Introduction and Background
Pearl is a thirty-minute work for symphony chorus, orchestra, and solo baritone that I composed between 2019 and 2022. It sets extracts from the medieval poem Perle (probably by the anonymous ‘Gawain poet’),1 translated into modern English by poet laureate Simon Armitage (2016). It was commissioned by the BBC Proms and premiered in 2022 (after a 2-year delay, owing to the global Covid-19 pandemic), by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Roderick Williams as the baritone soloist, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth.
Written largely during (though not submitted as part of) my recently completed DMus in Composition entitled Composing Narratives: Reimagining Musical Storytelling in New Vocal and Instrumental Works (Kaner 2022a), Pearl constitutes Practice (as) Research (P-R) on themes linked to those of the doctorate. Taken together, these works form a body of recent compositions in my catalogue concerned with the creative potential of music intended to convey a narrative, whether this music contains a performed text (sung or spoken), or is purely instrumental, founded in the scholarship of Almén (2008), Klein (2013), Kramer (1991; 2013), Reyland (2008; 2013), Ryan (2014), and others.
This article then, in a sense, acts as an extension of my doctoral research, and, as will become apparent, shares with it not only the concern with musical narrativity, but also the ‘self-narrative’ (Spry 2001) documentation of practice following P-R models commonly used in other disciplines such as theatre (see Nelson 2013, especially Chapter Five). The main aim of this approach is to foster sufficient reflection in action on the compositional process and decision-making, rather than solely after the ‘musical output has been created’; the latter being ‘a sequence that is specifically warned against in other P-R disciplines, where the disconnect between practice and theorising of practice is considered dislocating’ (Leedham and Scheuregger 2018: 12). Thus, the self-narrative model is considered to offer a far richer portrayal of the day-to-day creative activity that, ‘when placed in historical, social and cultural contexts, form[s] a neonarrative, a new story shaped through autobiography as a portrait-of-self that mirrors and situates their experience’ (Stewart 2007: 126), and captures the ‘subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on the research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist’ (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011: 274).
In this case, such an approach is used in conjunction with more conventional music-theoretical models, leading to a multi-layered form of self-analysis and reflection intended to unpack both the technical and ‘the ephemeral aspects of the creative process—which are precisely the kinds of knowledge that only creative practitioners can provide’ (Leedham and Scheuregger 2018: 4), arguably resulting in what Robyn Stewart eloquently describes as a ‘bricolage’, that ‘works within and between competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigms’ to generate ‘vast possibilities [...] to reflect the diverse ways of artistic practices’ (2007: 127).
Accordingly, this exposition is presented in two parts: in Part 1—Technical Account, I offer an analytical exegesis of the finished piece; in Part 2—Creative Journey, I present and discuss a number of extracts from my creative diary (kept throughout the writing process), alongside compositional sketches, with the aim of painting a richer picture of the process leading to the completed work by exposing some of the major artistic problems I confronted along the way. In contrast with what is often critiqued in P-R (and self-narrative writing more widely) as a tendency towards a heroic portrayal of the researcher (see Freeman 2015; Leedham and Scheuregger 2020: 78), via this two-pronged approach, I offer a possibly more balanced account of the work’s gestation that perhaps mirrors the more subtle, unheroic plot of Pearl itself.2 Ultimately, I characterize my artistic endeavour as one that yielded few dramatic epiphanies, but rather a gradual accumulation of understanding, building on my previous creative experience, of the nature of musical storytelling in this piece, resulting in a broader sense of equanimity with my individual traits as an evolving creative practitioner and musician.
Extensive scholarship and debate on musical compositions as narratives (and the musical setting, or adaptation, of narratives from another medium such as poetry) has of course existed within the sphere of musicology for decades.3 Yet, as a multi-modal piece of creative research, this article represents a more unusual contribution to the slowly (but now steadily) emerging field of Practice Research in Composition,4 in which, so far at least, composers’ thinking on narrativity in their own work is less often foregrounded. While it will ultimately fall to others to determine the specific resonances and relevance of my approach for practitioners working outside music, my aim is that sharing my work in the inherently interdisciplinary context of this journal might invite comparison and discussion of other approaches to narrative, especially those that are adaptations from one source medium to another, and perhaps stimulate ideas for creative application and/or collaboration elsewhere. In particular, my use of narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan’s (2014) framework for the analysis of ‘storyworlds’ across different media highlights, I believe, its power to parse a source narrative in one medium into its constituent components and then think about how to creatively reconstruct/reconfigure it in another (or others). Similarly, Byron Almén’s A Theory Of Musical Narrative (Almén 2008) has perhaps yet to make a significant mark on the domain of music theory. However, with its specific insights about the non-verbal potential of music to narrativize, not as a ‘derivative’ of literary narrative, but in his words, a ‘sibling’ form that identifies ‘foundational principles common to all narrative media’ as well as those ‘unique to each medium’ (12), I believe this article highlights some of its value and untapped potential for artistic practice, even beyond music. Taken together, I hope this case study demonstrates the potential of all these tools, in combination, to enrich and support artists’ thinking about narrativity, especially in non-verbal mediums, in a manner that might suggest avenues for further creative research and exploration.