Lamentation

My first idea for Lamentation came from a decades-long preoccupation with funeral wailers in Taiwan: professional mourners for hire to cry at funerals to guide the emotion of people with a reserved nature.

Lamentation was initially planned around a lament bass: a descending bass motive in the western music tradition, used to denote sorrow or tragedy. Over the course of composing the work and after many reconceptions this lament bass became hidden under the surface of, and integrated with a musical material consisting of quasi-modal features that also contain whole-tone and pentatonic scales. The work opens and closes very quietly. The way the instruments interact is not in a typical melody-and-accompaniment way, but is rather contrapuntal, and in a virtuosic melodic unison towards the end. Chords (providing the necessary harmony for a lament bass) were cut from the piece altogether in the end. In Lamentation I was reinterpreting a similar technique used in The Stillpoint, a work I composed twenty years ago for violin and vibraphone.

Additionally, there is the possibility for the pianist to activate two brief recordings of a crying woman.

Edward Top, 2014