Mirror Suite
Alan Charlton
Commissioned for Música en las Montañas, August 2014
Première: July 2014, Capileira, La Alpujarra. London premiere: July 2016 (by Crouch End Festival Chorus)
Mirror Suite is a setting of four poems by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) taken from his 1921 cycle of poems of the same name. Lorca was greatly influenced by nature, particularly the landscape near Granada, where he grew up. In Mirror Suite (1921) Lorca re-imagines natural phenomena, such as rainbows, birdsong, the earth and the sky, through a world of mirrors and reflections. The four movements are scored for unaccompanied choir, which is divided in various ways. Each movement is based on a canon* or mirror canon**: the musical lines are always being reflected in various ways, creating the musical equivalent of mirrors.
In the first movement, Tierra, the poet imagines the surface of the earth as being an unsilvered mirror, which would enable, for example, lilies and roses to grow upside down. This concept is represented musically with a four-part mirror canon, its pivotal note, middle C, repesenting the earth’s surface.
In the second movement, Réplica, Lorca describes the the effect of how a single bird’s song can appear to sound like many birds through natural reflections. For this movement, the women’s voices surround the audience, with an initial soloist being copied by the other women, creating a harmonious cacophony of birdsong which then subsides back to a single line. Against this, men’s voices sing the text in canon.
The third song, Aire, describes the air being pregnant with rainbows. They shatter, spilling rain over the grove. This arch-like movement is a four-part canon based on arch-like melodic lines that imitate the shape of the rainbow.
The work is concluded with a frenetic setting of El gran espejo, (‘The Giant Mirror’) whose text roughly translates as ‘We live under a giant mirror. Man is blue. Hosanna!’. The choir is split into three separate choirs, spatially separated. The first choir sings a mirror canon, which is then imitated by choirs two and three, creating a mirror canon in three-part canon.
* An example of a canon is London’s Burning: a melody is copied exactly by a second voice, then a third, etc. the whole effect forming a harmonious whole.
** In a mirror canon, the second voice copies the melody of the first but inverted (upside-down), creating a mirror image of the melody. Where the original melody rises, the inverted melody falls.
