Round the bay sample score pages
The brief for this project was to select a text and to compose music that in some way responded to one of a range of ideas associated with the word ‘halcyon’. I responded to the idea of “the ocean and its moods” and also “tranquillity”.
I based this piece on a poem by Judith Beveridge. For me, her text evokes the image of a bay that reverberates with echoes of the past, including sounds made by fishermen and their boats. It incorporates images of the natural landscape too, including rockpools, seagulls, and ocean spray. Rather than setting the complete text, I abstracted key words and phrases to construct a drifting, haunting atmosphere. The mezzo soprano’s line emerges gradually and proceeds to form part of a blended, woven texture.
The opening is characterised by relative stasis. Towards the centre of the piece there is an increase in textural density and rhythmic activity. The vocal line also mobilises in terms of melodic movement. The closing section features slowly ascending scale patterns and imitation between the parts.
There Is a Haunting Music Round the Bay
by Judith Beveridge
There is a haunting music round the bay —
I hear it in the wind that howls in the lanyard
ropes the sailor reeves through the dead-eyes.
I hear it as he clangs a deck-hand’s awl
and chants back to shore with a coracle’s catch.
I hear it in the nets that drag over the decks
and in the sinkers that roll across piers
with the periwinkles washed from their rockpools,
and as a deckie bellows a flagon song into the hole
of evening. I hear it as spray is hissed
through blowholes in towering jets
and when I put a shell to my ear and the sea
discharges a longshoreman’s song of the sun
turning in the awl-working cry of the gull;
when it enters the circlets of waves
and the eyelets of running threads the men
keep close and slide through their fingers.
There is a haunting music round the bay —
it enters the string-work of yachtsmen who sing
about leaving for the islands; it enters
the voices left in the strings of boxes echoing
on the windy slopes and in the pines that sway
and disperse their needles on the Sunday streets.
I hear it in the hum and turn of the wind
on the edge of water where oarsmen make round
music of their muscles and net-makers work
with their eyeleteers. I hear it in the seapools
where infusorians wave their delicate hairs.
And as an old deckie dashes his flagon against
the rocks and distributes the glass scales
of the yachts that float out with the tide, and
a child with driftwood blows into the wind —
there is a haunting music round the bay.
Jane Stanley 
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