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Dark Mother

duration 30'

The second movement, Mourning, continues immediately. Demeter's weary misery as she searches for Persephone is given voice by a long, slow melody which gradually coils down, beginning incredibly high up on the violin and ending some five minutes later in the lowest register of the piano. The melody is at first stretched out then, as it compresses, colors and articulations are added; a sobbing glissando figure, a pulsing heartbeat, icy harmonic chords. The melody of this movement is, in fact, the basic material of the entire work. All of the swirling arpeggiated chords in Abundance come directly from superimposing this melody's pitches, four at a time, to make strings of chords.

These pitches are now combined in another way to make Stasis. Again played attacca, this movement
depicts Demeter's fury and her blighting of the earth. A succession of fast harsh chords begins to slow down, then comes a section for violin and cello alone where a more compassionate impetus is felt. However, the harsh chords return and now freeze and lock until there is absolutely no movement at all.

A brief pause leads to the final movement, Procession; the creation of the seasons. A tiny snippet of music is heard for spring, then a pause. Next, a tiny snippet of summer music and a pause. Then follows fall music, and a pause. Finally, winter music and another pause. This happens over and over, the snippets getting slightly longer each time, the pauses getting slightly shorter. Eventually these four seasons join together and the music takes off into a bright revolving dance getting faster and faster.

REVIEW
BankBoston Celebrity Series commissioned a new work for this special occasion, Andy Vores's Dark Mother, a musical response to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and a radiant Phyllis Curtin narrated the story with elegance, emotion, and sly wit before the performance. The work is as remarkable as the circumstances required: Vores is on a roll these days. The four movements outline the situation—Abundance, a picture of burgeoning nature in luscious arpeggiated figures; Mourning, a lament that plunged through the entire range of the assembled instruments; Stasis, angry, bleak, hammering chords; and Procession, in which the seasons pass by and begin to dance, bringing us round to the mood of the beginning. The same intervals generate melody, figuration, chords, and dance; this is an organic piece. It also calls for the kind of wildly imaginative, emotionally charged virtuoso playing that it got.
Richard Dyer • The Boston Globe