Arcanabula (2020)

First, a mea culpa. I have, over decades, protested that I was not fond of the bassoon. Until, that is, James Aylward visited my studio and played my oboe piece ‘e/meth on his lovely instrument. The sound was much more sumptuous and expressive than I had been prepared for, to the extent that I immediately started to ponder a new solo bassoon piece. For me it is a sine qua non that the piece one writes be congruent with the character of the instrument one writes it for, and I patiently waited for an idea to strike me that was suitable for bassoon. Which turned out to be Arcanabula. This was a neologism that I came up with by analogy with incunabula and imagined meaning “the earliest stages or first traces in the development” of some concealed symbolic meaning. Of course, my very first step was to search online for prior usage and to my amusement the word turned out to have a very specific meaning in the world of gaming: a wizard’s spellbook. (Never mind the confused fake Latin… I treat the word as a collective plural). The wizard connection stuck with me, and I started to see the bassoon as a wizard’s staff, or rod, a sophisticated and puissant ceremonial adjunct that doubled as a musical instrument. So far, so playful. The slightly whimsical tone did not hinder me from writing a very structured, if rhapsodic work. After the enforced 12-noteness of the vibes pieces Luminous and Dark Integers, and the relative austerity of ghosts of motion, it was a real pleasure to be able to dig deep into the toolbox of microtonality and provoke some really sonorous multiphonic playing from James.

Taking my lead from the idea of the spellbook, I came up with a piece that was nested at several levels, like categorised chapters, with the even-numbered sections constituting a caduceus of intertwined material deriving from two different processes, and the odd ones a set of micro-variations lasting from about a second up to ten. This baroque and over-ornate structure seemed to me exactly what one might expect from, for example, a denizen of some Invisible College; in a sense, the purported origin of the word wizard in the archaism wys-arse is written into the piece’s texture.

As is evident from the video of James’ performance in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, I wrote into the score the possibility of performing Arcanabula in wizard-like outfit. For some players this will be a step too far, but James embraced the possibility of extending the character of the piece to his outfit and had suitable robes made. However, as far as can be discerned, the piece has no thaumaturgic effectiveness.

The writing of Arcanabula stretched from initially assembling the material in April 2019, to writing the last notes on 28 November 2020.