Alas! air on an accelerating ground (2024)

Composer's notes:

I was having a look through the surviving works of the forgotten English composer George Frederick Pinto (1785-1806). Sadly, he died before reaching musical maturity but he left a number of songs, which seemed very interesting and harmonically daring to me. One of them, 'Eloisa to Abelard', particularly struck me in its recapitulation of early material in the final verse, but at double-speed, creating a sense of accelerating passion through the song, like the acceleration of a lover's heartrate.

In his song, Pinto set a section of Eloise to Aberlard by Pope. I decided to set a response text; Abelard to Eloise by the poet Judith Cowper (1702-81). I selected a particularly interesting harmonic sequence from Pinto's song and used that as my 'ground bass'. The introduction (as in many a ground bass air) plays once through the ground at an extremely slow tempo, lasting over thirty seconds. The final expression of the ground lasts just a fraction of a second. My hope was to gently play with the idea of passion, raising the lover's heartrate much further than is medically advisable!

Duration: 2'

Instrumentation: Baritone voice and piano

First Performance: Mads Jakobsen and Juan Elvira Márquez, Bayreuther Festival Junger Künstler, 16.08.2024.