This week, I had the pleasure of listening to Eleanor Alberga’s “Shining Gate of Morpheus.” This is a really stunning work written just eight years ago, in 2012. The piece manages to create a strong sense of story and a wide variety of textures with only a string ensemble with an additional horn. After listening to this work, I was genuinely surprised to see that it had such a minimal orchestration. The sweeping landscapes and various textures she produces seem to create the illusion of a much wider instrumental palette.
I couldn’t resist the temptation to look up the reference Alberga makes in her title. I learned that Morpheus is a deity associated with sleep. (Oh, Morpheus, please be with me through this finals week!) Understanding this mythological reference helps me understand why the composer organized this piece in a fluid way, but not one informed by any particular structural conventions or forms.
Helping to reinforce this dreamlike aesthetic, the piece seems to wonder in and out different tonal centers. Some figures, like the idea being exchanged between the violins in the first page of the score center around A, being in the key of A minor. After a long voyage of different tonal centers, the piece ends on a wistful C-sharp minor chord, rather far removed from the original key. That the piece remains tonal throughout gives it a sense of structure and avoids the provocation that comes with any sudden clash and sense of disorientation. This choice preserves the fluid dreamlike character of the piece.
Although perhaps not as inventive in her choice of pitch collections, Alberga uses many unique rhythmic figures to help produce this ethereal quality. In truth, I don’t know which particular rhythms to single out for the purpose of this discussion. They line nearly every page of the score. The constant switching of time signatures denies any rhythm the time to settle into a groove in the ears of the listener.
Being explicit in its rhythmic notation, this work is a departure from many we have listened to thus for in the quarter. Perhaps a more explicit system of rhythmic notation is necessitated when writing for an orchestra, as opposed to chamber or solo music, two genres which encompass all or nearly all of the works we have discussed previously.
The Unquestioned Answer 