Causton: As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Description

As Kingfishers Catch Fire was composed in London during the summer and autumn of 2007 and takes its title from some lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Like the animals in the poem, I wanted to allow the instruments in my piece to be unashamedly themselves, and this conditioned the musical material: open fifths in the strings, long cantilenas in the wind, and a certain grandiosity in the writing for harp.

The piece opens with a sort of speeded-up Renaissance counterpoint for string quartet – perfect intervals and a resonant setting – and proceeds through several contrasting but linked episodes: a vertiginous solo for harp; a ‘shadow boxing' passage for harp and string quartet; distorted folk music which gives rise to fireworks in the clarinet part; frantic, strummed pizzicato; a slowly unfolding melody in the wind over string tremolos, which leads via a reprise back to a transformed, now subdued version of the opening string quartet. In the closing section all seven instruments, now united, cross a threshold into a slightly different world from which their previous music can still be glimpsed.

© Richard Causton