In the summer of 2002, the baritone Vincent Ranallo developed a concert project based on the soliloquy. He asked a handful of Quebecois composers to draw freely on the literary device to write pieces that would be played in June 2003 at the Orford Arts Centre (now known as Orford Music). For the occasion, I asked Nathalie Mamias to write Soliloque, a short prose poem in French that captures the state of a dreamer-wanderer absorbed in their interior monologue. Abandoned and alone, they become a prisoner of their own words.
The text has two sections developed from six out of seven notes of the scale. The starting point of the first section is the word sol (1) and brings us progressively to the term solo, in a journey that seemingly doesn’t lead anywhere (“ne mène nulle part ”) on the surface. From then on, the piece revolves around different combinations of the notes la, si, do, ré and mi (2). The meaning emerges, as if by chance, from the author’s skillful syllable play. It reaches a peak when the wanderer, wanting to break out of their isolation, addresses a friend who gives no answer.
The score reflects the dramatic curve and binary structure of the text. In the first part of the piece, I closely followed its deviations and syncopated rhythms until the phrase: “Solo, D’une voix, Ma voix, Esseulée, Solo…” (3) that is followed by a plea to an absent friend. This attempt to finally reach out takes on a redemptive character that justifies the shift, in the second half of the music, towards the lyricism of a sustained song.
From a technical point of view, the music echoes how the text plays with words and names of notes, sometimes discretely, as strategic points in the harmonic fabric, and other times in a more obvious fashion, for example when the note in the text corresponds to the note played by the cello and/or sung by the baritone. Lastly, all throughout the piece, the voice and cello primarily move together in a memetic relationship, the momentum of each bringing the other along with it with slight lags that evoke the heterophonic process.
Soliloque is dedicated to baritone Vincent Ranallo who premiered it at Orford Arts Centre in June 2003, accompanied on the cello by Isabelle Bozzini.
Translation: Colleen Mason, February 2020
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(1) Which means, among other things in French, the musical note G.
(2) A, B, C, D and E in English.
(3) “Solo, One Voice, My Voice, A Lonely Voice, Solo”