WINGATE: METAPHYSICAL MONOLOGUE NO. 8 
for Soprano Solo

Date:
2022

Duration:
4'

Notes:

Although born of the post-war modernist trope of an experimental, instrument-like elaboration for the human voice, the Metaphysical Monologue No. 8 for unaccompanied soprano takes as its hereditary starting point the lonely and rarefied vocal lines of Medieval plainchant. The piece attempts to be both song-like and instrumental-solo-like at once, leaving the performer with a possible identity crisis while navigating the additional difficulties inherent in the serialist ambitions of the MetaMon series. The modern ear tends to be so coddled in the expectation of elaborate vocal accompaniment that an encounter with unaccompanied vocal music might come as a bit of a shock, a shock often serving to propel us into the contemplative religiosity of past times, where a solitary voice reverberating amongst lofty cathedral arches was enough to float us along like a ‘feather on the breath of God,’ as Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098–1179) so memorably put it. Yet these associations combined with the atonal framework of this piece’s monody create a piece of compelling peculiarity amongst Wingate’s œuvre, stylistically remote from many other more Romanticist vocalise precedents such as Heitor Villa-Lobos’ famous Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (1938/45) or Reinhold Glière’s Concerto for Coloratura Soprano, Op. 82 (1943).

 

This Metaphysical Monologue’s subtle Medieval flavor is tempered by a second major area of inspiration via avant-garde vocal works from the 1960s and 70s. Having already heard by the age of 12 many of the period’s works recorded by legendary soprano Jan DeGaetani, Wingate had been making sketches of high modernist solo soprano pieces of his own for decades, before finally settling on this present manifestation as part of the MetaMon series, finally completing it in 2022. Influences from DeGaetani’s vocalisms in George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970) and Jacob Druckman’s Lamia (1974-75) are subtly apparent, and the piece was also inspired in spirit by Luigi Dallapiccolo’s 1942 work Cinque frammenti di Saffo (1942) ('Five Sappho Fragments'– incidentally that composer’s first 12-tone work), although none of these aforementioned works are themselves unaccompanied solo works. Wingate’s use of atonal materials is here arranged to be merciful to the performer, who must find a path through the forest of tone rows without the the aid of surreptitious hints from the musical surroundings.

 

Both vocal agility and fragility feature prominently in this Monologue’s proceedings. But it must be pointed out that, upon reflection, the piece seems to inhabit an almost absurd amalgam of formal conceptual relations – being part of a set of instrumental pieces called, figuratively, ‘monologues’ but here performed by an actual voice, standing in as an instrument of sorts, and affecting an instrumental style to sing a wordless (figurative) monologue when it could just as well speak an actual (non-figurative) monologue – if it weren’t compellingly trapped in an artifice of wordlessness by an inter-referential artistic design, and in which the very concept of ‘voice’ (singing, speaking, or otherwise) threatens to inhabit every metaphysical corner.