The Candle
2010
‘She puts a candle into a candlestick; but the candle is broken, so that it does not stand up. The girls at school say she is clumsy; but she replies that it is not her fault.’
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, James Strachey (trans.), 1955, 186
In this account of a dream told to Freud in 1903, the words used convey little – they are at a remove from both the rich, subjective experience of the dreamer and from the latent ideas, urges and feelings to which the dreamer’s unconscious alludes.
In this piece the dreamer engages with the dream’s content at only the most basic level – that of the surface narrative. Underneath, the instruments explore the dream’s emotional, sensual and erotic implications, as well as the suggestible, dreamy, half-conscious state of the dreamer, symbolised primarily by recurrences of harp chords like those at the opening. The dream eventually wakes the dreamer, and only the residue of the dream activity is left.
Instrumentation: Voice (alto), 2 Harps & Viola
Duration: c. 5’30″
Premier: 16th May 2010 by Vaganza – Olivia Howie (alto), Olivia Jageurs & Naomi Lewis (harps), Ali Vennart (vla) – at York Spring Festival of New Music, Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, York – conducted by the composer
Further performance: 8th June 2010 by Vaganza at ‘Sing Ariel: The Music of Alexander Goehr’, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.