Badb (pronounced ‘badhv’ where ‘dh’ is a voiced fricative, as in ‘these’) was one of a trio of war-goddesses from Irish legend. She assumed variously the guises of a beautiful woman, an old hag, and a carrion crow. Her manifestation in the latter form was an omen of death. Before a battle she would appear in anticipation of the carnage, and as the battle took place, would flit around the heads of the warriors. Afterwards, she would feed on the corpses strewn across the fields. Like the other two battle-furies, Macha and the M’rr’gan, Badb was both sinister and sexual; she prophesied the end of the world, the fall of the gods and an endless reign of chaos. There are three distinct types of material in this piece, portraying the three juxtaposed personalities of Badb: the sinuous, seductive syrensong of sing-flute representing the mysterious, beautiful femme fatale who befriended the Irish warrior C’ Chulainn, then lured him to his death; the unearthly shrieks and battle-cries of the old hag, which were said to arouse fear and dread in the living; and the hideous crow, pecking at the flesh of the slain with bloodied maw. Much of the piano’s harmonic structure is derived and interpolated from chords representing the crow in Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux, while the notes B, A and D feature prominently through the piece.
Ecstasy of Flight captures a moment in the life of a child who longed for a companion in her isolated life in the precise middle of nowhere. She was visited by a powerful dream, of wings, the curling of the wind in the cloud-tops, the perfect peace of the blue land of the sun, and the shape of the world as one great, majestic song. That was the moment in her life from which she could look back later as an adult composer and say that it all began.