Unfeathering, for solo violin

Composition

Unfeathering is based on the poem ‘Swan’ from Falling Awake (2016) by Alice Oswald, who studied Classics here at New College. I’ve taken a recording of her reciting the poem and, like much of my recent music, transcribed the speech into musical notation. The first challenge, then, was simply to try to make the ‘music’ of Oswald’s voice playable on a solo violin. I’ve done this by shifting octaves here and there, and elaborating with various effects and chords the vowels/consonants, rises/falls, and stresses of her delivery. ‘Swan’ begins as a poem about a dead bird floating down a river – an unusual subject for any poem – and after the depiction of ‘the plane-crash mess of her wings,’ glides into quite contrasting imagery of a white wedding dress, a church, and its bells. I’ve never been entirely sure what the poem means, and it’s precisely these strange juxtapositions that have kept drawing me back to it as a reader, and now as a composer. Unfeathering is an attempt to get closer to its elusive centre.

However, there’s more going on here than the mechanical process of turning speech into music for violin. Firstly, Oswald’s poem doesn’t just describe a swan’s unfastening it enacts it. Its structure and syntax often falls apart, mirroring the disintegration of the bird. In a similar way, Unfeathering detaches the ‘music’ of Oswald’s speech from her words, creating a piece that reflects this same sense of fragmentation. Secondly, while researching swans in folklore and art, I came across a ballad called ‘Molly Bawn’ (also known as ‘The Fowler’ or ‘The Shooting of His Dear’). In it, a man mistakes his lover for a swan and accidentally shoots her. The connection to Oswald’s poem – swans, love, and death – was impossible to ignore. So, as the violin traces the contours of Oswald’s voice, fragments of a transcription of the song (as sung by Seamus Ennis in a 1951 recording by Alan Lomax) begin to surface. At first it clashes with Oswald’s lines but eventually they align at the point of the second verse of the song, where Molly’s spirit returns to ask her father to forgive her lover. Finally, the wedding bells from Oswald’s poem ring through, drawing the piece to an uncertain close.

Authors: Lewis, L

• Publication date: 2025-05-28
• Language: English