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Work

From Melodious Lay (A Hamlet Diffraction) : solo voice(s) with orchestra

by Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn (2016)

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The Australian Music Centre's catalogue does not include any recordings or sheet music of this work. This entry is for information purposes only.

It is listed in our catalogue because an event featuring a performance of this work was included in our calendar of Australian music. Details of this performance are listed below.

Work Overview

Delving into the material that makes up Shakespeare's Hamlet(s) offers a never-ending array of discoveries and possibilities, both as narrative and as the basis for new musical vocabulary.

Our starting point, in writing and composing an opera based on Hamlet (a project commissioned by the Glyndebourne Festival to be premiered in June 2017), using only words written by or ascribed to Shakespeare, was the impossibility, even after generations of forensic work on early editions, of establishing where Shakespeare's hand was or was not to be found in the first Quarto, the second Quarto, the first Folio editions of this play, all published in or shortly after his lifetime. "So let's use it all", said we, and that's what we authorized ourselves to do.

Three other works have grown from this experiment: And once I played Ophelia, a piece for soprano and string quartet, Gertrude Fragments, a short suite of miniatures for mezzo soprano and guitar, and now our Hamlet 'diffraction' - From Melodious Lay, an orchestral poem with soprano and tenor voices.

From Melodious Lay is an exploration of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, diffracted through a liberal redistribution of texts both spoken by these characters, or spoken about them by other characters.

And what if Gertrude's famous lament "I thought thy bride-bed to have decked and not have strew'd thy grave" was uttered by Hamlet, who surely once also thought to share that particular bed with his beloved?

And what if the mysterious and faith-ridden line "But for this, the joyful hope of this…" - taken from the First Quarto version of a rather well-known Hamlet soliloquy - helped us understand Ophelia's resilience, her disarming capacity to move forwards in a world of relentless obstacles?

From Melodious Lay is not an attempt at explanation or analysis, but rather a poetic and musical exploration of colliding worlds, those of Hamlet and Ophelia, those of Shakespeare and our own, those of the written word and its musical reflection. It is indeed a diffraction of these worlds, and we do hope a melodious one.

Brett Dean, Matthew Jocelyn, October 2016

Work Details

Year: 2016

Instrumentation: soprano, tenor and orchestra

Duration: 23 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

First performance: by BBC Symphony Orchestra, Allison Bell, Allan Clayton, Joshua Weilerstein at BBC Symphony Orchestra (Barbican Hall (London)) on 1 Nov 2016

Text by Matthew Jocelyn after William Shakespeare.

Performances of this work

9 Nov 2018: at Celebrating Brett Dean (Melbourne Recital Centre, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall). Featuring Topi Lehtipuu, Lorina Gore, Brett Dean, ANAM Orchestra of the Academy.

14 Jan 2017: at National Symphony Orchestra, Taiwan (National Taichung Theater, Taiwan). Featuring National Symphony Orchestra, Taiwan, Shao-Chia Lü.

1 Nov 2016: at BBC Symphony Orchestra (Barbican Hall (London)). Featuring Joshua Weilerstein, Allan Clayton, Allison Bell, BBC Symphony Orchestra.

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