Lied 1

From YoungMusic

'Lied 1' is a short song written for Maarten Tielens. Maarten was taking singing classes at the time and was so kind to ask me to write composition for his examination. We quickly agreed on the price for such a song, namely 24 bottles of Duvel, a very fine belgian beer.

I have used part of a poem from Pablo Neruda here. It's a warning towards the united states because of its capitalism and makes a powerfull statement. It was translated into Dutch by ...(I have to look that up.) The song was also one of the first pieces of music I made since taking composition classes with Godfried Willem Raes.

I choose to only use a few central notes (e-f-b-c) here. The piano lets them resonate and the singers sings those a lot. What they do inbetween is mostly free intonation, but the rhythm has to be exact. I tried to evoke kind of a deformation of the voice, or melody. A lot of attention goes toe the consonants, instead of to the vowels. Notes in the piano too are mostly free, except for some places where notes are fixed, mainly to help the singer a bit.

In general, it is a very simple piece of music, with a clear structure. Most important for me is perhaps that the way I work with text here seems to come back more and more in my later works.

I don't have a recording of this piece, but pdf and sibelius score are available for download.