DAYSPRING - Kathie Mackie - 3-5 oct - Level 3
Years ago I heard William Payn's Elegy. I was intrigued by its overall structure/form. I decided to create my own piece in a similar structure; and Dayspring was born. The piece uses a variety of techniques, including shakes, LV, martellato, martellato lift, plucks and mallets to create or enhance texture and musical interest. It is programmatic in nature, and is suitable for church or concert use. The A theme serves an introductory function, building up the texture in octaves until it commences cluster chords shaken in the treble bells. Under these chords the bass begins stretching out the theme, while at the same time weeding out notes until it reaches the slower, more majestic B theme that begins in dotted half and quarter notes. The momentum begins slowly to build and we return to material taken from the opening A theme, this time with a treble ostinato over it. Trebles and basses trade the theme and it moves to the C theme. The C theme is a lyrical, contemplative theme. It begins in the high trebles over a middle bell ostinato and plucked. At two cadence points the middle trebles shakes a rising line which reminds me of the effect of a suspended cymbal roll. The bass then takes over the theme under a variation of the ostinato in the trebles, which in turn leads to what is essentially a closing theme and a return of a snippet of the B theme transitioning to a reprise of the A theme. As in the opening, the A theme leads into a full, slightly expanded B theme, with is no slowing of tempo. We then move into a more expanded version of the lyrical C theme. It begins softly and sweetly, building eventually into a more dramatic (I like to think of it as “heroic”) statement of the theme. It is at the end of the first half of this section that an optional cut has been added for those choirs requiring a shorter piece. When using the longer version, we have a statement of the C theme in a new key that uses a variant of the closing theme and ends with a fragment of the B theme over an arpeggio bass and ending with shaken treble chords as the bass moves upward to the top treble C.
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