Baw My Barne (unaccompanied chamber choir)

Baw My Barne is an intricate and intriguing setting of a medieval lullaby, which may be performed either by a group of eight solo voices or by a larger choir with a solo soprano. Written for SSAATTBB, this short work features Middle English, set with complex harmonies and angular intervals, which makes for a unique blend of old and new that could feature in any professional vocal or choral concert. Screenshots of the score are in the image gallery.

One of my very few forays into vocal writing (some might say, understandably so). Pepe Becker (Smythe at the time) and I were fellow students at the Victoria University School of Music in the late 1980s. Pepe started a vocal ensemble called Baroque Voices and I was included in the first raft of composers commissioned by this wonderful group. This is one of a handful of pieces that I'm not happy with. I was (and still am) an inexperienced composer for voice. Impacted, no doubt, by the fact that singing in front of anyone is the heads-side of my deepest-phobia coin (the tail-side being dancing). I haven't experienced the sheer joy of singing that I see in others. When I hear this piece, I can feel my lack of confidence in writing for voice. So much so, that this is one of a few of my pieces that is no longer publicly available.

The composers approached by Baroque Voices were given a collection of texts to choose from. Carla and I were expecting our first child (now Emanuel, a fully grown man), and I guess this is why I was drawn to the idea of a lullaby.

Also, at the time of writing Baw My Barne I was reading Vincent Persichetti's "20th Century Harmony" (the link will take you to Amazon). I came across the idea of progressing through modes in a way that they head 'toward the sun' (become brighter) or move to the fading twilight and then the dark night sky (lose luminescence). This idea of progressive modes fascinated me enough to use the concept in this piece. One example (in fact the one I used) is:

Locrian - to Phrygian - to Aeolian - to Dorian - to Mixolydian - to Ioanian - to Lydian.

Keeping the same root note, you can observe the other notes of the mode gradually moving away from the tonic (becoming sharper), and the overall sound becoming brighter. I used the same idea (but in a different way) in the third movement of my piano concerto "Three Psalms".

A lovely cassette was made of the new works, I have it somewhere..... Here's the original program (full program notes in the image gallery):