Night in Galicia

I’m not sure where to begin in describing Vladimir Martynov’s song-cycle, Night in Galicia, but I will nevertheless make some attempt.

The Galicia in question, by the way, is the region which maps over western Ukraine and parts of Eastern Poland, not the one in Northwestern Spain.

The song lyrics are drawn from two poems by Russian futurist writer Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922). Khlebnikov was a visionary thinker and poet whose ambitious objectives included the creation of a universal language and mastery over the laws of time.

I have discovered the fundamental Laws of Time, and I believe that now it will be easy to predict events as to count to three. If people don't want to learn my art of predicting the future… I shall teach it to horses - V. Khlebnikov.

The two poems in question: Night in Galicia itself, and Forest Melancholy, were, in turn, inspired by certain ‘thaumaturgic songs’ of supposedly archaic origin first recorded by the 19th Century folklorist I.P. Sakharov. ‘There is almost no possibility of grasping the meaning of these words,’ Sakharov wrote… ‘This is a kind of mixture of the heterogeneous sounds of a language no-one knows and which, perhaps, never existed.’ Here are a couple of brief extracts which give some translated flavour of these lyrics:

Evening narrows its gaze,
its great eyes straining,
it hides in lakes grown blue in its dream.
Perched on the old mossy bough of an elm,
I held doves in my hands,
And like tumbled boulders,
my braids of glee
hung free. So it was on an aspen in autumn.

Like a black wind, she sways,
red coals are her necklace.
She sings and she laughs,
in the fire’s glow - reckless.
She sings and moves and floats dreaming,
her hair sweeps aside clouds of midges,
a light shaft, she plays on pine branches,
and moonwards stealthily slides.

On the CD, these words are wailed, half-spoken, shouted and sung with great abandon by members of the D. Pokrovsky folk ensemble. They are accompanied by a classical string section, who are called upon to saw at their fiddles as though they were a band of itinerant peasants. Martynov builds this music using folk-music idioms, but shapes them with contemporary-classical compositional methods in a way that echoes Khlebnikov’s avant-garde appropriation of the traditional songs. The end result is an intoxicating blend of oral/musical tradition and self-conscious art, of the coarse and the sublime, of the primitive and the modern.

Like bird calls the scanned ‘AAA-OOO-EEEs…’ reverberate in the nightly silence of the wood. Nymphs answer to signals from demons, messages are exchanged, wind and wood goblins intermix. Male and female voices merge and intensify a capella into the polyphonic texture. Energetic string fifths set contrasts, calling out for an archaic order. And suddenly more familiar harmonies are heard, leading us gradually out of the nightmare into the morning and ending a thrilling, mysterious and moving ritual. (Record-company blurb).