After discovering a few weeks ago that in 2013 an opera was made of “The Masque of the Read Death” I looked for any online interviews about the work. Cecilia Livingston, on being asked “Please talk about the challenges in creating your adaptation of the story” answered: “The principal challenge in adapting Poe’s Masque to the requirements of drama, and opera specifically, is that Poe’s work typically has very little dialogue or ready-made mise en scene.”
(taken from https://barczablog.com/2013/10/14/10for_cecilialivingston/ accessed on 15/05/23)

She is also asked “What do you love about Poe and especially his story The Masque of the Red Death?” to which she answers: “I have mixed feelings about Poe as a writer, but as a provider of dramatic material with operatic potential, he has left a great legacy.”

These two quotes from this interview have been the difficulty I have found in the process of adapting Poe. It is dramatic and therefore suited to being staged, but finding text you can extract from the source material into something suitable for a libretto I have found very difficult. Since Poe returns often to the same themes it was quite easy finding poems of his which were suitable for adapting into the libretto.

In the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Alone" Poe writes in iambic tetrameter meaning there is an even pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables which I always find a problem since the style of the music for the rest of the opera is striving to changing meters in the music. I'm looking to break up the evenness of the stresses in the poem with changing time signatures, while still making sure to keep the stresses of the original poem in the "correct" place. Here are the first few lines of text set to music and focusing only on the role of the singer.

In my original proposal for PhD I had mentioned trying to use "non-lexical vocables" which are inspired by the band The Cocteau Twins use of an "invented language" to use which services the music (rather than text being set to music). In order to generate vocables in the style of The Cocteau Twins I asked chat GPT to generate some, It took a while to give the right prompts to the Artificial Intelligence but, eventually, it came up with something close to what I was looking for. Below is a link to the conversation which led there. Below that is how I set (as a hocket) the text the AI gave me.

A pdf of the chat i with the AI can be found HERE

Here is a setting of the extracted text where I have tried to connect all the words I've chosen from Poe to make into a drinking song for the chorus which has phrases of equal length. Below is a picture of an extract from the piece and below that is a link to the pdf of the full score.

Click HERE for the pdf copy.

I'm attempting to find poetic couplings in the original text and freely adapting them to create some kind of meter. Below I have colour coded which lines might similar in poetic character and, anything in red, are lines I have decided I don't need and I'm cutting.

following on from the task in the last blog post where I was trying to extract enough from the original story to make a libretto. I, this week, am trying to extract enough from the original text to make something lyrical enough to be an aria. Again you will see me trying to reduce the amount of words by cutting out the parallelism.

In order to have some text to work with I have tried to extract phrases or words from the original short story. The original is very (over) descriptive so i was cherry picking the strongest words and, had been pointed out to be by Nigel in a supervision Poe is using "parallelism" as a means of driving his point home. Meaning instead of one descriptive word he will list three, so the challenge was finding the 'best' words. I also had to try and find words which might be connected as line endings, if not exactly rhyming. Below is an example of how I marked up the story to extract the words I thought would 'sing well'.

The first stage of trying to work out how to write a Scottish dance as one of the movements for a set of pieces for piano quintet I looked at a traditional "Reel". Below is one, showing the characteristic constant quaver movement of the form.

The next step was to come up with an original musical theme which had the features of the piece above but was my own music.

​Below is my theme.

As can be seen from "Lord MacDonald's Reel" (printed above) - from bar 9 it goes into a second section, so I had to compose a second section which served the purpose it does in the traditional reel of being a distinctly new section but with similar music.

Below is a video of the second section leading back into the theme again.

The original reel I am using as a starting point is in the key of G major. My theme is 'in G' but is using a modal scale.

Below are written out all the traditional modal scales (all beginning on the note C).

The mode I used in the theme of my reel is the Mixolydian mode. This mode is characterised by it being almost exactly a major scale but with the second last note flattened. The reason I have shown the modes all starting on C is to explain as simply as possible the 'change' from the conventional major scale. If you were to play all the white notes on a piano keyboard from C up to the next C you come to it would be a C Major scale. If, instead of playing the second last white note you come to (a B on the keyboard), you played a Bb then that would be the Mixolydian scale.

[Note: in the key my theme is in (G), again you play all the notes from G to the next G. Normally you would play an F# as the second last note of the major scale but if you flatten that to an F Natural, then you have the Mixolydian scale beginning on G]

Generating more material
If, from the outset I have set up a modal character how can I use this feature to create more musical material? Can I create a new modal scale which makes musical sense from the original theme?

Below is the Mixolydian scale on C. 
​
EXAMPLE A

 I have used slurs to show where the semi-tones are. So the Mixolydian scale consists of: a tone, a tone, a semi-tone, a tone, a tone, a semi-tone, and a tone.

As this is the scale that forms my theme, how can I modify this scale to create a new scale which I can use to generate more material. If I read the scale backwards (i.e. its retrograde), then the descending scale would consist of: a tone, a semi-tone, a tone, a tone, a semi-tone, a tone, and a tone. Below is exactly that (each interval that ascends in the original just descending in the example below: 

​                                       EXAMPLE B

So, to clarify, In example A the scale moves up a tone, then a tone, then a semi-tone etc. Example B moves down by these distances ( a tone, then a tone, then a semi-tone etc). In example C, below, all I have done is put these notes into an ascending scale (on the note C), and in example C (ii) we see exactly the same scale begin on the note G (since that's the starting note I need for my composition)

​                                   EXAMPLE C

                                 EXAMPLE C (ii)

Now this new scale can be applied to the music I have already written to create a "variation".

Below is a video (with the score) showing how I applied this 'transformation' to the second half of my original theme.

Applying the same kind of process to another movement in the work for Piano Quintet, I looked at the Scottish Strathspey.

Below is an example of a traditional Strathspey.

The rhythmic feature which immediately stands out is the "Scottish Snap" rhythm. I began to sketch ideas around this distinctive feature but wanted to see if I could create a more melancholy mood. Music which is reflective, rather than music to be danced to.

Below is a video of a piano piece I wrote which acts like a sketchbook of ideas for a more substantial piece.

Those sketches in the video above started to generate music which is becoming the opening of the second movement. There is a lot of material from the "sketches" which didn't make it into this version below so I have lots of material to work as transitions, or for the basis for a new section (if needed) to balance out the form. The opening of the movement is in the video below.

​The 'Slow Movement'

Since my Quintet is basically following "Sonata Form" I need to find a way of producing a slow movement which has a relation to Scottish traditional music. I break from my idea of this being a work made up of dance movements by having a lyrical Scottish Ballad to form my slow movement. As composers have often done with this 'singing style' (cantabile) slow movements.

The following solo piano piece takes it's phrase structure from the famous poem "Auld Lang Syne" and is basically a "song without words" for piano.

As you can see from the score below, it is a mainly chordal piece which I thought could be treated like a chorale ( a hymn-like tune harmonised in a chordal/homophonic way) as is this piano piece.

The scope for generating music for this slow movement began to form when I realised that, if this piano piece is a chorale, then the form used by composers, throughout different periods of musical history, of the "Chorale Prelude" could be the inspiration to draw on for this movement.

The Britannica Encyclopedia says of the form as it is often applied today that: "​Generically, the term chorale prelude is often applied to compositions that are not genuinely associated with the chorale but that do preserve the genre’s textural characteristics."

It also describes the compositional features of the form as: "The chorale prelude retained improvisational characteristics even as a fixed compositional type. Typical examples feature the hymn tune as a cantus firmus (fixed tune), which is broken down into its constituent phrases played in long note values and preceded, accompanied, and followed by contrapuntal manipulations of their salient motifs.​" https://www.britannica.com/art/chorale-prelude​