13 - Sunset before Twilight, 1978–94

Summary

With the flood of performances and broadcasts celebrating Maconchy's seventieth year, it is hardly surprising that this momentum did not continue into 1978. However, her music was not entirely neglected, with a handful of BBC broadcasts, in addition to several performances of String Quartet No. 11 by the Lindsay String Quartet taking place over the course of the year. On the international stage, Jane Manning and Richard Rodney Bennett premièred her song cycle Sun, Moon and Stars (1977) in Hong Kong in February, later performing the work in England at Hull University on 13 October.

Throughout the year, Maconchy was busy with several commissioned works, which included continued work on Heloise and Abelard, which she completed on 25 July. She also revisited Hopkins's The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, writing a new setting of the work for the William Byrd Singers at the request of their conductor Stephen Wilkinson. Maconchy also found time to compose two additional works during the year: Contemplation for Cello and Piano, and Four Miniatures for unaccompanied chorus, both of which received premières the following year.

Of Hopkins's poetry, Maconchy described The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo as the poem of his ‘that has haunted me most vividly, and which seems to me to cry out for music’. Arranged for mixed choir and alto flute, viola, and harp, the William Byrd Singers and members of the Lontano Ensemble premièred the work on 25 November 1978 at a concert held at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Of her approach to the poem, she wrote the following in a programme note:

Much has been written about Hopkins's ‘sprung rhythm’, both by himself and by later commentators, but another rhythmical quality of his verse, very important for a musical setting, seems to have gone almost unnoticed. This is the variety of pace – of tempi – within a poem, and particularly this poem. There are lines that hurry forward, propelled by an almost aggressive alliteration, followed by lines of slowly drawn out syllables. And, of course, in music the two things can happen at the same time – something music can do which words alone cannot.