| à un quart de voix (2010) for oboe, E-flat clarinet, and prepared cello |
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Duration: 2'15"
Dedication: Daryl Buckley
Performance History
12/6/10 - ELISION - Kings Place, London, UK
"Johnson's barely-there cello drones and glistening wind traces proved particularly gripping in their spectral invocation of Berlioz's enigmatic performance marking that is commemorated in the work's title." -- Stephen Graham, Musical Criticism
Program Note
"à un quart de voix" - a particularly evocative and punishing performance indication from Hector Berlioz's Nuits d'été (the fifth song, "Au cimetière"): "with a quarter of the voice," not merely (as most translations of this phrase take it) "to be sung very softly," but with a fierce sense of restraint, a strenuous physical effort towards the abdication of projective power.
This is a pair of movements of equal length, each comprising collections of approximately corresponding, approximately repetitive, approximately canonic melodic detritus in the winds over a faint grounding echo in a droning, staticky cello. It may be too much to imagine this piece as an homage to Berlioz's ubiquitous, painfully expressive linear awkwardnesses...