Composed for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as part of the Leverhulme Young Composers’ Professional Development Programme.
Calling the Night Gods was premiered on July 12th 2017 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Magnus Lindberg, at St John’s Smith Square, London.
In this piece, quotations from canonical works—by Beethoven, Wagner, Purcell, Handel, Tchaikovsky and others—are woven into an overarching musical structure that subsumes the excess sensory stimulation of its citational plurality into a coherent musical language that evokes something more deeply-felt than the surface associations of style and history. Within this, Stef Conner’s compositional vocabulary is transformed through its transposition into an imagined Babylonian soundworld, formed from both archetypal and specific human ritual practices. It draws formal and melodic materials from the prosody of a Babylonian incantation used in extispicy. This homogeneous ‘host’ idiom, into which heterogeneous citations are interpolated, also sets the mood, or induces the affect, that frames those citations as markers of dissent, since the incantation is musicalized with all the familiar tropes of fear and horror. In a narrative sense, the performance of the Babylonian text reveals the future, exactly as it is supposed to—a future made up of fragmentary musical allusions to the atrocities of history’s greatest tyrants.
Little (or perhaps nothing) in this composition’s invented musical idiom is truly “Babylonian.” Rather, the style is a contemporary one, made more particular than the sum of its stylistic antecedents by the imagined sounding of Babylonian divination. Thus, Calling the Night Gods ultimately addresses the question of whether adopting historical “imaginaries” as an aesthetic point of departure allows composers to unseat the specific cultural associations of their techniques and methods, which are are so often the dominant markers of what we call compositional “voice.”
You can read an interview with Stef on this piece on the LPO website.