Part 1: Technical Account

Synopsis

For those unfamiliar with Pearl the poem, a brief synopsis of the work is provided here, extracted from my own programme note for the premiere:

The poem, found in a manuscript now held at the British Library, tells the tale of a grief-stricken jeweller who revisits the place of the death of a girl he calls his “pearl” (presumably his daughter, though this is never confirmed). He falls asleep in his sorrowful state and has a remarkable dream of a gleaming paradise, which he journeys through to discover, to his amazement, his beloved “pearl” standing across a river surrounded by a heavenly chorus singing “harmonies that would melt the heart”. Stunned, he enters into a long dialogue with her about his grief, and longs to cross the water to join her. As he attempts to do so, his path is blocked, and he awakens, transformed by his vision and unburdened of his grief, assured of her eternal peace in paradise (Kaner 2022c: 8).

Consisting of 101 twelve-line stanzas, it is a relatively lengthy work (especially for musical setting) with a complex verse structure involving ‘concatenation’, an intricate system of repetition that groups its 101 verses into twenty sections. Its genre has been fiercely debated by literary theorists since its publication in the late nineteenth-century, containing elements of elegy, allegory, and dream vision. (For an overview, see Mitchell 2000.)

Creating/Curating the Text

In initial discussions with Simon Armitage (whom I approached for a new text following a previous collaboration (Armitage & Kaner 2018)), he quickly proposed Pearl as suitable for musical setting on this scale. Given its length, and extensive passages of Christian evangelism, some of which simply paraphrase scripture, I had some early misgivings about setting the poem, though I was immediately struck by the innate beauty and musicality of its structure and imagery, especially in Armitage’s reworking. Nevertheless, after several abortive attempts to combine passages from it with excerpts from other poems by Armitage on related themes of loss, I ultimately alighted (with the poet’s encouragement) upon a setting of Pearl in its own right, by selecting a small set of extracts that captured what I felt to be the essence of the poem’s narrative thrust and some of its most powerful and moving imagery. (The final text appears in the preliminary pages of both the vocal and full scores.)

Storytelling Aims

As stated in the introduction, in my recent practice (cf. Kaner 2022a; 2024), my approach to musical narrativization is grounded in the work of Byron Almén (2008), who proposes ‘a sibling model’ that ‘recognizes both its commonalities (temporality, directedness, psychological and cultural significance, hierarchical organization, conflict, an emphasis on action) and its potential differences with respect to literature and drama’ (37). The once-vigorous debate as to whether music can be considered to narrate in literary or dramatic terms is thereby largely sidestepped by Almén, allowing him to focus on developing a hermeneutic approach to examining evolving musical interrelations (or ‘hierarchies’) within the course of a work. As a composer, his theories (and others’) have enabled me to develop the means to depict changing musical worlds and unfolding events in response to a poem’s (or other text’s) narrative shape. The details of how this evolved for Pearl, and how I set about achieving it, will be explained in stages below. However, in summary, my intention was to create a musical narrative that functioned both as a supporting enrichment of the text, and in its own right (supposing, for example, a listener was unable to understand its text for some reason) through musical devices such as word-painting, the employment and manipulation of topics and a goal-directed musical structure governed by, in Almén’s terms, evolving hierarchies over time.

In doing so, it was my aim to highlight features of the narrative and poetic imagery I was especially drawn to as follows:

• the images of pearlescence and radiance found throughout the poem, and their intensification as the Jeweller gets closer to seeing Pearl;
• the depth of sorrow expressed in the Jeweller’s mourning, especially nearer the opening;

• the larger ‘journey’ of the narrative in which the protagonist reckons with, and eventually overcomes his grief (even though, in a more literal sense, the Jeweller remains on ‘the same spot’ throughout the entire story);
• the distant and somewhat strange world of the poem, whose story is both immediately relatable on some level, yet also unfamiliar and distant, given its twelfth-century setting; 
• the intensity and uncanniness of the Jeweller’s dream-vision, especially at the point where he ‘speaks’ with his deceased beloved Pearl; 
• elements of the religiosity of the poem, without too much emphasis on the specifics of the Christian doctrine.

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