed in the following link which will open in a new window:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/how-slowly-dark
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The idea behind How Slowly Dark leapt at me the moment when I read Theodore Roethke's haunting and melancholy lines:
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spacerI see, in evening air,
spacerHow slowly dark comes down on what we do.
spacerThe piece is a dream-soundscape, deliberately rather formless and wandering - as dreams are. (I could make a score, but probably no-one will want to perform it... so why bother?) Strands of familiar piano music float from my childhood into the present moment, evolving on their journey into an aural tapestry, a private look into my mind's inner ear. Where will these fragments travel after this? And likewise, what is it that each of us might, in turn, bequeath to the future?
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In particular, the music attempts to acknowledge the fundamental influence of mum's pianism on my guitar playing years, and later, extrapolating beyond that into my present composing. Even in my early years I used to comment that I wasn't really playing a guitar at all, but imagining a piano with a neck.
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Instrumentation comprises: Piano, Classical guitar, Strings, ATTB choir, and tuned Percussion.
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The opening fades up into a brief passage from Liszt's La Leggierezza, a virtuoso concert study which requires from the pianist a light, nimble, lyrical, and understated touch. The piano crossfades into a guitar adaption in a new key (as, in my misspent youth, I was often fond of doing).
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Enter J.S.Bach - unexpectedly - smack in the middle of the guitar passage. One of the concealed elements glueing this patchwork dream together is a Bach Chorale, the same one borrowed by Alban Berg for his Violin Concerto, his tribute to Manon Gropius. Es ist Genug ("It is Enough, Take Me Now") was one of the last chorales written by the ageing Bach when he was going blind: I therefore deemed it to be eminently suited to the present circumstance, especially given that my mother enjoyed learning German. I borrowed Bach's melodic tritone (G, A, B, C#. See Box 1, below):
The opening of Bach's chorale Es Ist Genug, performed as 'vocalise' on this recording.
The original key was A-major, highly symbolic because Bach symbolised its three
sharps as the crosses on Calvary Hill. Hey, one cross is enough for me.
(PS: Bach is not responsible for the last few notes).
spacerAlthough the fragment in Box 1 is entirely tonal, functional, and - yes - 'legal' in Bach's harmonic language, I nevertheless grasped the opportunity to fashion the whole tone scale into un-Bachlike whole-tone harmonies, especially my beloved augmented triad. As a child, my ear gravitated instinctively towards any occurences of augmented triads (major triad with sharpened fifth degree), although then, of course, I had no technical words nor understanding, just feeling. Here, today, it constitutes the perfect compositional excuse to evolve towards Dubussy, yes? Sure, I can do anything I choose inside my own dream. The dear old augmented triad has not dulled with age or familiarity... formal musical education has failed to erase its melancholic magic (thank goodness).
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But Bach can always be mined deeper. Box 3 (see the bottom of the score) is a series of rising chromatic semi-tones. This motif becomes a "pillar of the temple" in the dreamworld of How Slowly Dark, woven throughout the entire piece no matter which composer happens to be at hand. The observant ear will already have detected it pervading the Liszt-based passages for guitar and choir. Liszt beat me to the idea, dang it. Fragments of it - as well as the whole-tone elements - emerge and recede frequently in the fabric of the sound like a kind of structural glue. Eggs in the musical cake-mix, perhaps. The chorale is only quoted at any length at the very end of the piece - as was Bach's own habit in his Cantatas. It may be worthy of note that both these elements, the whole-tone scale and the chromatic semi-tones, rise in pitch - and (hopefully) in spirit - surely an appropriate metaphor for my mother.
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At about 20sec, the strings fade up in C major during the E major guitar passage, converging on a cadence which merges the two keys into a chord of E augmented (E, G#, B#, which is enharmonically equivalent to a chord of C augmented, ie C, E, G#):
(Interesting to note, by the way, that Es ist Genug is the only
one of Bach's chorales in which He used all twelve tones)
spacerThe F, F# and G of the cello and double-bass are part of a normal formulaic Baroque cadence in the key of C major (implying ii - V/V - V), whereas in the context of E major, Liszt's E#, F# and F-double sharp perform a highly chromatic and purely melodic/colour role. Aligning these enharmonic notes whilst superimposing and contrasting their keys makes for an interestingly ambiguous cadence: is the root C or E? In effect, it's both, really - the guitar's low E is very close in pitch to the cello's C, so there is no obvious front-runner in terms of the chord's perceived root note. After this brief Ives-inspired side-trip (thanks, Charles!), the guitar resumes briefly back in E major - just as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it hadn't even noticed the choir...
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As the guitar fades, the dream drifts into a meditative choral arrangement - the same piece of Liszt, yet utterly transformed. The paradigm Piano > Guitar > Third medium, a sequence neatly summarizing my entire musical life (as in "Listener, then Guitarist, lately Composer"), sets the underlying format for subsequent sections of the piece. The choir begins multi-layering the rising chromatic motif in the manner of an introduction, after which it presents a quartal re-harmonisation of the four-square Liszt melody.
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As the voices fade on a cadence of C augmented, who should materialize out of the mist but Monsieur Debussy. The first movement of Debussy's Pour Le Piano deliberately explored augmented chords by using them in a non-functional and colouristic manner (ie requiring no 'resolution'). Rebellion! Mutiny! Mozart's Universe turned on its musical head. Crikey, these chords were no longer expected to resolve to pre-ordained destinations - they could just "be". I recall as a child hearing my mother play Pour Le Piano and vaguely thinking "Hey, there's that funny sound again... and gosh, there's another... and another!" Interesting to reflect that Debussy's piece was composed in 1901, a mere sixteen years before my mother's birth.
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Meanwhile, Bach's chorale again looms up like a pale watercolour wash to provide a ghostly background floating behind Debussy's stridently rhythmic piano chords. This time the choir offers the rising whole-tones of the opening phrase itself, Es ist Genug: It is Enough.
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As per the blueprint, Debussy's piano gives way to a guitar adaption - necessarily a thin-blooded mock-up and hardly a match for the piano, of course. What was I thinking! Thankfully, stimulated by Debussy's strings of augmented chords, my dream dissolves into a more guitaristically sympathetic and lyrical passage of guitar with string accompaniment. This is actually a brief quotation of my own piece for chamber orchestra, Reconciliation, whose sound-world seems (on the surface) to be as stylistically remote from Debussy's pianism as it is possible to be. Nevertheless, in musical terms, it is closely DNA-related by its free use of of augmented harmonies à la Debussy. Thank you so much... may I call you Claude? And of course - equally - thank you to my mother for performing it so sublimely. Both pieces do what Herr Bach would have considered ridiculous and illogical - attempting to tonicize/stabalize a chromatically-altered chord whose normal "Common Practice" syntactic function is that of a species of dominant (by its nature inherently unstable).
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After the string passage, the violin evaporates in a rising whole-tone scale (generated - again - by the augmented harmony), into which Chopin delicately floats the theme of his Ballade No 1, another pianistic pot-boiler from my youth. My mother adored Chopin, who, in his heart-warming and enlightened Romantic Wisdom, invariably managed to remember to obey The Golden Rule which obliged the sharpened fifth note to resolve by step (in this case, Bb to A):
Several passing percussionists, one of whom may well have been Toru Takemitsu, notice the three semi-tone motif and decide to play with it as a cat teases a mouse. This continues in a rhythm-free microtonal zone until the guitar steps in, tentatively takes matters into hand by re-instating tempo, crystallizing an unexpectedly conventional cadence, and framing attention back onto the piano's final entry. We hear a snatch of Schumann's Papillons (from Carnaval Op.2, another of my mother's epic favourites), before it disintegrates into nothingness. It is in its original key of C, even though this fragment begins on its V chord (G). The tonic C is only implied, not stated.
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The Schumann is soon comprehensively submerged by the Chiangmai Bach Choir's otherworldly vocalise of the entire opening section of the chorale Es Ist Genug continuing in a radiantly clear G major, thereby prolonging the dominant of C. Its three phrases, too, fade slowly, glacier-like in their tenacity and endurance - almost as if locked in a hapless struggle against inevitably encroaching Darkness. Heightening the sense of "unfinished-ness" is the fact that although the chorale begins anchored on the tonicized centre of G, the last phrase skids off a banana-skin C# towards its dominant key, D. But not only that, but you land gingerly on a very un-final and slippery triad of D augmented. The music ends before it finishes, awash in a sea of ambiguity, heart-breaking pathos, and incompletely fulfilled potential. One thing's for sure, whatever comes after the final silence is always up to you.
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By now the final three notes of the chorale excerpt (G#, A, A#) will probably be more self-explanatory (refer back to Box 2 in the first diagram). Analytically, the final harmony could be C: II#5, ...or perhaps C:V#5/V ...or your ear might demand G:V#5 (or even D:I#5 if you were totally outfoxed by the persistent C#) ...but aw heck, who really cares? It feels tonicized/completed in a strange kind of a way, but it isn't. It can't be - unless you decide to let it. Whatever the case, the Memory will probably linger in your mind after the Sound has died away.
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Noreen Stokes was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in January 2000
for services to music, especially for accompaniment and art song.
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She organised a recital soon after arriving in post-war London from Capetown.
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(Click on any picture if you need to biggen it)
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By Xmas 2007, mum could just manage to see a small faint area under strong lights.
She still maintained her discipline of technical practice every morning from 7-8 am.
She still maintained her discipline of technical practice every morning from 7-8 am.
Nowadays (2011), she feels too disheartened to even attempt to go to a piano.
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Post Script: Noreen Stokes passed away
on Sunday 11 March 2012, aged 94.
RIP at long last, Mum.
I can still hear your music.
Post Script: Noreen Stokes passed away
on Sunday 11 March 2012, aged 94.
RIP at long last, Mum.
I can still hear your music.
