Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Gary Carpenter
Ghost Songs (2018)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Basque National Orchestra (San Sebastian).
- 2.1+ca.2(bcl).2(cbn)/433(btbn)1/timp.3perc/hp.pf[cel]/str
- SSA chor
- 20 min
- Marion Angus, R.L. Stevenson and Anon.
Programme Note
1) Dawn and Twilight
2) The Ghost
3) On Some Ghostly Companions At A Spa
4) Annie Honey
5) The Wee Wee Man
6) All Souls’ Eve
The world of Marion Angus (1865-1946): ghosts, twilight, folk memory, music, mythology and legend. Her poems are direct, often wistful, certainly plangent, and imbued with a gentle, pantheistic mysticism. In setting them, I sought to explore the intersection between waking and sleeping, night and day, nature and super nature. By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem is a biting critique of fellow guests at a spa (a rhyming ‘hell is other people’!) whilst the anonymous poem (one of Child’s Ballads) tells of a vertically challenged fellow with unpredictable superpowers.
There are four particular elements that colour the piece:
• Like apparitions, melodies in one song appear or reappear in others. For example, the Ghostly Companions tune haunts both The Ghost and The Wee Wee Man whilst a variant of The Ghost’s principle tune inhabits both Ghostly Companions and Annie Honey as a bass line. Similarly, Dawn and Twilight reappears in The Wee Wee Man and forms the harmonic basis for All Souls’ Eve.
• Canons: these become metaphors for shadows, echoes and reflections.
• Major/minor key ambivalences reflect hypnagogia (the in-between state where one is neither fully awake nor fully asleep).
• Fragments of Scottish folk tunes also haunt the score, particularly - and appropriately - ‘Drowsy Maggie’. Writing this piece rekindled my own spectral memories of the many years I spent playing in Scottish country-dance and ceilidh bands!
© Gary Carpenter 2018
2) The Ghost
3) On Some Ghostly Companions At A Spa
4) Annie Honey
5) The Wee Wee Man
6) All Souls’ Eve
The world of Marion Angus (1865-1946): ghosts, twilight, folk memory, music, mythology and legend. Her poems are direct, often wistful, certainly plangent, and imbued with a gentle, pantheistic mysticism. In setting them, I sought to explore the intersection between waking and sleeping, night and day, nature and super nature. By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem is a biting critique of fellow guests at a spa (a rhyming ‘hell is other people’!) whilst the anonymous poem (one of Child’s Ballads) tells of a vertically challenged fellow with unpredictable superpowers.
There are four particular elements that colour the piece:
• Like apparitions, melodies in one song appear or reappear in others. For example, the Ghostly Companions tune haunts both The Ghost and The Wee Wee Man whilst a variant of The Ghost’s principle tune inhabits both Ghostly Companions and Annie Honey as a bass line. Similarly, Dawn and Twilight reappears in The Wee Wee Man and forms the harmonic basis for All Souls’ Eve.
• Canons: these become metaphors for shadows, echoes and reflections.
• Major/minor key ambivalences reflect hypnagogia (the in-between state where one is neither fully awake nor fully asleep).
• Fragments of Scottish folk tunes also haunt the score, particularly - and appropriately - ‘Drowsy Maggie’. Writing this piece rekindled my own spectral memories of the many years I spent playing in Scottish country-dance and ceilidh bands!
© Gary Carpenter 2018
Media
Euskadiko Orkestra / Basque National Orchestra performing Ghost Songs in Bilbao in November 2022
Reviews
I am hard pressed to think of a new work that has made such a dramatic first impression. First, this is a luscious sparkling orchestral work, generously written for each player. Then there is the sheer thrill of witnessing the next generation of music-lovers on stage, over eighty children and teenagers singing. ... Carpenter conjures up unearthly sounds and colours, at the full range of what is possible to explore extremes of light and dark. The six poems are tightly bound together not only by their mystic themes but also musically, with melodies in one appearing or reappearing spectrally in another, all underscored with fragments of Scottish folk tunes. ... The piece grips from start to finish ...
17th February 2019
... the simply conceived modality of its vocal writing neatly counterpointed by the unnerving underlay of the orchestration.
28th November 2018
...beautifully written for the young voices and performed with exemplary precision in both the notes and the words.
26th November 2018