Description

A setting of three Old English riddles (two complete, one partial) from the Exeter Book, released on Stef’s album Riddle Songs (Delphian Records, 2020). Flight combines solemn, chant-like modality with complex interlocking flurries of text, which wind their way through rich harmonic shifts “reminiscent of Takemitsu” (Gramophone, 2021), and multi-layered textures that evoke the sound and imagery of swallows, starlings, and swans in flight. Technically demanding, rhythmically complex, and harmonically dense, this piece is suitable for professional performers, highly experienced/expert leisure-time choirs, and advanced student ensembles.

“. . . the more extended numbers in Riddle Songs are perfectly formed arcs of imaginatively conceived choral sound, thrillingly executed by the fourteen members of the ad hoc choir Everlasting Voices. . . The texts of the three biggest panels – Fire (track 2), the melismatic Flight (track 14 – a dyad of bird poems) and the remarkable mini-epic Ice (track 19), with its ethereal tintinnabuli and barnstorming tenor solo (Nils Greenhow) – are drawn from the Exeter Book, the most voluminous of the surviving codices of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Each of these longer pieces simultaneously project austerity and complexity and somehow seem to connect us to an impossibly distant past. Conner has thus fashioned an unusual music whose modernity is far from inaccessible. . . Riddle Songs is a delight. It’s as novel and refreshing as the texts are ancient and enchanting.” – Richard Hanlon, Music Web International (read the full review)

The Crucial Info

Forces: SSAATTBB + 2 soprano solos
Duration: c. 7′
Texts: Old English riddles from the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501)
Date of composition: 2014 (originally titled Lyft); revised 2019
Premiere: Seattle, USA, 2014, The Esoterics (cond. Eric Banks).
Accolades: prize commission for the Esoterics’ POLYPHONOS Competition
Recordings:

• AETHERIA : Music of the sky, air, and atmosphere. Eric Banks; The Esoterics. 2016. Seattle, USA: Terpsichore.
• Riddle Songs. Stef Conner; Hanna Marti; Everlasting Voices. 2020. Edinburgh, UK: Delphian

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