Tenebrae

Notes

Tenebrae was written as part of a project involving several composers, each of whom contributed a work reflecting on the life, death and/or character of King Richard III. In the event, I proved to be the only composer to have turned to Shakespeare for a viable literary subtext. Mindful not only of recent scholarship surrounding this enigmatic monarch, but also of such questioning voices as Josephine Tey’s in her 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time, I can assure apologists for Richard – of whom there are many, often extremely well informed – that my intent was always to create a viably abstract ‘ what if…?’ meditation in sound from Shakespeare’s conjectural character study, not to nail a would-be historian’s colours to the mast and denounce Richard as the ‘dreadful minister of hell’. Any journalist will tell you that bad news makes better copy, and so it is sometimes with composition!