Idea for November 2024: heterophony

This is the compositional technique used by Benjamin Britten in his extraordinary music drama Curlew River, which is based on a Japanese Noh play. Apparently, the technique is all about simultaneous variations of a single melodic line. Anyway the effect is haunting and heartbreaking, and it slows down time almost to a halt.

I discovered this after watching Deborah Warner’s beautiful production at Blythburgh Church in Suffolk, now made into a film on BBC iPlayer.

There’s an astonishing performance from Ian Bostridge as a madwoman in search of her lost child, the other side of the Curlew River. And the musicians come from the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme, run by one of my current clients, the excellent Britten Pears Arts.