The Sirens Cycle

First performance: 1 October 2016 – London, England
Wigmore Hall
Calder Quartet
Piia Komsi, soprano

The first part of The Sirens’ Cycle with soprano can also be performed separately (21′)

My compositions always have a narrative character; they are mostly rooted in spoken language. This becomes apparent in the subject matters that I tend to choose and also in my preference of highly accurate musical articulation. I am especially happy to write compositions for string instruments because they can produce exceedingly speech-like and finely articulate sounds ranging from extremely deep to extremely high tones thanks to their enormous wealth of sound colours and very extensive tone range.

The Sirens Cycle is the developed version of an operatic idea. It is dominated by a soprano voice accompanied by a string quartet, similarly to a choir throughout the piece. The starting point for this composition was Franz Kafka’s absurd short story, The Silence of the Sirens. The motif of the Sirens started to occupy my mind so much that I decided to make a thematic connection and draw in the Siren-motifs used by Joyce and Homer. This is how a cycle of three parts of very different characters came to life. Their diversity stands for an idea of the song or the silence of the sirens.

The various foreign languages influence the style of my compositions to a great extent. In The Sirens Cycle, the musical material changes according to the language used by the individual authors:  the 1st movement JOYCE is in English, the 2nd movement HOMER is in Ancient Greek, while the 3rd movement KAFKA is in German.

/Peter Eötvös –  2016/

Parts:

1st part: Joyce (1-7 movements)
Interlude
2nd part: Homer
3rd part: Kafka

ATTENTION: There are other compositions named Joyce:
Joyce for clarinet and string quartet >
Joyce for clarinet solo >

The Sirens Cycle consists of three movements for string quartet with soprano and two electronic interludes. The negation of song in Franz Kafka’s Das Schweigen der Sirenen [The Silence of the Sirens] inspired me to compose a work reflecting on song itself. I took an extract from Ulysses by James Joyce and requested IRCAM in Paris to transform the text through spectral analysis into pitches, note values and tone colours. In the first movement, I strictly adhered to the resulting note sequence, but increasingly became liberated from it during the progress of the work. I linked the quartet movements with interludes evoking audible associations with the song of the sirens.

/Peter Eötvös/