Hic sunt Dracones (Here Be Dragons)

Program Notes

In a text that is both largely conversational in tone and dense in imagery David Hopes’ dragons are underground, stumbled upon by digging explorers (rugrats with plastic shovels?). There is a topsy-turviness to things here, irony amidst the gruesome details, and, especially in the closing lines, some ambivalence about the whole business. In the closing lines, “Praise the calamity. Praise the rout. The little horrors are canceled out,” are many possible layers of meaning: The dark thrill of a horror movie; nostalgia for dangerous adventure and things Arthurian; or even, admonition to take things around us with more perspective. For me, I took the concept of “praise”, with its religious, and specifically “gospel”, overtones and used it as a launching point to ever so gently undermine the strange and sinister sounds and tones of the overriding musical atmosphere. The wink is subtle, but it’s there.

The piece is built as a “passacaglia,” defined (roughly) as a series of varying activities over a recurring pattern in the bass. The bass pattern gives the piece its bones and provides a strong orderly footing.  I’ve added a more modern touch in my piece by subtly varying the bass line occasionally so that it becomes quite a different creature later on.  The line itself is of a distinctly dire character. Aside from an opening leap upwards, it is defined (appropriately) by its descending nature. The line is played by an upright bass, doubled up the octave by a bass vocalist on the syllable “doo,” lending a curiously incongruous sense of scat singing.

Above the bass, the treble chorus deepens the mood with spare non-verbal chords in various timbres, punctuated by non-voiced sounds such as hisses, clicks and explosive breaths. All of this provides an unsettling texture for the male trio which delivers the lion’s share of Hopes’ words.

The first stanza is an anticipatory prelude, largely quiet and in the key of A-minor, setting an eerie stage for what’s to come. It is interrupted by a soulful outburst of regret from a solo alto, the first words sung so far by a treble voice (“O, the different plans we’d make if we thought they’d ever wake.”). The piece then immediately plummets to the darker key of F-minor as the dragons finally make their entrance in the flesh. Gone now is the conversational tone. Spooky glissandi begin to appear in both the chorus and the trio, and the chords are denser. The bass line gets progressively shorter, increasing the tension with each appearance. At last the trio and chorus switch roles, and the trebles sing the text for the first time as a group. They sing the last two lines of the piece in gospel-inflected chords, while the men accompany with repetitions of “praise.”

Following a climax in the (yet lower) key of E-minor, the men and bass all converge on a fiery version of the passacaglia line, tightened and sped up. Sung on non-verbal syllables of “oo” and “ah”, the effect is over-the-top, bordering on comical, like the soundtrack to a silent horror film. The coda of the piece appears suddenly, back in the spare A-minor texture of the opening. Things conclude with a loud stomp and burst of (hot) air.

Hic sunt Dracones (Here Be Dragons)
David Hopes

They should have stopped down there amid
  the tangled roots and power lines
  and white things crawling without spines.
  They should have stopped before they did.
  We should have known they’d go too far,
  past dead pharaohs and the diamond mines,
  past the much-regretting dinosaurs
  to where the sleeping dragons are.
(O! The different plans we’d make
if we thought they’d ever wake!)

For the roar of their wings and the
blast of their breath
  rhyme in our timid hearts with “death;”
  for the host of their fires in startled night
 scatters the best of us into flight.
  (O! Dark of the belly and blaze of the scale,
  flame of exhaling and hammer of tail!)
Praise the calamity. Praise the rout.
  The little horrors are cancelled out.