the heavens can make light and flame and ice and water was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music as part of their Bicentenary 200 Commissions Project.
The piece takes - as its starting point - a reading of a translation of a poem by Ukrainian poet Kateryna Babkina. This reading was analysed (for pitch and rhythmic content), processed heavily (in the electronic samples) and reflected upon constantly while I was composing the piece.
Throughout the piece, the player is directed to perform (in general)
extremely quietly with violently loud accents. The effect is one of a text, or spoken dialogue that is half-remembered by the listener. The electronics alternatively veil the performance further, or illuminate it concretely with snippets of text and moments of concrete interaction with the live performer.
Though the piece was composed mostly in 2021, it was completed and premiered three weeks into the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, in March 2022. It carries within it every resonance of sadness, anger, helplessness, smallness, and loss which I have felt in watching that criminal tragedy unfold.
The heavens can make light and flame and ice and water –
and you’re as small and weak against them as an insect,
a wrinkled berry on a frozen hawthorn in December,
the shadow of a bird that fades across the snowy steppe –
yes, this is you, so small against the heavens. All-embracing,
they will envelop everything around you in their arms –
held tightly in their clasping velvet, rigid, black, abrasive,
you’ll stand as though up t o your neck in water, warm and dark.
And now you stand as though bef ore the heavens begging –
timidly, you raise your lowered eyes without permission:
perhaps the sky, on such a night, as one might for a baby,
will turn some music on f or you and set the stars in motion.
Kateryna Babkina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
