The Dreams that fly from me
The Dreams that fly from me is based on a poem by Ivan Goll called Bloodhound:
Bloodhound in front of my heart
Watching over my fire
You that feed on bitter kidneys
In the suburb of my misery
With the wet flame of your tongue lick
The salt of my sweat
The sugar of my death
Bloodhound in my flesh
Catch the dreams that fly off from me
Bark at the white ghosts
Bring back to their pen
All my gazelles
And savage the ankles of my fleeting angel
Trans. Michael Hamburger
I was inspired by the idea of a “fleeting angel” which, at a time when I had been having difficulties composing (and then wrote The Dreams that fly from me with relative ease) seemed very poignant: the angel of the poem seemed to be a poetic representation of my inspiration.
On a more technical level, I made a conscious effort to delineate the soloists and orchestra throughout the work, using all available techniques such as tessitura, speed, dynamic, harmonic density and articulation (to name a few). Although not perhaps audible, one of the pretexts of the work was to gradually increase the amount of conflict, while decreasing the unity between the solo quartet and the orchestra: a tension that is never entirely resolved in the piece. The solo quartet is by and large treated as one voice, but in the second movement, the “antagonistic” music of the orchestra sometimes almost destroys its unity.
The Dreams that fly from me marked a new stage in my development as a composer: although there is still far to go, it is my view that there is an effective conglomeration of methodical planning and intuitive writing in the work to an extent that I had hitherto not been able to achieve. Although in all my recent works there had been much planning before beginning to write, the self-imposed “rules” had at some point always felt musically stifling rather than enhancing: this is not to say that ideas did not change and evolve as the piece progressed, simply that I felt more equipped to translate the pre-planned formal discourse into music that was neither subjugated to or ignorant of its overall structure