MODART provides emerging compsoers with the opportunity to develop a new work for vocal ensemble and receive a public performance by the Song Company
MODART
"But in some respects the most intriguing piece of the evening was Kate Moore's Uisce (a Gaelic word for water), where the performers were placed way upstage and charged with delivering...a piece 'laid out like a waterfall where the performers must navigate their way through the score creating a river system of pitches.'"
- OPERA OPERA David Gyger
Program Note: Uisce Kate Moore
This piece is scored for any number of voices and is notated so that the melodic lines are laid out like a waterfall where the performers must navigate their way down the score creating a river system of pitches.
The word uisce is an Irish word for water, and the piece is about the idea that music is like water; vital for life, necessary for cleaning.
The idea for the work stems from the composer's research into traditional Arabic music where she came across the possibility that the root of the word music, musiqa (Arabic), musique (French) originated from a story in the Koran and Old Testament about the twelve streams of water that poured from the rock that Moses struck to feed all the nations.
The composer was struck by the similarity of the Gaelic word with the traditional word for music. On removing the M from the beginning of musica you are left with usica which by turning the letters around just a little becomes uisca. Curiously uisce is also the root of the word whisky.
The texts of the piece are anagrams of passages from The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse and Ulysses by James Joyce describing music as a means to achieve beauty, perfection and purity, but also the inevitable gradual decay and passing away of all things that are beautiful and perfect.
Uisce may be performed in equal temperament, but may also be performed in a temperament created from a scale of prime number harmonic partials as specified in the score.
