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From Station Island
Conductor's score and parts on hire
978-0-19-358353-5
27 July 2006
Price: Available on request
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The text is an abridged version of the cycle of twelve poems by Seamus Heaney entitled Station ISland. Forces or CategoryMale narrator, baritone & ensembleDuration25 minutesDifficultyDifficultOrchestrationfl (+picc&afl), cl (+bcl), perc, hp, vln, vcProgramme NotesText by Seamus Heaney,
abridged by Anthony Powers.
When Hans-Christian Euler invited me to write a new work for his Ensemble Musica Viva Hannover he suggested the poetry of Seamus Heaney as a text, and in particular the semi-dramatic cycle of poems Sweeney Astray. I was enthusiastic, as I had been keen to attempt a Heaney setting for some time, but in the end I settled instead on another cycle, Station Island published in 1984.
This set of twelve substantial poems needed considerable cutting down for musical setting, and that was the first task. My intention was to preserve the shape and feel of the original whilst reducing each poem considerably, and the overall number of poems from twelve to nine. The poems naturally suggested two connected but contrasting voices, a male speaker and a
baritone; the speaker takes the role of the poet himself Station Island is an autobiographical work concerned with the growth of a poets mind and the baritone the numerous characters from past and present whom the poet meets.
Heaney describes the poems as a sequence of dream encounters with familiar ghosts, set on Station Island on Lough Derg in County Donegal. The island is also known as St Patricks Purgatory because of a tradition that Patrick was the first to establish the penitential vigil of fasting and praying which still constitutes the basis of the three-day pilgrimage. Each unit of the contemporary pilgrims exercises is called a station.
These 'dream encounters' range from the remote mythical past of Ireland to the vivid political present - or very recent past
- of the 'troubles', the locations and imagery likewise ranging from country to town. In a way which perhaps reflects this my own music is based entirely, if not always obviously, on transformations and distortions of a traditional Irish reel which only fully emerges in the last number, played there on the flute.
The music follows closely the moods and images of the words, sometimes sketching in an atmospheric background, sometimes picking up, quite realistically, on a particular sound described in the text. So the piece hovers between melodrama (in the old sense of spoken declamation with musical accompaniment) and song-cycle, whilst perhaps suggesting both cinema and chamber opera too.
From Station Island was written in the summer of 2003 to a commission from the
Hannoverische Gesselschaft fur Neue Musik. The first performance was given by Sebastian Bluth (baritone), Charles Ebert (speaker) and Ensemble Musica Viva Hannover, conducted by Hans-Christian Euler, on 26 October 2003, at the Musikhochschule, Hannover, Germany.
© Anthony Powers 2003
Reproduced be permission of Oxford University Press
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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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