The wine-dark sea IV

by Matthew Whittall

for guitar and harpsichord

Description

The Mediterranean looms large in my family history and genealogy.
Learning the mythology of Greece and Turkey as a child through books and
bedtime stories, I came to associate this body of water with mystery,
no small amount of adventure and, despite my strong physical and
psychological attachment to the North, a distant, muted sense of
ultimate home. As I draw primarily on landscape for creative impetus,
during a trip to the region in 2007, I expected to find in the lands of
my ancestors a potent new source of ideas.

Although the vistas were arresting and beautiful, they did not
resonate in me on a deep level. What I – a northerner by more than birth
and temperament, it would seem – was allowed to carry away from that
trip were merely fond recollections of a foreign place, profoundly
“other” from my experience: the iconic, archetypal “Mother Sea” and its
numberless shades of blue, the quality of the sunlight, the smell of
flowers and herbs in the air. These are the impressions informing The
wine-dark sea, a dreamlike postcard written after the fact, through a
haze of memory. I could add to this a feeling of blissful honeymoon
detachment and, in the choice of early instruments, a sense of the
contemporary overlaying a deeper antiquity.

Instrumentation

guit, cemb

Category

Chamber Works

Premiere

Rody van Gemert, guitar, Assi Karttunen, harpsichord, Viitasaari Time of Music festival, Viitasaari, Finland, July 2, 2014.

Commisioned by / dedications

Dedicated to Rody van Gemert and Assi Karttunen.

+ Add information