The supposed beginning of the cosmos, or some other concept such as reversal expressed in music and a few words. The chorus impersonally looks 'back' at the vast aeons of Time, and 'out' into the infinities of Space. The soloist sings personally from within the poignant and immediate here and now. (This kind of temporal disjunction is a poetic device that is used many times in the work)

Sound

TENOR

 All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all.

Sound

Far up in the stretches of night;

Night splits and the dawn breaks loose.

EXPLODE Exploring

Exploding

Into time

Into space

I, through the terrible novelty of light

Turning

Returning

Eternal

Reversal

(Music continues into No. 2)

2. Creation of the World by Music

The cosmic creative force operates through music-an ancient tradition this, whereby music can bring order to outer or inner disorder and has physical power (of Orpheus). Shiva (Creator, Preserver, Destroyer) danced the present world into being. In the domain of imagination and revelation, the key words here are 'dream' and 'backwards'.

In the complementary domain of material knowledge, the key words are 'measurement' and 'might~ Halley's comet was last seen in 1910 (I saw it myself as a child): it is due to return in 1986. Maybe the messengers, even the angels, will return. . .

SOLOISTS

Shall we . . . ?

Measurement began our might

Steadying the mirror's echo of the mirror's light

Music is of itself divine

The great wild satellite has reversed its course, 'Remember', he whispered in my ear, 'it will come back . . . speeding on its homeward journey to the sun.'

A flight of angels through the sky

singing, singing:

and the poet singing

achieved is the glorious work

3. Jungle

Soloists and chorus

So much has been observed and recorded about the variety and prodigality offorms in the animal species that wegawp in disbelief and wonder. We can also be disturbed by it, sensing it to be pointless, ludicrous, even cruel. Against the speed and restlessness of man's history, it is clearly 99.9 per cent fixed and eternal, and by implication, therefore, ever more meaningless. Yet we humans must find a balance between the wonder and the horror.

The sound ofthis metaphorical 'jungle', implying the everlasting struggle ofprey and predator, is manifest in atour-part choral complex of verbal tags. These tags are referable to animal imitations, but the onomatopoeia is mainly suggested by the rhythm.

CHORUS

Clatter-chatter, clatter-chatter, Monkee

Pad, pad. the huge cats, prowl, growl . . . . Orrhh!

Hahahahiyeena-like ahahahaha. Jackass.

Caw caw ock ock. mockcawing, Bird.

(fu rious panic scream)

Merde!!

SOLOISTS

The lover can see (Jungle chorus continues)

and the knowledgeable.

Observe the pilgrim-lover at the creek

Searching, through a zodiac of time, the

tiny for the huge.

SAVANNAH

As were I stalker on the dry Savannah

or glass-masked diver in the deep.

Crokiokiax

SOPRANO

At last I knelt on the

island's winter-killed grass,

lost dumbstruck,

staring at the frog in the creek

four feet away. Just as I

looked, he slowly crumpled and

began to sag. The spirit vanished from

his eyes as if snuffed.

His skin emptied and dropped

his very skull seemed to crumple

and settle like a kicked tent.

He was shrinking before my eyes

like a deflating football

MEZZO-SOPRANO

Through the puncture shoot the poisons

that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organs

-all but the skin-and through it the giant water-bug

SOPRANO

I gaped, bewildered, appalled.

An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog

then glided away.

Merde!!

BARITONE

Allah asks:

'The heaven and the earth and all betweer~

Thinkest thou I made them in jest?'

MEZZO-SOPRANO

Sometimes, when a lacewing lays her fertile eggs ori a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, She is hungry.

She pauses in her laying turns around, and eats her eggs one by one. Then lays some more, and eats them too.

TENOR

'Well, Lord God', asks the delicate, dying lacewing whose mandibles are wet with the juice excreted by her own ovipositor, 'What's it all about?'

And do you know, he couldn't ...

SOPRANO

I want out from this still air.

Take a deep breath, Elijah: light your pile.

The world may be fixed but it never was broken.

The fleeing shreds I see, the back parts, are a

gift, an abundance.

SOPRANO AND MEZZO-SOPRANO

Occasionally

Look

the mountains part ...

Look

The tree with the lights in it appears . .

Sound

the mocking-bird falls

and time unfurls across space like an oriflamme.

4. The Ice-cap moves South-North Chorus

Man's emergence in history, his nomadic wanderings at the mercy of the elements, as the ice-cap in the northern hemisphere moves south over thousands of years. The more easily imaginable outer social life of the family at the mouth of the cave is set against the rituals within the cave, where man has some mysterious contact with the transcendent. The music moves downwards.

HAND

Then spoke the thunder:

DA

Resounding

TEMPLE

5. Dream of the Paradise Garden Soloists and chamber choir

Only now do we reach thepossibility ofa settled society-a Garden of Eden. Always a dream, forwards or backwards, it is never an enduring reality, for there are always predators (e.g. the Centaur here) ready to invade and despoiL . . . This movement invokes Eden through linesfrom Milton's Paradise Lost set after the manner of a Renaissance madrigal, then an instrumental transition ( flutes and harp) which is in the rhythm of a sarabande. In the scene proper, there are four characters: two human (Man and Woman), one superhuman (called, neutrally, Ancestor) and a member of the animal kingdom-a Dragon (who can later be 'demoted' from such splendour of form).

MAN (TENOR)

Come, Ancestor, and take a seat.

ANCESTOR (BARITONE)

I thank you; and the air is cool

WOMAN (soprano)

Dragons don't sit, I suppose.

DRAGON (MEZZO-SOPRANO)

I'll poise myself upon the grass.

ALL SOLOISTS

Evening shadows bring surcease across the meadows of our peace.

ANCESTOR

Man, have you checked the walls lately?

MAN

Sounder than ever:

tho' you'd know without moving.

DRAGON

I flew around them t'other day; seemed alright to me.

DRAGON

WOMAN

With our dear dragon for a guardian, All is safe and homely.

ALL SOLOISTS

Evening shadows bring surcease across the meadows of our peace.

WOMAN

Dragon, Dragon, have you caught cold, trembling in the night air?

DRAGON

My scales are dropping

MAN

Help, know-all Ancestor, Why is that?

ANCESTOR

A thief, a Centaur, jumped the wall

WOMAN

Dragon, fly, fly to our defence.

DRAGON

My wings fall off!

I move but on my belly.

MAN

All-powerful, what now?

ANCESTOR

Impotent, celestial;

my new country's there,

far, far beyond the stars.

But you may pray to me.

The snake glides swift and cringing to its hole.

The pure inviolate deity ascends the sky.

in narrow room Nature's whole wealth,

MAN

What have we done?

What guilt?

WOMAN

Why are we all alone?

MAN

What piercing sense of loss!

WOMAN

What aching unstaunchable wound!

It was a sweet communion

corrupted now to cold

indifference of the watching stars.

MAN AND WOMAN

Weep, weep, and cry again To all delight of human sense exposed

Look back, back, and gaze again in narrow room Nature's whole wealth

rose-lawns and meadows; river noises yea more, a Heaven on Earth.

lost or remembered in the bitter-sweet songs

of music for blissful Paradise the garden was.

Let's go. Southward went a river large

passed underneath ingulfed,

rose a fresh fountain;

visiting each plan, and fed

flowers worthy of Paradise.

This was the place.

This was the everlasting place of dream.

6. The Triumph of Life

Soloists and chorus

The title comes from Shelley's last and unfinished poem. I have set portions of it alongside an account of Shelley's own death by drowning off the coast of Tuscany.

CHORUS

At dawn

that insomniac poet on the hill-top

stretched his faint limbs . .

TE NOR

Before me fled the night;

behind me rose the day

the Deep was at my feet

and Heaven above my head

when a strange trance over my fancy grew . .

. . . trance

which was not slumber,

was so transparent that the scene came through.

As in that wond'rous trance of thought I lay

this was the tenour of my waking dream.

Methought I sate beside a public way.

A crowd numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

Old age and youth, manhood and infancy

mixed in one mighty torrent did appear Bizzwazz, whizzing wings . .

. . . did appear,

all hastening onward, yet none seemed to know

whither he went, or whence he came, or why.

And as I gazed methought that in the way

the throng grew wilder.

And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might

so came a chariot on the silent storm

of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape.

All the four faces of that charioteer

had their eyes banded . . . little profit brings

speed in the van and blindness in the rear,

nor then avail the beams that quench the Sun

or that his banded eyes could pierce the sphere

of all that is, has been, or will be done.

So ill was the car guided, but it past

with solemn speed majestically on.

the million with fierce song and maniac dance raging around

for where'er

the chariot rolled a captive multitude

was driven

Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,

half to myself I said, 'And what is this?

Whose shape is that within the car? And why?'

I would have added-'ls all here amiss?'

But a voice answered . .

'life'

'Then what is Life?' I said . .

~ The cripple cast

his eye upon the car which now had rolled

onward, as if that look must be in the last,

and answered . .

ALL SOLOISTS

Out from the harbour speeds a yacht

straining to entrap the sun.

That figure at the prow,

now who is he?

Who is he?

Th'insomniac poet

moral navigator on the sea of life;

less skilful on the sea itself!

They haul up sail on sail

to their new topmast rigging

to race it seems

that inevitable falling of the sun.

Faster, faster!

Faster, faster!

No more towards the sun

but flying now before the storm

in chase behind them on the wind.

All other boats haul down their sails

to hurry, frantic to the land.

But not that poet's.

Some helpful captain,

flying by them to the coast,

calls to come aboard or lower sail

The tall black figure at the prow

shrieks, 'no'; and again shrieks, 'no'-

Proud as the sun itself yet dropping into dark

As the night comes

oh, can we still scry the scene?

The yacht under full sail,

heels over-and is gone.

SOLOISTS AND CHORUS

Real the time,

the place?

The night

the shore?

Real the drama that we do?

Cramming the brine-soaked body

into the metal box:

harsh incinerator.

The fire from heaven. Real the sound?

Resounding.

Flames feasting on flesh on bones

on blood Real?

Or unreal?

The trance which was not slumber

was so transparent that the scene came through wherein we visioned

that the human beating heart can never be burnt up

utterly.

7. Mirror of Whitening Light Chorus

Science and technological mastery are now in the foregrouniL The title refers to the alchemical purification or 'whitening' process, by which a base metal may be transformed into gold and by extension, to the purification of the human soul. Music is again used as a metaphor ofordering hence, the three canonic chorale preludes, based on the plainsong Veni creator spiritus preceding each of the three sections of the movement

Instrumental Prelude I

Instrumental Prelude 2

TUNING

radiant

look, look!

Instrumental Prelude 3

8. Hiroshima, mon amour

HIROSHIMA

Soprano and chorus

The single voice of a woman is heard in an act of remembrance and mourning, a threnody for those individuals who lost their lives in a brutal worlcL The text is almost all drawn from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem and also, at the end, her Poem without a Hero:

all of it poetry that grew from -her own experience into that of all Russia~ Now, through translation into other languages, and perhaps through translation into music, it has widened into a world experience.

SOPRANO CHORUS

No (humming) . .

not beneath another sky.

No

not sheltered by a stranger's wing

I was where, . . . where,

among my people there, . . . there,

where alas they were to be.

Slowly it floods my mind

like a melody in music

I heard him whisper

9. Three Songs:

I The Severed Head

Soloists and chorus

Scenesfrom the mythological life ofOrpheus: not merely that part of the myth (which so obsessed the European imagination from the sixteenth century onwards) dealing with the death of Eurydice and Orpheus's failure to bring her back from Hades, but also Orpheus's death at the hands of the Furies, the Thracian Women who tore his body to pieces and threw the head into the river, where it floated down to the sea, still singing.

TRIO (SOPRANO MEZZO-SOPRANO AND TENOR) CHORUS

Peer into that cavern's mouth

whither the crazed singer wandered

turning returning . . . turning returning

and turned again.

BARITONE

I saw my lady weep . . . Ah

SOPRANO AND TENOR

Stalk on, stalk on

into daylight

BARITONE

Who alone already lifted

the lyre among the dead

dare, divining sound . . . Sound

the infinite praise.

TRIO

Stare at those wild women

swarming the river bank

tearing

crunching

dismemb'ring

wrenching apart

all constellations of anatomy.

The head,

skull too hard to bite,

they hurl into the stream

of time: . . . of time

flowing diving singing. . . . Ah

BARITONE

Woe! where are we? Ever yet freer, like torn-loose kites,

We flitter half-high, with edges of laughter,

bounced by the wind.

Order the screamers, O singing God! . . . Time

That they may wake flowing

bearing on the river-race the head and the lyre.

II The Beleaguered Friends

Mezzo-soprano and chorus

This refers to an actual situation. A group of anti-Nazis in Japanese-occupied Peking in i 944 await the end of the war. While waiting they listen to a series of lectures on the I-Ching by Helmut Wilhelm (son ofRichard Wilhelm, renowned translator of the I-Ching).

MEZZO-SOPRANO

Not in the jade palace, with the Emperor's diviner juggling yarrow. Not in the hovel, with the blind flautist alley-vendor finger-guessing coin-signs.

Hidden, from hound and hawk, in the goat-winter house, we wait awhile

he asks the book:

What number is the Now?

CHORUS

Ah. Time-wait

to tell the number and the name.

Fortieth of sixty-four;

Deliverance.

If there's nothing left where we've to go, return brings good fortune.

If there's still something where we've to go, hurrying brings good fortune.

III The Young Actor Steps Out

Tenor and chorus

Our mortality is the one inescapable feature of our existence: the triumphal chariot of Life will throw each one of us, powerful or puny, into the ditch. Species generation alone may be immortal. Nevertheless, in coming to terms with this vision we are always conditioned by our time, and therefore have to keep it all in balance since it is not an absolute~ We are, in short actors constantly finding ourselves at the beginning ofthe drama. Here, in this song a young actor before his first rehearsal at the theatre in Olympia (in a novel of classical Greece), goes sight-seeing and visits the temple ofZeus. He peers at the great statue of the god. As his eye travels up, it meets the 'face of power~

TENOR

Heat filled the wooded valley, for spring comes like summer there.

Already the river was shallow in its pebbly bed; the dust was hot to the foot, the painted statues glowed.

I went in from the hot sun to the sofl, cool shadows, and gaped with the rest at the great statue inside, the gold and ivory, the throne as big as my room at home. Till my eye, travelling upward, met the face of power which says:

CHORUS

(Music continues into No. 10)

The singing will never be done

Soloists and chorus (wordless)

Fínally, the sound 'where no airs blow' (which is the metaphor in this piece for the transcendent) is momentarily all-powerful present and immediate.