in Compositions
January – February 2010. For girls choir and electronic sounds. Written for St. Catherine’s College Girls Choir.
A sonic and musical-symbolic exploration of the word Magnificat. The meaning of the word as well as the phonetics informed the composition.
The choir is treated in two ways: (1) as a ‘live’ historical recording, with sampled record hiss, crackle and noise forming the backdrop; and (2) as a kind of granular synthesiser, producing a range of textures derived from phonemes.
These two layers of perspective (as a historic recording in the first case, and close-up, deconstructed sounds in the second), alternate climaxing in a full exclamation of “magnificat”.
St. Catherine’s Girls Choir, directed by Edward Wickham, were recorded singing, speaking and whispering. After editing and processing the sounds, the word Magnificat is magnified by splitting the word into its constituent phonemes and forms several episodes within the piece, the focus shifting back and forth between the choir and the electronic sounds.
Another way of describing the revealing of “magnificat” might be to draw a parallel with a child learning to speak, beginning with babbling and garbling sounds, followed by syllables and finally the word in full.
Thank you to Edward Wickham and St. Catherine’s Girls Choir for their patience and hard work when learning this new piece.
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