May 25, 2022
Bonus Music: 10-yr Anniversary Secret Recordings
Sharing the original improvisatory recordings that became the song cycle Orpheus. I recorded these in August 2012, and certainly never intended to release them! However, I'm also entering a period where this sort of improvisatory composition style is coming back to me in interesting ways, so I wanted to share a bit about my musical life with you.
If you'd like to hear the entire completed song cycle with the full piano part, for the tenor I wrote it for, here it is:
https://soundcloud.com/mattiamauree/sets/orpheus
6 movements: Proem, Death, Pride, The Dark, Look Back, After
Text by John North Radway
i. Proem
After the ebb a weed or two remained, a gutted shell, a crab’s rent leg, a man come to mourn at the shore. The mudflat stank of things that almost were.
He lay upon that waste with nothing more or less to fear than anhedonia of galaxies and the north wind’s disinterest.
Almost a hero, almost a god, nearly a lover, he’d nearly known bliss and the song the world had wri…