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- John McCabe
Floraison (1975)
- Novello & Co Ltd (World)
Programme Note
Floraison (literally, "flowering" or blossoming") depicts the flower maiden and love goddess Blodeuwedd (which means "bloom maiden"), who is also an owl goddess of wisdom. She is made of nine kinds of flowers, and in one pagan ritual her husband was sacrificed, ascending after death into the skies in the form of an eagle.
This composition is cast in the form of a passacaglia in which there are nine free variations, but perhaps more important than this is the initial image behind the piece, which was that of a flower gradually opening and then closing. This image governs the shape of the music, with its increasingly elaborate and intense growth towards the climax and then a return at the close to the opening ideas. The work is the middle panel of The Goddess Trilogy, three separate concert works for horn and piano inspired by the idea of the Great Goddess of ancient Celtic mythology, of whose three sister-aspects Blodeuwedd was the central one. It was written in 1975 and first performed by Ifor James and the composer at the 1975 Three Choirs Festival, Worcester.
© 1991 by John McCabe
This composition is cast in the form of a passacaglia in which there are nine free variations, but perhaps more important than this is the initial image behind the piece, which was that of a flower gradually opening and then closing. This image governs the shape of the music, with its increasingly elaborate and intense growth towards the climax and then a return at the close to the opening ideas. The work is the middle panel of The Goddess Trilogy, three separate concert works for horn and piano inspired by the idea of the Great Goddess of ancient Celtic mythology, of whose three sister-aspects Blodeuwedd was the central one. It was written in 1975 and first performed by Ifor James and the composer at the 1975 Three Choirs Festival, Worcester.
© 1991 by John McCabe