vo mesurando [2012]

for four voices [SSCtCt or SSAA]

duration :: 5’

Commissioned by EXAUDI

First performance :: EXAUDI — London, UK, 22 October 2013

If a madrigal is an unaccompanied chamber-scale vocal work, intimate, reliant on knife-edge unanimity of purpose and gesture, dedicated to the illustration and evocation of a poetic text, then vo mesurando is a madrigal.  The Petrarch sonnet which lends detached phrases of its text, “Solo e pensoso,” describes an incommunicable state of inner torment, a compulsive evasion of connection and communication with humankind, and a denial of the possibilities of vocal eloquence—and so it is here.  The material and energies of the work are private, quite often simply inaudible, and aimed if they are audible at a space as close to the singers as possible.  The gently aggressive regularity of the gridded form; the fragmentary repetitions, sequences, and canons; the emergent shards of syllables and glimpsed phrases; these are all madrigalian figures that you are overhearing, but they are not for you.