Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains

Description:

In recent pieces, Laurence has been reaching for a kind of clarity and emotional directness that he hears in the music of certain artists he loves, but finds impossible to describe using words. It is a quality that only exists temporarily in the act of listening; it cannot be sustained for an entire piece. Maybe he could describe it as a kind of closeness, or rawness, or hotness, or the sensation of being touched through the musical fabric. It emerges in the music of C. P. E. Bach, Schubert, Berlioz, Janácek, and Tippet. He hears it also in Nina Simone’s voice, in Bill Evans’s piano, in J Dilla’s sampling.

Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains. This gorgeous parade of images comes from a disparaging definition of Romanticism in the nineteenth-century Parisian newspaper, Le Corsaire, as quoted in David Cairns’s biography of Berlioz. Romanticism is defined as ‘greasy hair growing over the coat-collar’, sighing at least three times a minute’, and ‘dreaming of lakes, mists, bats, daggers, and fountains’. When Laurence read the quotation, that final parade of images reached out and poked him. The images had conspired to rebel against their own glibness and communicate something vivid and fantastical in spite of the intentions of their author.

None of the four movements of Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains have anything to do with lakes, mists, bats, daggers, or fountains.

Full scoring:

Violin 1
Violin 2
Viola
Cello