After giving many performances of my earlier song cycle High Windows, Michael Chance was keen to have a new piece, this time not for voice and piano, but for a combination which, like the lute-song, seems above all to require, and consist of, intimacy. I wrote these songs for Michael in 2000. They are settings on specially written texts, by Michael's wife Irene Noel-Baker, which take and transform elements of Greek myths, notably the stories of Apollo and Daphne, and Orpheus and Eurydice. The result is a piece which shifts from the mythological past to the present, just as the medium of voice and guitar suggests both Elizabethan music (with lute) and the folk or pop of today. Without writing music of either kind, I have certainly alluded to each, and have also tried in a way to reinvent those lute-songs whose marvellous words I know were in Irene's thoughts as she wrote these texts for music.
Apollo and Daphne
Apollo stands
His strong hand on the shining flank
His adamantine eyes at rest
On the beautiful animal.
Daphne waits
Transformed into a laurel
Her broad leaves
Waiting for rain.
Orpheus' Song
I am calling Eurydice
Whose golden hair is caught up
In the snares of Elysium.
Night folds me in its silence
And the dark earth draws me down
Further, into the fire.
The Glance
In your eyes
I search for the fixed knowledge
In my eyes
You search for certain knowledge
Until the curtain falls
Suddenly
And I am blind as night
And the theatre is empty.
The Beginning of the Game of Love
There is a rustling of birds
Who gather into flight
And turn, on the breeze,
Away
And they seem to us ecstatic
As they rise and jest
And we see we are like children
And we take our parts to play
Change the story, lightly leave it,
For the sleep that gathers dreams
Where the furnace burns on
In the silence of the night.
Four Sapphic Fragments on Intimacy
On my wrist
Your finger lies
A thin rind of moon
Cupping the blue night.
Ripe as a nut
I burst with love for you
Until the sweetest, softest touch
That brings
Your eyes, your smile, your tongue
For the scattering of a thousand fruits.
You have opened my heart
Supped at the table of my mind
Pulled taught the rope
Around the tempest of my body
And taken it to harbour
Where I lie
In the crook of your arm
Smooth as a rock
Where I taste the salt
Left by the fling of the sea
In its unerring, timeless
Ministrations
I have found acceptance in your eyes
And I think that I may travel
Further than I could have known without you
Nor am I, any longer, at a loss.
The Race of the Moon and the Clouds
Spun through the orbit of the night
The full moon seems to still
Lending her speed to clouds
Born on the wind.
They travel while she stands
And waits
Till free again she
Spins her swift progress
Leaving the clouds behind
To dissipate in open sky.
We race on high
Then stop, hold out our hands
And turn.
I let you let me
Roam and spin and fly.
