The Brightness

The Brightness is a piece for choir with original words. It has a nighttime theme, with the story describing someone falling to sleep, being woken up, and then going back to sleep again. The music is harmonically driven, and the use of chromatically altered chords defines it’s style. In fact, the music has very few unaltered major or minor chords. This gives a feeling of openness, or brightness, as the title suggests. There is often interplay between the voices, and the melodic lines are transferred between the voices across the duration of the piece.

In contrast to the smooth opening section, the central episode has shorter and sharper notes, representing a disturbance in the night. The dynamic level also increases, and some words are shouted, vastly increasing the intensity. After this, the higher voices echo each other, which gives a hypnotic quality as the character falls back to sleep. The original melody is then repeated with different harmonisation and voicing. This reflects the fact that the words have changed, and now the new day is approaching. The piece ends unusually on a second inversion major chord, giving a sense of both completeness and openness.

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