IAN BLAKE: Listen to this...

from The River Daughter

(Zoey Pepper)

In one of the best-known of Ovid's poems of metamorphosis, a choice between violation and transformation is made by Daphne's father, the river god Peneus. Pursued by Apollo, she calls on him to come to her aid: Peneus acts on her plea to take away the glamour which so inflamed that solar god, and duly transforms her into the laurel tree. Nothing remains of her but her 'shining beauty'. Gods move in mysterious ways.

vix prece finita torpor gravis occupat artus,

mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro,

in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt,

pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret,

ora cacumen habet: remanet nitor unus in illa.

Frank Zappa said of the bassoon: 'It has the medieval aroma...I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing a bassoon. It's a great noise – nothing else makes that noise.'

This aromatic old instrument gets computerally twisted and merged with the voice: all the sounds you will hear are derived from Zoey's voice and bassoon as the piece plays with thematic and sonic change, wandering first through changes in tonality, then of sonic counterpoint, before reaching an uneasy stasis.

Wolle die Wandlung! 'Desire transformation!' urges Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus. Fittingly for bassoonists and singers, he assures us that Daphne, in her transmuted state, would have us become as the Wind:

...die verwandelte Daphne will... daß du dich wandelst in Wind.