Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup (2016)
(for mixed sextet)

Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup is inspired by chapters nine and ten of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), ‘The Mock Turtle’s Story’ and ‘The Lobster Quadrille’. Along with Alice, the main characters in these chapters are the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. Both creatures are composites of two animals: the Gryphon - the head and wings of an eagle, and the body and tail of a lion, and the Mock Turtle - the head, hooves and tail of a cow, and the body and flippers of a turtle. I see these chimera characters as a type of metaphor for the amalgam of musical styles in the piece; rock, jazz, metal, hip-hop, pop, blues and funk. The Gryphon and Mock Turtle scold Alice for imagined slights, tell long stories and sing long songs which never quite end, order her to recite poetry (which comes out all muddled!), and insist on her taking part in an unusual dance; the Lobster Quadrille.  In capturing these happenings, I’ve set the piece with a type of stop-start-momentum and spattering of rhythmic hiccups.  The piece also asks for the instrumentalists (like Alice!) to recite a portion of poetry. The text is from the first two lines of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’:

‘”Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.

“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail”.’ 

This rhyming couplet is both literal and ironic, prefiguring tempo and mood changes, yet half of these see a slowing down of the music, rather than a speeding up, as suggested by the whiting!

The piece is split into four main sections, and there are four main melodic/rhythmic threads that continue throughout. These are woven across each other, intertwining at times, as well as appearing as discrete soundblocks, positioned side-by-side, and/or careening off into another direction/thread at the latest possible moment. These include: a blues-y piano and slap cello refrain – Alice’s hurrah!; lyrical string lines and long glissandi, mirroring the exaggerated and ‘mock’ emotion of the Turtle’s sad story and heavy sobs; funky bass lines with flashes of disco – a reimagining of the Lobster’s Quadrille; and metal-inspired bursts of sounds with trashy cymbal stacks – the continual ‘little arguments’ and misunderstandings that take place. At the same time, these four ideas draw influence from the branches of arithmetic studied by the Mock Turtle: ‘Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision’. These titles are, of course, a parody of the traditional branches, and together inform how I have approached the four sections in the way of tempo changes, time signature shifts, and the warping of phrases - though I won’t say in which order they appear or which musical thread they relate to!  

Holly Harrison, December 2016