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High Windows
978-0-19-345696-9
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Paperback
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01 February 1996
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This item is temporarily out of stock. Orders for out-of-stock items are supplied and charged as soon as the item becomes available.
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for high voice and piano
The words for this cycle are drawn from poems by Philip Larkin. There are three lyrics about the natural world and two typically down-beat townscapes, framed and linked with a setting of the visionary final lines fo the title poem. The whole suggests a musical form as close to a Baroque cantata as to later song cycles. Forces or CategoryHigh voice & pianoProgramme Notes1. The Trees
2. Solar
3. Dublinesque
4. Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel
5. Cut Grass
In writing some songs for Michael
Chance I wanted to find texts that would avoid the associations of the counter-tenor voice with things strange and un-wordly. Larkin's poems, with their finely observed realities seemed ideal, and I chose five from his final (1974) collection High Windows.
There are three lyrics about the natural world (The Trees, Solar, Cut Grass) and two typically down-beat townscapes, one exterior and one interior, the whole sequence suggesting the cycle of the seasons and the transience of life. Framing and linking these five poems is a setting of the visionary final lines of the title poem. These short 'recitatives' provide a context for the whole work, and, perhaps appropriately, suggest a musical form as close to the Baroque cantata as to later song-cycles.
High Windows was
written to a commission from Michael Chance, with funds from the Arts Council of England, in 1992.
© Anthony Powers
Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press
Texts
...And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:...
1. THE TREES
The Trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead
they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
...high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass...
2. SOLAR
Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.
The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin,
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your
Gold.
Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for
ever.
...And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing...
3. Dublinesque
Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings light on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.
The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle length dresses.
There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),
And of great sadness
also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.
...the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere...
4. FRIDAY NIGHT IN THE ROYAL STATION HOTEL
Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
a larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
In
shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.
...and is nowhere, and is endless.
5. CUT GRASS
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,
White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.
...shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is
endless.
Text © 1974 by Philip Larkin
Reproduced courtesy of Faber & Faber Ltd.
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Anthony Powers (b.1953) Born in London in 1953, Anthony Powers studied at Oxford, in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and at York with David Blake and Bernard Rands. He taught for two years at Dartington College of Arts before being appointed Composer-in-Residence to Southern Arts. Since then he has moved to Herefordshire where he continues to divide his time between composing and teaching, currently at Cardiff University, where he has been Professor of composition since 2004.
Powers's music is characterized by strong architectonic frameworks that support a language of poetic intensity and magical sonorities. His music often takes its inspiration from the tension between different states, be they physical properties, landscapes, seasons or emotions.Anthony Powers at Cardiff University
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