'Octet with Voices': Recontextualising the choral symphony in the chamber music medium

Short Summary An original musical work entitled Octet with Voices will be composed, realised in sound via a series of workshops in Boston and San Francisco, with musicians who will subsequently perform and record it, and documented in score, recordings, conference paper and journal article. Despite scoring for just 8 musicians, the work will be a species of 'symphony'.

Summary (Loncepts, Composition) The concept of 'symphonic thought' informs many works of the Western tradition. Although (of course) associated particularly with the symphony, it is customarily considered to extend to the string quartet and the instrumental sonata, because it refers not just to medium, but also to the structure, character and treatment of musical material. In fact, Hans Keller proposed the string quartet (even more than the symphony itself) as the locus classicus of symphonic thought, essentially because its capacity for 'musical argument' without the palette of colour available in the orchestral medium meant that 'symphonic thought is at its purest in the quartet' (Keller 1986: 3)

Symphony, string quartet and sonata are normally intimately linked to the instrumental medium.
However, in exceptional 19th- and 20th-century examples of the symphony, voices (especially choral ones) are imported. In his notes to the 1960s recording of Britten's Spring Symphony, Gordon Stewart mentioned Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Mendelssohn's Lobegesang, Mahler's vocal symphonies and Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony as ancestors. The appearance of voices in such works considerably modifies the very concept of 'symphonic thought'.

One might expect such developments in the history of the symphony to be reflected in the string quartet and instrumental sonata, but (with the exception of a handful of questionable examples) this has not proved to be the case. It's difficult to think of any examples of the instrumental sonata expanded by the importation of voices along lines comparable with the aforementioned 'choral' symphonies. In the case of the string quartet, one or two possible 20th-century candidates for the analogy arc described in the literature (Dale 1993, Femeyhough 1999): Schoenberg's Second (1908) and Femeyhough's Fourth (1990). But the interpenetration of the vocal clement is not comprehensive: in both cases, 2 of the 4 movements are solely instrumental, the vocal element is a soloist, and the treatment of the voice quite different from the treatment of the chorus in the cited choral symphonies. The same could also be said of the massive (150') recent British work by Alasdair Hinton (actually a quintet), broadcast recently on BBC Radio 3: in which a 90-minute song cycle forms the finale.
Octet with Voices will therefore exemplify a virtually unprecedented form: a chamberanalogue of
the 'choral' symphony ('string quartet expanded by voices'), exploiting the capacity of the string quartet for 'symphonic thought at its purest' but also thoroughly, ubiquitously and simultaneously engaging with the utterly different traditions of vocal-ensemble writing. A principal compositional task will be to develop an appropriately heterogeneous musical language for this hybrid form (details in 'Case for Support').

Summary (Realisation) Octet with Voices will be realised by means of workshops through which the proposed work (for the standard string quartet medium plus SSAA vocal quartet) will be created in sound. These will involve a collaboration with the Ives Quartet and the vocal ensemble Mockingbirds (San Francisco) and with the Hawthorne Quartet and the vocal ensemble Pandora's Vox (Boston). This two-stage workshopping process, with different ensembles, will provide the opportunityfor reflection, self-criticism and revised thoughts on the way to an ultimate version.

Summary (Output) Output will comprise a score, a recording, and a conference paper and journal article describing the work's concepts and how the new work embodies them.