Songs Translated from a Forgotten Language

Williams, Alan

Abstract

Full score of the song cycle Songs Translated from a Forgotten language

The piece formed part of Psappha’s Arts Council England-funded Unheard Voices, in which four composers (Jay Capperauld, Nina Danon, Shruthi Rajasekar, and David Nunn) alongside Alan Williams set texts to be sung in non-standard accents. The composers worked with three poets, Nigerian Vashti Suwa gBolagun, a Hausa speaking poet, who writes in English and Nigerian pidgin; Louise Wallwein, a Mancunian performance poet; and Ian McMillan, Barnsley poet, whose work explores South Yorkshire dialect and identity.

Alan Williams led the project, which took place between September 2020 and March 2021, and had to happen online due to pandemic restrictions. Singer Claire Wild developed techniques Williams had initiated in his 2017 opera to be sung in a South Yorkshire Accent, The Arsonists, to replicate the speaking voices of the poets. It is believed it was the first time that Nigerian Pidgin had been used in contemporary western art music.

Williams’ own piece set texts which were originally posts on Twitter by Ian McMillan. The idiom is much more self-consciously modernist, with a strong influence of Kurtág’s Scenes from a Novel with its ‘Hungarian’ instrumentation of violin, cello and cimbalom. Like Kurtág, the texts and therefore the settings are aphoristic and fragmentary and extremely concentrated. But on the texts themselves there is a strongly absurdist tendency, prompting thoughts the work of Tandori and Weöres. Hence the Ligeti-an tendency to explore the absurd through repetition and melancholy.

The score also contains transcriptions of Ian McMillan's speaking voice, done by the composer, into the International Phonetic Alphabet. THese should be read in conjunction with the recording of Ian McMillan's own vocal performance of these poems.

• Online Publication Date: Nov 8, 2023
• Publication Date: Nov 8, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jan 20, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17866/rd.salford.24488344.v1
• Publisher URL: https://salford.figshare.com/articles/composition/Songs_Translated_from_a_Forgotten_Language/24488344
• Collection Date: Nov 8, 2023