Tansy Davies’ song cycle The rule is love, for contralto and chamber ensemble, receives its Canadian premiere on 22 March from Danika Lorèn, conductor Gregory Oh, and Ensemble Soundstreams in Toronto. The 10-minute piece appears alongside Oliver Knussen’s Songs without Voices.
In The rule is love Davies sets texts by John Berger and Sylvia Winter across four songs, lasting ten minutes in total, accompanied by soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, violin, double bass, and percussion. The work draws on a range of unusual and extended techniques for the vocalist, including free chanting, improvised muttering and melodic decoration, and unpitched and whispered sounds. Davies writes of the work,
The rule is love…was created systematically at first; I made musical alphabets out of both texts, and found ways of working with the resulting patterns from which to build the piece, almost letter by letter, before stepping back and shaping it intuitively.
The percussive nature of the vocal part, to me, is linked to the idea of a skin or membrane (like the skin of a drum), which can be seen as both a protective layer and a wall of repression. Sometimes it’s as if her voice is blocked; her words are withheld or covered up and must break out through this skin or “glass ceiling” in order to be heard.
The four songs set the same text twice, each with a more physical, percussive version and a more dreamy, lyrical one. It’s as if she has secret dreams of revealing things that are so powerful, in the end they push through blockages and demand to be heard, no matter what.
The cycle was premiered by Elaine Mitchener and the London Sinfonietta in London in 2019 and has subsequently appeared as part of Mitchener’s hour-long programme On Being Human as Praxis at both MaerzMusik (2023) and Donaueschinger Musiktage (2020), who co-commissioned the piece; watch it here.