Ophruoeis - Nocturne for alto flute and orchestra (1996)

The genesis and the sources of Ophruoeis are complicated; their interlinkedness makes them
difficult to describe. The following notes therefore treat the piece under separate headings.

1: Initial impulse and form

Although I did not conceive Ophruoeis in any form until nearly a year after the initial occurrence
that eventually led to its writing, the latter was an experience of breath-taking beauty and
enormity. (Perhaps it was the prolonged after-effect of this beauty that led to the hiatus between
its experience and the first thoughts of treating it as a starting point for a composition. Perhaps
also it was the composition of the preceding piece, Crece en la noche el cielo, that in its
concentration on stars gave me the final impulse to write Ophruoeis.)

On holiday in what I later found out to be the finest place in France for stargazing, I was
swimming late one night in a secluded stretch of the River Tarn. Looking up, I was presented
with a spectacle of countless dazzling stars, spread in a canopy that abruptly ceased on each side
as it met the steep slopes rising from the banks of the river. Floating in the water, I was to all
intents and purposes ‘disembodied’, and felt myself to be part of the environment rather than a
human intruder. The awesome splendour of this sensation could have been frightening were it not
for a very human ‘star’ - a candle placed on the jetty to guide us back to safety and corporeality.
This tension between the human and the divine or the infinite is the basic concept of Ophruoeis,
and my original idea was simply to auralise this in some unspecific way. The first compositional
question that was posed was that of structure, and in order to remain ‘true’ to my original
experience I based this structure on the only temporally significant even that occurred during it: a
shooting star. These were very common in this place and at this time of year; this particular one,
however, was somewhat different. Passing directly overhead, following the east-west course of
the river, it was not the usual momentary streak of light, but rather took a few seconds to trace its
way across the sky, burning red as it did so, until it disappeared. Taking the course of this
shooting star as a structural determinant, I used star charts to discover through which
constellations I had seen it pass (taking into account latitude, date and time). I found them to be
Pegasus, Cygnus, Lyra and Hercules. As Cage had done in Atlas Eclipticalis - although for a very
different conceptual purpose and to very different expressive effect - I measured the distances
between the constituent stars of these constellations and found them to create a structure in which
the first and last constellations (Pegasus and Hercules) were of approximately equal length; the
second (Cygnus) was slightly shorter; and the third (Lyra) was comparatively minuscule. Having
by now determined the concertante nature of the piece (see under heading 2), I was struck by the
coincidence - the first among many that occurred during the composition of Ophruoeis - that these
lengths would fall beautifully into the constituent sections of a concerto movement:

Pegasus - Exposition
Cygnus - Development
Lyra - Cadenza
Hercules - Recapitulation

I decided to treat the Lyra section, however, not as a cadenza (which would in any case be found
towards the end of the recapitulation in a typical concerto movement) but rather as a
‘Brittenesque’ ‘hidden variation’ (c.w. Britten’s Nocturnal, Third Cello Suite, Lachrymae) in
which the solo alto flute and its associate group of instruments (see under heading 2) present their
‘human’ music in full.

2: Instrumentation
The dichotomy between unearthly and human in Ophruoeis is presented instrumentally by an
orchestra in which high pitched sounds and metallic percussion predominate (this being a
conventional celestial topical reference), contrasting with and accompanying a solo alto flute,
whose warm and breathy timbre are associated throughout with ‘man’. Although the orchestral
music can become very fragmentary, three instruments particularly stand out and are treated as a
bridge between the soloist and the general mass of sound. These instruments (solo horn, harp and
solo cello) also possess warm and human timbres and accompany the flute as a group in the
‘hidden variation’ Lyra section.

The traditional Exposition/Development/Recapitulation form of Ophruoeis demands a certain

musical resolution. I chose to present a philosophical resolution of sorts as well. The opening two
sections and particularly the third section, Lyra, can be considered to be a magical process
preparing the recapitulatory Hercules section, which I planned as representing the co-existence of
human and heavenly - the state which my experience in the river had suggested to me. (In this
respect, compare Lyra with the similar magical process at the centre of Crece en la noche el
cielo.) The musical material of the piece, although differently treated in this last section, still
carries the variously human or heavenly connotations it did previously; thus the change in
philosophical state is represented by a redistribution of roles in the new texture at the end of the
work, in which the alto flute plays the ‘oblivion’ motive (see under heading 3) for the first time,
whilst the orchestral wind and brass breathe down their instruments (pitchlessly). This
progression is reinforced by the increasing use of improvisation in the percussion section during
the piece. The percussion are a vital and extensive part of the orchestra in Ophruoeis and are
generally representative of the inhuman; thus their improvisation represents, in its freedom and
individuality, a shift away from this state.

3: Musical sources
From early in the composition of Ophruoeis I searched for musical sources that would be relevant
to the concepts with which it was concerned. From Tim Buckley’s most avant-garde album
Starsailor I chose two tracks. The title track (an improvised, atonal multi-tracking of Buckley’s
multi-octave voice) was a rich fund of chords, pitches and melodic material for the orchestra’s
‘celestial’ music: the opening of Ophruoeis is an orchestral paraphrase of the opening of the
‘song’, combining Buckley’s material with original music; and the music of Starsailor’s first and
third lines is particularly important (the third line’s music is the above-mentioned ‘oblivion’
motive). In fact, the words and the title of Starsailor contain, in their imagery of stars, suns, maps
and rivers, more of the coincidences which characterised the composition of Ophruoeis:

I am a bee out in the fields of winter

And though I memorised the slope of water
Oblivion carries me on his shoulder
Beyond the suns I speak and circuits shiver
But though I shout the wisdom of the maps
I am a salmon in the ring-shaped river.

The second track from the Starsailor album whose material I used, which is entrusted to the alto
flute and gradually focused in upon until it is revealed in a close approximation of the original
(played by the alto flute, solo horn, harp and solo cello) in the ‘hidden variation’ Lyra section, is
Song to the Siren. This simple, tonal song is essentially a love song, and it is used in Ophruoeis as
‘human’ music. Once again it contains references to water, and also, of course, to the Sirens
(Greek mythology is important in Ophruoeis: see under heading 4); these latter are malicious
beings in myth, but I use the reference here for their parallel to the candle on the jetty, and as a
metaphor for the power of music.

A much less important musical figure, taken from a similar ‘popular music’ source, is used at one
point (just before Cygnus) in Ophruoeis: a track from Tangerine Dream’s early album Zeit. This
whole album is concerned with stellar imagery; the track in question is named Birth of Liquid
Pleiades, and is mentioned here merely to point out another coincidence - that the word Pleiades,
given by ancient Greek seafarers to the cluster of stars, translates as ‘sailing ones’ - Starsailor
again…

An entirely different type of music (perhaps not so different, in the long run…) provides the
material for what can be seen as the orchestra’s ‘second subject’ - that is, if the Starsailor material
is the ‘first subject’. The Gregorian chant Alleluia for Transfiguration Day forms the basis for this
music, having as it does another relevant text, here in rough translation:

The eternal light is dazzling,

A flawless mirror,
And the image of beneficence illuminates us.
Alleluia.

In Pegasus the music for the first three lines of this chant is presented in a highly fragmented way,
split between the various sections of the divided strings, and incorporating octave transpositions,
chromatic alterations, glissandi and complex rhythmic mutations; in the ‘recapitulation’,
Hercules, the music setting the word ‘Alleluia’ (the iubilus), which is virtually identical to the
rest of the chant, is set simply and singingly for the whole string section in octaves.

4: Mythical and Christian sources

The Sirens and the Pleiades have been mentioned above, but the importance of mythology in
Ophruoeis really resides in the figure of Orpheus, the human figure whose music gives him power
over nature and the gods. The realisation - one more coincidence - that the lyre with which
Orpheus performs his divine music is in myth the same lyre that was flung into the sky after
Orpheus’ death to form the constellation Lyra (the pivoting constellation in Ophruoeis’ structure)
confirmed his importance to the conception of the piece.

Once more coincidentally, I realised that the Alleluia that I was using for musical material was
that of the day of the church calendar on which Jesus’ evident Orphic (i.e. man/god) qualities are
most explicit: Transfiguration - the passing from one state to the other.

5: The title
Until the piece was nearly complete I had no title for it; it seemed to encompass too many
thoughts and concepts to be limited to one of them. At the same time, however, the figure of
Orpheus was starting to dominate my thoughts as being a fitting symbol for the piece as a whole
and, flicking through Robert Graves; The Greek Myths (which later would also help in the
genesis of The Chant of Carnus), I found that the name Orpheus is (or was) thought to derive
from ‘Ophruoeis’, meaning ‘by the riverside’. This wonderful melding of the universal (the
archetypal figure of Orpheus) and the personal (my own experience in the river) seemed too good
to be true, and the last and most satisfying of the series of coincidences that led to, and helped
guide, the writing of the piece.

Ophruoeis won the 1997 Cambridge University Musical Society Composition Competition - although as I have no
idea how many other entries there were to the competition that year (if any!) the prestige of this award seems dubious.
It had been composed with no thought to entering the competition, and so its orchestral demands, particularly in the
percussion department, were not geared to the CUMS orchestra - this fact made the performance which usually comes
with a win in this competition impossible.