Ideal Voices…

Programme note

My encounter with the poet’s work began in my teenage years, when I discovered The Complete Works of C. P. Cavafy in our home library. I opened the book at a random page and began reading. From the first poem, I experienced something unfamiliar. Thoughts and fears that I had kept hidden came alive before me, against my will, and acquired a new dimension through the lines of each poem: thoughts, fears, desires, meanings and emotions that I both feared and longed to experience.
At that time I tentatively tried to set some poems to music. My musical knowledge and aesthetic judgement were not yet developed enough to produce a result that satisfied me. Yet I felt a powerful need to put on the stave the feelings these poems awakened. That need continued to smoulder, returning at different periods, each time more strongly.
At the beginning of 2013, I decided to start setting the poems again, without relying on a single note or thought from my earlier attempts. The first was Voices. On completing it, I felt those voices gradually coming alive, memories unfolding and taking form in other Cavafy poems. This conceptual connection guided my choice of poems. The impulse driving me left little room for calculated strategies. Each setting is an inseparable part of my emotional state at that time, always grounded in respect for the poet’s words.
I worked on the composition for about a year, taking Voices as my starting point; it ultimately gave the song cycle its title. The poems and their sequence were chosen entirely through personal and aesthetic judgement. Adding an introduction and interlude completed the cycle’s final form.
Setting these poems was an inner necessity rather than simply a desire. That necessity was filled with tensions, conflicts and contradictions, expressed in different ways throughout the work. These formal and orchestral contradictions are within me; I am present within them, and I intend to stand by them.
The ideal voices awaken our earliest memories, the ones the mind tries to hide and forget. Yet they emerge when night comes, like music fading away. They are thoughts of unfulfilled loves we beg to return and take us with them, of decisions we could not make, situations we could not change, and actions we wished to alter but our minds resisted.
These memories return as extinguished candles multiply, as we swear to begin a better life, as the same tedious things repeat—until the moment comes when, prepared and courageous, we must bid farewell to the Alexandria we are losing.
Yannis Mygdanis
September 2017