Work
Mahuika as a boy
for tenor, string quartet, and glockenspiel
About
This is my second collaboration with the poet Jackson McCarthy, and I’m sure there will be many more to come. I read this poem before I met him, and was taken with its simple couplets, as well as the way the mythological intertwined with the casual. Here’s what I sent to Jackson when I first completed the work, which I feel conveys everything I need to say about it:
“It’s an early McCarthy...so I tried to lean into the adolescence, the earnestness, the sentimentality. The strings are often on the verge of Romanticism in their flourishes but quickly get interrupted by the MENACE OF DEATH in the glockenspiel, or stop and start with the stifling of desire. The tenor line is conversational, a few extended techniques such as his muffled singing when in a dream, his whispers, his stilted realisations of want....when he finally gives in and hits the high Gs he is left suddenly alone in the barrenness of his desire...
...LOVE your work as always and this is a very formative McCarthy for me, one of the first i read. a very perfectly placed still life, the underside of it flaming w passion. hope i managed to convey that. let me know if it SUCKS xx.”
Text note
Jackson McCarthy