the little match girl passion
Author: Blogger in Residence, Rory Johnston
I’ve recently been returning to pieces that I have not listened to in a while, re-exploring music that captured my imagination and wow-ed me. It’s been a wonderful time, and I have listened to a wide range of composers, from Monteverdi (Vespers 1610), to Ligeti (Lux Aeterna), and Tavener (Svyati). I also took the time to relisten to a piece by David Lang called the little match girl passion, and that is what I’m going to talk about today.
David Lang is an American composer, based in New York, and he in on the composition staff at Yale School of Music. His music comes very much out of the American minimalist scene and focuses itself on pulse, the interaction between different those pulses, and silence as a structural and punctuating force.
the little match girl passion was first performed at Carnegie Hall in 2007 by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008. It tells the story of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Lang says:
The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children's stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.
What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.
The piece is written for choir with four extra voices also each playing a percussion instrument, be it a bass drum, some tubular bells, or a glockenspiel. Lang states that one of the main structural influences of the piece was Bach’s St Matthew Passion. His interpretation of Andersen’s telling of the story as an allegory for the suffering of Jesus brought this comparison of a Passion-like text to the fore. He says:
The Passion format—the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it—has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.
With this idea of comment and structural juxtaposition, he created a text that mixes his own words with text from the Gospel according to Matthew, Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion), and Hans Christian Andersen.
The piece is really powerful. It has 15 movements/sections totalling 35 minutes of music. Each movement creates a different texture and revels in it, placing the material against itself in different ways and capturing the attention of the listener through subtle changes of both harmony and pulse.
What do I mean when I say pulse? Well there are two different things I mean. Firstly, Lang’s use of the division of beats to give the music and the pulse a sense of flexibly either being slow or fast without changing anything but one or more part’s durations. For example: In the first section ‘come, daughter’ (and yes, Lang likes to write things all in lower case because he’s edgy), we are introduced to the soprano and alto parts entering one after another in a simple crotchet pulse, with a slight division of quavers as we are introduced to the text ‘daughter’. Suddenly, though, when the tenors and basses enter we hear this division-idea in the tenors. The part simply repeats the word ‘come’, but switches between different durations to fill the crotchet beat it is sitting on, from two quavers, to four semi-quavers, to sextuplets and other durations, all shifting with each beat of the over-riding pulse. This gives an ostensibly static texture internal motion and energy, keeping the listener engaged and subverting their expectations. You can hear this again in the later movement ‘when it is time for me to go’.
The second framing of pulse I’m talking about can be heard in the second movement, ‘it was terribly cold’. Lang structures the movement in such a way that we cant quite distinguish what the overarching pulse is until it is halfway done. The movement opens with an upper-voice singing text with a fast repetitive quaver drive and lively melodic line that, with its text emphasis, gives an impression of shifting metres, between simple and compound times. As the piece moves on, though, we are introduced to the tenors and basses singing ‘so the little girl went on’, which finally unlocks our understanding of what the pulse has been – an overarching sense of minims (vaguely 3/2 in the first section and then 4/2 when the tenors and basses start singing fully). This construction allows for complex sounding music within a structure of methodical duration.
Silence also plays a big part in the power of this music. The movement ‘penance and remorse’ is a great example of this. This is, for all intents and purposes, a chorale. It is harmonically and rhythmically homophonic, but its first and last sections are broken up into small phrases that break up the line and keep you hanging, waiting for the next utterance. These sections could just as easily be sung through, but the decision to separate the sound adds emphasis, both to the text that Lang is trying to highlight – the brilliantly evocative words, penance, and remorse – and the slight shifts in harmony, that, were the gaps not to be there, would otherwise be missed.
The piece as a whole is a fantastic creation and I see why it won such a prestigious prize as the Pulitzer. Lang manages to capture lots of humanity and drama within a music that has few constituent parts. An example of this is the final movement ‘we sit and cry’. It’s deeply moving and the mixture of the high ringing percussion with the short vocal snippets with their rising lower voices and repeating soprano line that seems to hang ethereally in the air are an absolutely astonishing creation, they show how you don’t ever really need much to capture something truly human and engaging. And the choice to end the piece with just the percussion is a stroke of genius.
I’d urge you to go and listen to the whole piece, it’s not that long and will really open your eyes (and ears) to the possibilities of modern composition that don’t rely on complex harmonies and other esoteric constructions.
The other pieces I’ve been listening to:
Vespers of 1610 – Monteverdi
Lux Aeterna – Ligeti
Svyati – Tavener
Written by Rory Johnston