Murmurs from Limbo
Duration: 17:00
Completed: December, 2004
Instrumentation: Alto, Tenor, Alto Saxophone, Horn, Tuba, Percussion, and Viola
Dedication: For Dad
Score Excerpt:
Program Notes
Murmurs from Limbo is a meditation on the process of dying which follows a protagonist through different states of consciousness. As the protagonist slips in and out of consciousness, the clarity of ideas and the sense of time change. One could think of it as a view from the sickbed. In this way I hope that the piece will be a little like when James Joyce relates Finnegans Wake to a developing picture melting: “Heated residence in the heart of the orange flavored mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearly your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw.”
What will the hen hear here? The texts come from anonymous poets of the 13th and 15th centuries, and are written in Middle English, the language in between the Old English you would find in Beowulf, and the Modern English of William Shakespeare. The writers approach death with extremes of faith and cynicism. One text moves methodically through the mundanities of preparing a corpse for burial (digging the grave, stitching the shroud, orienting the feet towards Jerusalem, etc.), and suddenly moves to caustic criticism of the deceased’s conduct in life. While we are asked “on [your dying day], what good will all your worldly pleasures be?”, we also hear the the writers want to enjoy life, and we get more than a whiff, occasionally, of the earthy fun-loving of Beowulf.
Philosophers have written that sleep is a poor analogue for death. Yet, it is a hard idea to shake, because we have no other way of understanding what it would be like to lose our consciousness. So, like Finnegans Wake, Murmurs from Limbo is a piece of the night, of the dark, of the unknown, of death, but where there is perhaps the twinkle of a hope of resurrection.
