Kerry Milan - Rapture Song Cycle for Female Voice and Pianoforte

Rapture Song Cycle for Female Voice and Pianoforte

Instrumentation

female voice pianoforte

Recording, download - 2.47MB

Score, download - 0.09MB

Kerry Milan - Rapture Song Cycle for Female Voice and Pianoforte

Other Information

 The Rapture Song Cycle for Female Voice and Pianoforte comprises 20 settings of the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Her book Rapture is published by Picador. The 52 poem collection is really one book-length love poem, and a moving act of personal testimony, charting the course of an affair, touching on infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - a contemporary look at an age-old experience.

Kerry Milan´s settings seek above all to be faithful to the ever-changing spirit of this magnificent work, winner of the 2005 T.S.Eliot prize.

But how to set such a captivating range of emotions, changing not just from one poem to the next, but within just a few lines, often with short sentences each with its own suprising turn of phrase or feeling?

This need, to be able to switch suddenly and unexpectedly from one thought or reflection to the next, led to the decision to choose the medium of twelve-tone music and happily the result has been some hauntingly beautiful music with a contemporary feel and, like the poems themselves, a hopefully universal appeal.

The 47 minute work is scheduled for recording in late 2017 by Yvonne Howard and Scott Mitchell.  The music scores are available from the splendid classical music site tutti.co.uk, from where also pdf format individual settings can be readily downloaded.  In addition, the opening bars of each setting can be viewed, along with the correseponding sound file.

The vocal range is C4 to B5 with ossia.

For the technically minded, the original tone row is:

C   A   A flat   D   F   F sharp   B   B flat   G   C sharp   E   E flat,

which, as the musical detectives among you will have already noticed, begins by spelling out   CArol Ann DuFFy!

The opening page of "Forest" is available from  Score download and there is also a sound file of this movement with clarinet taking the voice part.

Kerry Milan - Rapture Song Cycle for Female Voice and Pianoforte

Kerry Milan - Rapture Song Cycle for Female Voice and Pianoforte