TRATAMIENTOS DE LOS TRASTORNOS DEL VINCULO MADRE-HIJO

The Night Bride is a work of music theatre that was conceived at the beginning of my Ph.D. candidature but that was the final work completed as part of my portfolio. This work, along with Flight Paths, is the most collaborative work in the portfolio. The piece was composed specifically for soprano Anikó Tóth and cimbalom player and percussionist, Tim Williams of Manchester-based contemporary music ensemble Psappha.

Like Falling Out of Cars, The Night Bride utilised live acoustic instruments with an electroacoustic component. However, in this case, the sounds are not processed in real time, but are fixed audio files which are triggered by another “performer” at specified moments in the score, not unlike Fields of Darkness and Light for violin and fixed-media by Adrian Moore, or like my own early piece Residue (performed by Voxare at the International Computer Music Conference in New York in 2010). In some ways, The Night Bride differs from the other instrumental works in this portfolio in that it is less concerned with exploring aspects of electroacoustic music through acoustic instruments and more with combining aspects of electroacoustic music and instrumental music in such a way as to produce engaging music theatre. The

electroacoustic sections are very much informed by Radiophonics and my other professional activities, including Radio and audio drama.

24 _{A studio realisation of this piece can be found on CD 3 in Appendix 4 – Recordings}

The work is a very personal one and draws together a number of disparate factors and influences, such as the influence of Hungary, in terms of personal relationships, landscape/soundscape, folk music and the music of Béla Bartók, György Kurtág and György Ligeti on my music; Radiophonics, sound design, narrative and

electroacoustic music.

The initial phase in the development of this stage work was a short story written by myself, which also draws on/is based on the Szekler folk ballad Anna Molnar, (Bosley & Sherwood, 1991) collected by Zoltán Kodály, as well as on Béla Balázs’ libretto for Bartók’s A kékszakállú herceg vára (Balázs, 1911). This short story version was then adapted into a comic book version by writer Mike Sizemore, which was in turn illustrated by David Kennedy. Mike Sizemore wrote the libretto for this music theatre version based on this comic book adaptation. The comic book illustrations acted as a further inspiration to the compositional process.

The third collaborator was Anikó Tóth, a performer with a wide range of specialisms and talents. I wanted to compose a work that would allow her to demonstrate her abilities as a classical and folk singer, actor and dancer. Although now specialising in the performance of contemporary works, Anikó began her musical career as a

performer of Hungarian folk song. Anikó played an important role both in the music and in the staging of the piece at its premiere. One of the songs that was an

inspiration for The Night Bride from was ‘Túl a vízen zörög a jég’, the first song I ever heard Anikó sing during a trip to Transylvania together in 2003.

The Night Bride was premiered in Vienna on 2nd _{June 2012 by Tim Williams and}

Anikó Tóth.

4.10.2. Field Recording

A major factor in the development of this piece was a field-recording trip to the Székelyföld (Szekler Land) in Transylvania, where The Night Bride is set. I had travelled to this area a number of times before and it is also the place where I first heard the folk song ‘Túl a vízen zörög a jég’, sung by Anikó Tóth as we were travelling together.

Although it would have been possible for me to construct tape sections from sounds I could record in the UK, it was very important for me to use sounds collected in the area of Transylvania in which the story of The Night Bride is set. The journey to Homoródszentmárton (M#rtini$), the village and its environs where the sounds were collected, was by train from Budapest to Segesvár (Sighi$oara) - a town with alleged connections to Dracula’s historical inspiration Vlad III the Impaler - to

Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc) - one of the historical centres of the

Székelyföld (Szekler land) and the place where I first heard Anikó Tóth sing ‘Túl a vízen zörög a jég’ - and finally to Homoródszentmárton (M#rtini$), a small Szekler village with a very traditional agricultural lifestyle with very little mechanisation.

The minimal mechanisation and road and air traffic in the area meant that it was much easier to capture the soundscape of the area, which would have been fairly close to the soundscape of the area at the time The Night Bride was set. R. Murray

Schafer would describe the soundscape of the area in which I was recording as “hi- fi”:

A hi-fi system is one possessing a favourable signal-to-noise ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level. The country is generally more hi-fi than the city; night more than day; ancient times more than modern. In the hi-fi soundscape, sounds overlap less frequently; there is perspective - foreground and background (1994, p. 43).

I also wanted to ensure that the soundscapes used within The Night Bride were as accurate as possible and did not contain any non-indigenous bird song. Regarding bird song, Schafer writes:

Each territory of the earth will have its own bird symphony, providing a keynote as characteristic as the language of the men who live there (1994, p. 31).

The manually-pumped organ and the church bell were both recorded at the Unitarian chapel in Homoródszentmárton, Transylvania. The sounds of wildlife were all

recorded in the fields and forests of the surrounding area.