Brightness Falls:Three Movements / A Note to the Composer
A good number of musical influences shaped the writing of this piece.
One of them was the idea of the oratorio—like what Handel did with the Messiah. He was dealing with past and future glory, Brightness… deals with past and present falls— from grace. While Handel was intrigued by the weight and beauty of the scripture, I am a little more interested in the messengers—angels and their psychology or presumed lack thereof…
My fascination with angels coincides with my fascination with androids. I am quite convinced they are one and the same persons, with humans as perhaps a more complex version of the twain, but not exempt from the same existential dilemmas which are witnessed in Milton (Paradise Lost), Shelley (Frankenstein) and BladeRunner (Ridley Scott/ Philip K. Dick)…
This Angel/Android dimension is explored in Brightness… and one aspect of this expressed through binary code. I had the idea that these binary sequences could be transmitted as signature haunting choral sequences….
Brightness… is triparte and each movement has it’s own special needs:
Downward Jasper was inspired by a Bertolt Brecht/ Hanns Eisler collaboration, An den Kleinen Radioapparat (To the little transistor radio)— lovely haunting lyrics and melody creating a scenario in which a fleeing dissident (or worse) implores his little transistor radio not to conk out on him—so it can keep him in touch with his enemies (the Nazis) and chart their every move, their every victory…
Other influences were Liszt’s Nuages Gris and Unstern (Dark Star): sinistre, disastro, moody, dramatic and presaging particular doom—as does this piece.
In Leviathian, a group of schoolchildren are transfigured by radiation from a frozen dinosaur exhibit. Their human DNA unravels into prehistory, soon they are chirping and cooing in elemental bird languages—a hybrid chorus to recreate primordial settings…
And in Concerto for An Angel, His Computing Consciousness, Two Lovers and a Cello in A Supermarket, every part is written—except for the Cello.
Brightness Falls: Three Movements ©2004, 2013 onome ekeh