A piece for lower voice and percussion, music and text by Palme 2023, duration 15 minutes.
Written for Helena Sorokina and Manuel Alcaraz Clemente (Schallfeld Ensemble), who premiered the piece at the Symposium Composition and Research, GMPU Klagenfurt, 15.03.2023.
In this piece, dried roses and leaves contribute as percussive instruments. The plant material is handled by the percussionist and the singer. In the music and the text, I use snippets from a love song by the composer Francesca Caccini.
Text
Part I – A cold rock
Pia Palme 2023, with Italian text fragments by Francesca Caccini (1587–1641) from her aria ‘Lasciatemi qui solo’ (in her ‘Primo libro delle Musiche’, op. 2825)
Altri, altri, altri, altri,
Altri meco non voglio
I want no one else with me!
NO! ONE!
Ch’un freddo scoglio, ch’un freddo scoglio, scoglio
Tornante!
Veil your sweet lips! Don’t look at me! Hide!
She sings
Lasciatemi qui sola, sola, sola*)
She sings
Leave me here alone to sing
She singsAltri, altri, altri, altri,
Altri meco non voglio
I want no one else with me!
NO! ONE!
Ch’un freddo scoglio, ch’un freddo scoglio, scoglio
Tornante!
Veil your sweet lips! Don’t look at me! Hide!
She sings
Lasciatemi qui sola, sola, sola*)
She sings
Leave me here alone to sing
She sings
Leave me alone
Leave me here to die, to die alone
Keep your distance at all costs
Lasciatemi morire, morire, morire, morire
DEATH is just a word, a word!
Part II – The shadows of my song
A word, a word, a word forming in darkness, darkness
A word between, between, between my lips
Lingering,
Clinging to my breath,
Dropping,
Faltering, falling,
Fall, fall, fall,
Falling into an abyss beyond time
That opens up under my flesh
Touches the other side of dark matter
Life reversed
An inner voice
Still singing on
Life, life reversed is gone,
Is gone, is gone, is gone,
Gone with the sound
Vanishing into spaces of memory
Spaces, spaces of memory
Vanishing, vanishing spectres of the past,
Spectres of the past
Shadows of my song
Reverberate
Hear, hear the shadows, shadows, shadows
Or is it microbiology
Winding
Firing cells
Twisted grey
Matter at play?
Or a virus dancing within my scull
Banging againstOf my song,
My song, my song, song, song.
*) In the Italian language, the word ‘solo’ has been / is being used in the male form exclusively – even a female singer would use ‘solo’ and not ‘sola’ when singing about herself. The Italian dancer and artist Paola Bianchi, with whom I collaborated at the time when I wrote these texts, encouraged me to implement the unusual ’sola’ into Caccini’s fragments, instead.