Upon Silence

Like György Ligeti at a crucial point in his career a generation earlier, George Benjamin has had the benefit of formative experience in the electronic studio. Experience of that kind is not, of course, a necessary qualification for finding new sounds in conventional instruments but, at least in developing an understanding of the possibilities, it helps. While there is no electronic element in the present version of Upon Silence, for example, it is most unlikely that without the composer’s experience at IRCAM - the acoustic research institute under the Pompidou Centre in Paris where he worked on his Antara - it would sound anything like it actually does. In its original version the sonorities produced by applying present-day techniques (including sound projection) to an ensemble of viols were new almost by definition. In the revised version for modern instruments they are still new, partly because of the ghost of the viols behind the violas, cellos, and basses and partly because of the minutely detailed instrumental colouring.

The inspiration of the work is a late Yeats poem, Long-legged Fly, about three significant historical figures absorbed in silent thought: Julius Caesar in his tent planning a military campaign, Helen of Troy as an adolescent in Sparta, and Michelangelo working “with no more sound than mice make” in the Sistine Chapel. In each of the three verses in Benjamin’s setting the mezzo-soprano voice follows the rhythm and the natural inflection of the words syllable by syllable. In the three two-line choruses, which offer the evocative image of the long-legged fly moving on the surface of the water, the vocal line is drawn in progressively freer and freer curves and more and more extravagant colours while the melodic current in the fluid string texture below the voice becomes perceptibly firmer.

What might be described as the scientific element in the scoring can be most clearly observed in the three verses - the first characterised mainly by sounds produced on the bridge but also by sustained flautando bowing and harmonics, the second by a rapid tremolando at the point of the bow on the bridge combined with a variety of pizzicato techniques including a kind of legato or glissando effect. Up to this point the string players are instructed to play without vibrato. But, as a long melodic line gradually takes shape in the three cello parts - beginning at the start of the third verse but continuing only intermittently - more and more vibrato is to be applied in what develops into an expressive counterpoint with the voice in the final chorus.

Dedicated to the memory of Michael Vyner, Upon Silence was first performed in the original version by Susan Bickley and Fretwork under the composer’s direction in London in 1990 and in the revised version by the same soprano with the Ensemble Musique Oblique again under the composer’s direction in Paris in 1992.