Shifting Thresholds (2016)

The impetus for this work came from my discovery that Wagner’s concept of ‘endless melody’ had inspired writers to invent the literary technique of stream of consciousness. I decided to reverse the process and use a literary source using this technique (namely Samuel Beckett’s novel Malone Dies) as the starting point for a piece that would explore endless melody. Beckett’s work concerns someone on the verge of dying who invents stories to keep themselves amused. By analogy in Shifting Thresholds sections dominated by melodic threads are interrupted by episodes which are more wide ranging in terms of tempo and instrumentation. Just as Beckett’s central character appears to be writing a journal, although not continuously, so Shifting Thresholds has breaks which divide it into four movements.

The first movement begins with a melodic line that is often static and cyclic and which ends quietly oscillating between two chords. This suddenly dissolves into a transition passage offering three alternative ways forward (like shifting thresholds). Eventually a fast, high music dominated by the flute wins out and becomes the first episode. Movement two begins with a line that is hesitant and faltering. This is interrupted twice, firstly be a substantial mechanistic episode and secondly by an intense, dissonant episode which ends the movement. Movement three begins with a cello solo line that finally enters a series of harmonic fields where the line is shared with other instruments. The movement ends with a short episode consisting of a “shuffling” idea and a quarter-tone inflected line on the violin. The latter signals the beginning of processes of decay and distortion which continue throughout the final movement, climaxing in multiphonics, heavy pressure bowing and other such sounds. The fourth movement recapitulates the previous three, but all the sections are shorter and altered by different instrumental, harmonic and dynamic colouring designed to suggest the manner in which human memory works.

The title, Shifting Thresholds, was taken from a poem by Beckett:

my peace is there in the receding mist
when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds 

It is designed to reflect the use of transition passages such as that described above in movement one, and also, more generally, how the music is forced to change direction due to the episodes.

Shifting Thresholds was commissioned by Gemini who gave the premiere conducted by Ian Mitchell on 16 December 2016 at Manchester University in a concert to celebrate the composer’s sixtieth birthday. 

Philip Grange