Alphabet

Danish poet Inger Christensen was concerned with two things while writing her book of poetry Alfabet: alliteration and the Fibonacci Sequence. The volume contains poems of increasing length, from a single line to over twenty pages, which delight in the sound of words.

In my setting of Susanna Nied’s English translation of these poems, I sought to do something similar. I structured the musical materials from pitches to durations, even the length of the two movements, on Fibonacci proportions, and I delighted in the sibilant sounds the instruments can make. The mercurial onset of attack in a high clarinet part; the blurring of pitch and noise in double bass multiphonics; the gradations between speaking and singing.