Description
Some Ill Planet is an experimental vocal work that weaves fragments of Shakespearean text into an abstract reflection on hubris, power, corruption, and misogyny. Cosmological and meteorological imagery seems frequently to allegorise the delusions of Shakespeare’s powerful men, which produce tragic and violent outcomes, often for female characters. Thus, as Queen Hermione suffers the near-fatal consequences of her husband’s paranoid jealousy in The Winter’s Tale, she laments that ‘some ill planet reigns.’ Similarly, the famous ‘storm soliloquy’ in King Lear (the text at the heart of this work) effectively exorcises Lear’s crazed tyranny, as his subsequent descent into madness is anthropomorphically paralleled by the inclement weather that sets the scene. In this setting, which combines the storm soliloquy with fragments from other parts of the play, musical and dramatic considerations are inextricably bound together: sung and spoken settings reflect the rhythm and inflection of the words as spoken by an imagined Lear. The interplay of sung, whispered, and spoken sounds (verbal and non-verbal) creates an integrated soundscape of musical gestures, atmospheric sounds, and raw emotional expression. The overall form of the piece is an arc of growing and diminishing intensity, which parallels the life-cycle of a storm by transitioning from paranoid muttering to frenzied, hysterical cries, and ending with comparatively sedate but disturbed murmuring.
The Crucial Info
Forces: SSAATTBB (also arr. SATB + SSA solos)
Duration: c. 7′40″
Text: Excerpts from King Lear and The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare
Date of composition: 2008, rev. 2009; SATB + SSA arrangement completed in 2014
Premiere: The 24, Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, York, 2009.
Other performances include: The 24, multiple venues including the China Conservatory, Beijing, and Hubei Theatre, Wuhan, 2010 (programmed with the Chinese title 厄运的行星); The Ebor Singers (incomplete), 2008; Juice Vocal Ensemble and Timeline Choir, Cambridge and Surrey, 2014 (SATB + SSA arrangement).
Recording: The 24, New Music from Old York, Boreas Music, 2012.
Listen
Perusal Score
Text
The text is a musical patchwork of Shakespeare’s words that relate to storms, in a literal (meteorological) as well as a figurative (psychological) sense. Most of the text is taken from the first half of King Lear’s ‘storm’ soliloquy at the beginning of scene nine, which forms a structural core.
King Lear – Scene 9; lines 1 – 9 (edited):
LEAR
Blow, wind and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched the steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous (…) [sheets of fire*]
Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the (…) world, Crack nature’s mould (…)
*In line 4, Lear’s ‘and thought executing fires’ is replaced with the Duke of Kent’s phrase ‘sheets of fire’ (King Lear, Scene 9, line 46). The following additional lines from King Lear are also included:
King Lear – Sc. 9; line 14:
LEAR
Rumble thy bellyful; spit, fire; spout, rain.
King Lear – Sc. 9; lines 75 – 78:
FOOL [sings]
He that has a little (…) wit,
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.
King Lear – Sc. 4; line 212:
FOOL [sings]
So out went the candle and we were left darkling
King Lear – Sc. 7; line 465:
CORNWALL
(Shut up your doors, my lord.) ‘Tis a wild night.
As well as text from King Lear, an additional half-line from the Rape of Lucrece is included. Like the title of the work, this fleeting reference to Shakespeare’s most shockingly misogynistic character alludes to the gendering of political power, current and historical.
The Rape of Lucrece – line 190:
Fair torch, burn out thy light…
Perform this Piece
Please contact Stef for more information and/or a license to perform this piece.