Hyperborean Race

In Greek mythology the Hyperboreans were a mythical race of giants who lived “beyond the North Wind.” The Greeks placed Boreas, god of the north wind, in Thrace, so Hyperborea lay somewhere far to the north — a country no traveller had reached, where, in Pindar’s words, “neither by ship nor on foot would you find the marvellous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans… neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed in their sacred blood; far from labour and battle they live.”

We all have our ancestors in our mind. We always hear their screaming but never understand. This piece leads us to the era of Hyperborea.

The work — for voice, electric piano, violin, cello, stereo fixed media, and at its Istanbul premiere in March 2017 projected visuals and a dancer — is notated proportionally in nine sections, Intro and A to H, coordinated by stopwatch. The fixed media enters twenty seconds before the players. The voice moves from nasal murmur through tongue clicks and mumbling to a scream at the top of its range; the strings explore circular bowing, sul tasto haze and scratch tone; the electric piano lays down irregular clusters. Each player executes the instructions as an individual, not as a group, and over the whole seven or eight minutes there is one long crescendo, until the metered final section arrives in full notation and then slows to a halt. The Pindar text is read aloud at the opening and again, half-buried, in section F.