9 Candles for Dark Nights (2005)
(for Solo Harp)

The soft, rough strike of matches.

Black space interrupted by a single yellow flame, joined in turn by others.

Illumination established, a subtle breeze stirs an ebb and flow,

bending simple arcs of flame, flickering through deep tunnels of night.

Moments of reverie drifting back into consciousness and a final dampening of candles,

gently fizzing back to darkness.

9 Candles for Dark Nights was commissioned by Matthew Hindson for the 2006 Aurora Festival. It was written for Marshall McGuire to play at a concert by candlelight. I therefore sought to create meditative lines that seemed familiar upon return, yet are never actually the same. The subtle structural alterations become subversive – a journey by stealth, experienced in semi-darkness. The premiere performance was given on 6 May 2006 at the Q Theatre, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre,

postscript:

At the time of writing this piece (April 2005), six navy and three air force personnel serving aboard HMAS Kanimbla died when their Sea King helicopter crashed while delivering aid to the Indonesian island of Nias. At a national memorial service their names were read out and nine candles lit. The title of this piece was independently conceived but the coincidence resonated with me.

Stuart Greenbaum

Analytical note

In writing this piece, I initially spent half a day calculating all possible harp pedal configurations. I came up with the number 2,067. I haven’t had this verified, but in any event it became clear to me that it was beyond useful. What I did want to exploit, however, was an idiomatic use of pivotal modulation through pedalling. This in turn led to the idea of a modulating glissando that shifts gradually to the sharp side of the harmonic cycle while the glissando is in downward motion. This gesture or effect became a recurring structural pillar for the work.

In between those recurring glissando gestures, the main ‘A’ material gradually gets shorter as ‘B’ gets longer. ‘C’ remains the same as a bridge back into ‘A’, except at the end when it bridges into ‘D’ (coda) which is effectively new material.

The material itself is at times like folk song, but the metrical ambiguity between duple and triple time is elusive and the presence of duplets and triplets further compounds a floating sense of time. The piece also exploits harmonics to gain a kind of antiphonal 3rd dimension.

Stuart Greenbaum