The opening to This Midnight Hour is inspired by the character and power of the lower strings of l’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France. From here, it draws inspiration from two poems—one by Charles Baudelaire and another by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Whilst it is not intended to depict a specific narrative, my intention is that it will evoke a visual journey for the listener.
¡La musica;
—mujer desnuda,
corriendo loca por la noche pura!
Jiménez’s poem is very short and concise (translated by Robert Bly):
Music—
a naked woman
running mad through the pure night!
This immediately struck me as a strong image and one that I chose to interpret with outbursts of frenetic energy—for example, dividing the strings into sub-groups that play fortissimo staggered descending cascade figures from left to right in stereo effect. This stems from my early explorations of electroacoustic music.
There is also a lot of evocative sensory imagery in Baudelaire’s Harmonie du Soir, the first stanza of which reads as follows (translated by William Aggeler):
The season is at hand when swaying on its stem
Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
I riffed on the idea of the melancholic waltz about halfway into This Midnight Hour—I split the viola section in two and have one half playing at written pitch and the other half playing ¼ tone sharp to emulate the sonority of an accordion playing a Parisian-esque waltz.