Winner - 2008 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers' Award

Duration: 7'
Dedication: James Weeks and EXAUDI

 [ EXAUDI/James Weeks, Mieko Kanno (vn); MP3 excerpt in new window ]     [ score excerpt ]

Performance History

11/28/07 - EXAUDI with Sophie Appleton (vn) - Greyfriar's Kirk, Edinburgh, Scotland

Exaudi made this challenging repertoire seem easy and, more importantly, a thoroughly enjoyable experience. -- The Scotsman

To hear this immaculate London-based group in Scotland, in Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust's belated opening event of its season, was a privilege and an adventure, a series of soundings softly spun, articulated, hummed, sighed, floated, whistled, murmured, moaned, intensified in what proved to be the atmospherically accommodating and flexible surroundings of Greyfriars Kirk. What we heard was something very special and so rigorously prepared that even the quietest music - and much of this concert seemed on the point of disappearing - gripped your attention, stretched your ears, challenged your senses as effectively as the moments when the singers suddenly let rip, or sustained a prolonged crescendo on a single note, or otherwise took you by surprise. -- The Herald

11/30/07 [premiere of SSAATTBB version] - EXAUDI - ConTmpo Festival, Girona, Spain

6/13/08 - EXAUDI with Mieko Kanno (vn) - Spitalfields Summer Festival, London, England [review by Tim Rutherford-Johnson]

One of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's "Favorite Concerts of 2008": "The smothered intricacy of Evan Johnson’s Colophons still haunts me, as does its startling central gesture. ... Looking back this was both the best programme and most revealing performance I heard all year."

Program Note

The quite extraordinarily awkward title, which refers parenthetically to a Middle English lament that has nothing to do   with the piece at hand, reflects this work’s status as companion piece to Dehiscences, Lullay (“Thou nost whider it whil turne”) (2005) for piano and cassette.  In the piano piece, staticky noise drowns out almost all of the sounding results of the pianist’s activity; here the tables are turned, and a flickeringly unstable drone on a detuned low violin string sets an impossible standard of quietness and fragility for the ensemble of voices that accompanies it.  An intermittently repeated, fluttery “signal” from the violin beats time, demarcating a form based on bent, folded and otherwise contorted proportional structures.  The “reflecting pool / monument” is in the middle.

The text is two lines from the Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: “Ye, for an heyre clowt to wrappe me” and “Lo how I vanysshe.” It is deployed mainly to mark preexisting repetitive and affective structures in the music, but I cannot pretend that these phrases were not chosen for their semantic content.  Dehiscences, Lullay (the partner piece for piano and cassette) is dedicated to the memory of my father.

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