Inspiring Minds: Poor Yorick

In 2008 Patrick Wildgust, the Curator at Shandy Hall, approached me with the idea of devising a concert to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1759. Over lunch at Shandy Hall, Patrick bombarded me with examples of musical associations and quotations in the novel, and by the end of the meeting it had become clear to me that a concert would not be enough. Instead I decided to make The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman the focus of the 2009 ‘Practical Project’ – a production created annually by our music students. In November 2009 some 90 music students presented a 2 hour entertainment in which scenes from the novel were enacted, interspersed with music referred to by Sterne (Purcell, Abel, Scarlatti) and music especially composed by students. The project was an ambitious one - to turn a notoriously difficult novel into a musical entertainment – but it was made easier by the fact that the novel is non-linear and already fragmented, with endless digressions, so that narrative continuity was not an issue.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Black page to express sorrow at Yorick's death. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Musical narrative has been at the heart of my own research (composition) for many years. For musicologists musical narrative means the way in which abstract music conforms to narrative theory. We speak casually about a musical ‘argument’ – but what does that mean? Can music convey argument? But that is not what concerns me, as a composer. My concern is how to convey a narrative text within vocal music. This is much harder than one might suppose (since, surely, composers have been doing this for thousands of years). But the fact is that the moment words are conjoined with music, the competing demands of musical line, musical rhythm and musical texture all conspire to reduce the intelligibility of text. That’s why opera houses resort to surtitles, and why choral societies print entire oratorio texts in your programme. That doesn’t happen in the theatre, does it? In music we have become accustomed to ‘not quite hearing’ the words. For many listeners, indeed, the words are of little importance. Beethoven’s Choral Symphony is about joy and brotherhood, and that will do.

Over the years I have employed a variety of methods to convey text in music, often including spoken passages and various forms of chant. If words are to be sung, their intelligibility is enhanced if the musical line remains close to a monotone – that is, all the notes on or close to a single pitch – and if the setting is syllabic, without ‘melisma’ (stretching a syllable over several notes). It also helps if the text is not too dense; a shorter text with short phrases is easier to handle than a long text with complicated phrase structure. Vocal music works best when the text is simple. Any librettist will tell you that their first draft has usually been cut drastically by the composer.

In 2008 I had the opportunity to write a piece for the Hilliard Ensemble – a quartet of male voices best known for their early music repertoire, but who have also commissioned a lot of new work throughout their 40 year career. I was asked to write something for a programme they were putting together around Petrarch and Dante, which would include madrigals by 16th century composers Pisano and Arcadelt. The piece I wrote – Il Cor Tristo – is a setting of Canto XXXII and XXXIII from Dante’s Inferno. In this passage, Dante arrives at the frozen lake at the bottom of the pit of Hell and discovers Ugolino, who tells the story of his incarceration and starvation along with his entire family. It is a powerful story, and the only extended narrative in the whole of the Divine Comedy. I set the long text in Italian, since the premiere was to take place at a festival in Perugia. The setting is entirely syllabic; the music is simple and uncluttered. I hoped that an Italian audience (already familiar with this text of course) would be able to follow it simply by listening. I think it worked.

The Hilliard Ensemble, in any case, were happy enough with the piece to perform it several times, and record it on ECM. You can hear the piece here.

Then, in 2013, the Hilliards announced their impending retirement and a 40th birthday concert tour, and they asked me to compose something for the four current members of the ensemble along with four former members who came back to celebrate with them. For this I returned to Tristram Shandy, and to another long narrative – the death of parson Yorick.

Yorick, a country vicar, is a relatively minor character in the novel, although Sterne later adopted the name as his own alter ego, and wrote about him again in Sentimental Journey. But in Tristram Shandy Yorick dies quite early on, and his death is one of two moving death scenes in the novel – although nothing in Tristram Shandy is to be taken too seriously.

I set the passage with only a few small omissions, and framed it with a chorus on Sterne’s famous comment on mortality from later in the novel: ‘Time wastes too fast’, together with Yorick’s motto ‘De vanitate mundi et fuga saeculi’ (‘on the vanity of the world and the swift passing of time’). The main narrative is again set entirely syllabically, almost in the manner of Anglican chant. Yorick himself sings in tired, deathly voice, with gaps as he gasps his last breaths. His friend Eugenius, in a deep bass voice, speaks the final lines: ‘He lies buried in a corner of his churchyard…….. with no more than these three words of inscription, serving both for his epitaph and elegy: Alas Poor Yorick’

In 2016 I reconvened the now defunct Hilliard Ensemble in Coxwold church, and we recorded the piece on CD. My colleague Jez Wells also recorded birdsong and creaking floorboards at Shandy Hall to provide a sense of place around the music. The Poor Yorick CD is now on sale at the Shandy Hall shop, yards from where Patrick introduced me to the whole world of Tristram Shandy in 2009.

Written by Prof. Roger Marsh (Department of Music)

The Library is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the publication of the 9th volume of Tristram Shandy with an exhibition of items from the Library collections, on the ground floor of the Fairhurst.

There will also be a talk by Mr Patrick Wildgust, of the Laurence Sterne Trust, on Tuesday 28th November. Book tickets for this event