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MartinIddon / Danaë

 

Martin Iddon
(2010)
page last updated Sat, 21 Aug 2010,  4:39am PDT

 

 

Description
String trio for players with a bow in each hand

 

 

Duration:   13 minutes
# of Performers:   3

 

 

Materials / Instrumentation / Performers
String Trio, each with two bows

 

 

Files
Danaë.pdf

 

 

Score / Notes
Representations of Danaë (Ancient Greek: Δανάη; English: ‘parched’) are commonplace in the visual arts. Titian, Boucher, Waterhouse, Rembrandt, Klimt, and, more recently, James Turrell have all found inspiration in Zeus’s visit to the imprisoned Danaë, in the form of a shower of golden light, by which she becomes pregnant with the hero Perseus.

 

My own piece, Danaë, is hardly an attempt to offer any sort of musical representation of the themes which have been so well-trodden in the visual arts, though it is related to them. My aim is to try to ‘shade’ musical light through and between bodies, or to examine a space between the seemingly transcendental ‘golden light’ and the visceral bodies of performers on stage. In order that a listener become, then, also a viewer, I impose one serious physical restriction on the performers: they perform throughout with a bow in each hand. The music, I hope, shows that ‘music’ is always already about more than simply sounds, and that a complex, muscular physical theatre takes place in order to create any sort of musical ‘event’.

 

 

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