Taxi of Midnight
Instrumentation: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion
Year Composed: 2015
Duration: 15 minutes
Pages in score: 65
Cost: Purchase: $50.00
Movements:
| I. fluid, flowing, falling II. of brine and mists and veils of midnight stars III. on currents of strangeness |
Audio samples from the premiere live performance of Taxi of Midnight by the AURA Contemporary Music Ensemble, Rob Smith, director.
Movement I. fluid, flowing, falling
Movement II. of brine and mists and veils of midnight stars
Movement III. on currents of strangeness
Click here for a score sample.
Program Notes:
Taxi of Midnight, was composed for AURA (the Moores School of Music Contemporary Ensemble), Rob Smith, director. The piece is inspired by the poem The Taxi of Midnight by Olga Cabral, whose poems I have set in a number of songs and choral works over the last 15 years; the three movement titles are all drawn from the poem. Cabral composed the poem after seeing Salvador Dali's surrealist assemblage, The Rainy Taxi. The music draws on the imagery of darkness, speed, and water, and speaks also of dark and uncertain journeys, both real and metaphorical, in my own life.
Below is the first stanza of the poem.
The Taxi of Midnight by Olga Cabral
- on seeing Salvador Dali's surrealist assemblage, The Rainy Taxi
Take me to the rain in the
taxi of midnight.
Speed me through boulevards
of brine and aquatic
streets
where the cold drops fall
in the lamplight
large as shining
sea-slugs or snails.
Through windshield of fog
we shall watch
the city sink into the sea
and spinning cliffs of obsidian
blur in veils of
midnight waters.
On currents of strangeness
drowned faces float by
under submerged streetlamps
and submarine buses
huge lighted aquariums
of glass
shoot the rapids
of darkness.
From the book Tape Found in a Bottle, published 1971, reprinted in Voice/Over - Selected Poems (1993). Copyright (c) 1993 by Olga Cabral.