already gone
Music by Lillie Harris. Text by Alice Oswald.
Joint-winning entry in Echo Vocal Ensemble’s 2019-20 composition competition.
Concert premiere: July 2021, King’s Place
Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Dunt: a poem for a dried up river’ has a contradiction throughout: between the Roman water nymph’s seemingly unshakeable belief that she can still conjure water, and the narrator’s broader overview that any hope has “already gone”. A reference to a “sealed glass case” implies she is, in fact, in a museum and far away from any river bed. This extremely poignant tone is further juxtaposed with the rhythmic lilt of much of the poem, which in many cases makes some of the saddest lines sing out from the page.
My setting of this text has strong environmental intentions. At the start of the piece, I capture the stilted, difficult attempts of the nymph to conjure water whilst also hinting at a lush, flowing, melodic sound world that only the nymph can still envision. Around halfway, the mood turns: the trill-like gestures that evoke all the individual ripples in a river end, and the texture becomes sparser and more tragic. The nymph's straining and desperate onward force continues, and the piece remains thirsty for a river that will never come. I have used the different verbs Oswald uses throughout the poem to evoke the desperation of the nymph: moving from “she tries” to “she struggles” to “she pleads”.
(Recording also accessible here)
(Score also accessible here)