Three musical scores for three voices/moods

Three musical scores for three voices/moods. The performers are largely free to choose the auditory output from these simple rules, also the instrumentation (with maybe a harp):

1. Imperative.

Take the rhythm of green as a thrumming.

Disregard Red, deplore that harsh beat as too akin to a tocsin on a bass drum

But now make blue perform an overarching polyrhythm. Enact this as a brief dance extempore over the previous rhythmic ground.

2. Indicative.

The desired background timbre here of high romantic purpose is powerfully illustrated in Penelope Fitzgerald’s concise historical fiction, ‘The Blue Flower’. But rather I speculate on how the lovers unite at the end, instead of significantly dying.

Novalis’ writing desk is situated by an open window, overlooking an incongruous void, perhaps some petrified body of water, and this is apprehended chiefly by the absence of sound, an anechoic auditory sign.

There is something like a hum of resentment in the room, like a carpet stretched to a drumhead over the floorboards, like a dampening wallcovering pulled taught over battens.

Trivial chance at the podium raises the baton for the downbeat. The writer is seated at the first desk.

Herzallerliebste carries the tympany, maybe the dustpan andante pensativa, and engages the brush a la sonnambula.

Now furiously at this motif the quill scratches presto as Novalis composes from his diary of ambient sound, which presently comprises all the harshness and soft longing of his puzzled and thwarted inner voices. The poet approaches that peculiar and sublime goal of vital obscurity, now deploying all those gaps and spaces where feral thoughts and unallied feelings seek their longed-for harbour, their momentary respite from straying.

This continuo resounds sostenuto until the final arpeggiated chord, eg:

A random freight cart rumble

The hoarse shriek of children at play, whose home is in the street

The expiration of time.

And poetry still fails, diffidently, as it is meant to do – wheezing and purple on the white sheets.

3. Subjunctive.

You may imagine a chasm, apprehended by sound as it might be ‘seen’ by blind bats. It were more clear perhaps to picture hearing in your mind’s ear the soundless reverberation of a vast, still void, different as that be from the muffled deafness as you may know this in a close and solitary cell. May this concordance resound, may the performer hold open this sonic space, till all possibilities of its interpretation be comprehended.