Stabat Mater dolorosa (2014)

“For me she’s the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either, just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one” Pablo Picasso

Stabat Mater dolorosa (2013-14)

Commissioned by BBC Radio 3, 2014 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival & Casa da Musica, Porto 

Cantata for 12 voices (SATB), Ensemble & Electronics (amplification/spatialisation)

The work sets part of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, verses that meditate on Mary’s sorrows at the foot of the cross. Attributed to the 13th Century Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, the poem lies at the heart of the later so called Marian cults.

Whilst the Stabat Mater verses run throughout, the work in fact opens with a collage of other related but radically fragmented material (in essence reduced to a kind of phonesthesia) connected by the theme of ‘weeping’. Principal amongst these are extracts from the French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Hérétique de l’amour’; a contemplation of the Stabat Mater text conflated with her memories of giving birth to her son and her meditation on the virgin birth. In this text she also recalls Pergolesi’s musical setting of the Stabat Mater, a work I briefly quote here. The other writings include fragments from The ‘Visions of Christ’; an early collection of poems by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a statement by Pablo Picasso explaining his fascination with the theme (in his work) of the ‘weeping woman’, where he describes woman as a “weeping machine”, and finally a poem on the sorrows of love ‘A Valediction of Weeping’ by John Donne.

The formal outline is as follows * :-

1. incipit (aperire) – tutti

2. I – chora A – intermedio a – concertante

3. II - chora B – intermedio b

4. III - chora C – intermedio c

5. IV – chora D – intermedio d - intermedio e

6. V - chora E

The opening movement (incipit) consists only of this ‘extra’ material radically cut-up and attached to six chords. Treated as individual ‘moments’ and separated by fermata of specific durations. Each chord is assigned an orchestration and arranged in a sequence of diminishing durations.

Textual ‘collages’ or intertextualities, (a term originally coined by Kristeva) alludes to the Baroque practice of inter-cutting texts (usually from the bible). Picasso’s strange but fascinating metaphor of a ‘weeping machine’ becomes a central image in the work, whereby I cast the mechanics of mourning as a slow machine, a music which unfolds in slow motion. The employment of electronics whilst not insignificant is restricted to the slow placement of sound in space and applied only to the choral sections. This movement of sound is defined either by a geometry of intersecting arcs (ichthys) or of crossing space (chiasmus). Picasso’s obsession with the theme of ‘weeping’ clearly references a long tradition in painting and sculpture, particularly in Spanish art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of depicting the sorrowing Virgin (Dolorosas). Baroque conventions such as da capo aria, recitative, fantasia, canzona etc. are also invoked, woven as they are into the machine-like oscillations of large-scale ritornello form.

The main ‘choral’ body of the work treats the Stabat Mater dolorosa text in its original form (in Latin), alternated with purely instrumental movement. Whilst the instrumental movements initially tend to mercurial, dance-like volatility, the choral movements are strictly held in a state of lamentations. As the work develops these instrumental sections become increasingly drawn into the deploration of utterance.