Alison Bauld's Farewell, Already


This March, the Daily Classical Music Post will introduce you to some of the most wonderful music ever composed—and, yes, it will all be by women composers!

https://youtu.be/y3VxF17TAeQ


Alison Bauld was born in Australia in 1944, and she moved to England to study with Elisabeh Lutyens and Hans Keller in the early 1970s. Her background as an actress as well as a musician certainly informed her works—they all have a strong theatrical element, and are very exciting to listen to and to hear/see live.

In 1985, Bauld was commissioned to write a radio piece for the BBC, and the result was the extraordinary Richard III for multitracked speaker and string quartet. Bauld actually gave the premiere of this herself with the Arditti String Quartet. In 1993, she decided to adapt this for solo voice (stylized speech, speech-song, and song) and string quartet, and this new version is called Farewell, Already. As Bayern Northcott says, "The text is a composite of Lady Anne's lamentations over the body of Henry VI and imprecations against murder Duke of Gloucester drawn from Act I, Scene II of Richard III. The form is broadly tripartite, with concerted outer sections linked by an unaccompanied central cantilena. After the intense, at times fugal, chromaticism of much of the writing, the pure white-note modality of the peroration for quartet alone comes with a particular poignancy."

My classical music post for today is Alison Bauld's Farewell, Already.

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