Heart as I.

Heart as I is a setting of two of Sappho’s fragments translated by Dr Alexandra Hardwick, a scholar and lecturer in Ancient Greek and, of equal importance in the context of this piece, my girlfriend.

The majority of Sappho’s work is only available to us in fragmentary form, and what of Sappho is left to us (both as a corpus of poetry and as a cultural figure) is as much read-onto as read: I struggle to read Sappho without bringing my own self — standpoint, contradiction, anachronism and all — into the text.

Consequently, I have not attempted to produce an authoritative, exegetic setting of Sappho’s work, as I believe that this would be both a disservice to the vitality of the text, and also impossible. Instead, I have aimed to emphasise and explore fragmentation and plurality: rather than approaching this piece in a strictly linear fashion, I encourage performers to take a more open approach to both time and pitch. I took inspiration from granular synthesis, in which sounds are broken down into small fragments (grains), reconstituted and superimposed: performers are encouraged to move freely through short musical cells, forming a cloud of words and phonemes across the piece’s length. Alongside Sappho’s text, both in original and in translation, performers draw on fragmented marginalia: writings-onto and -beside Sappho, the encountering of Sappho, love, desire, and time.

Thank you to the Marian Consort for working with me on this project as part of your Emerging Voices scheme, and to both the Marian Consort and to Laurence Osborn for your invaluable patience, feedback and suggestions during the workshopping process for the piece. Thank you, too, to Alexandra, for our discussions during the piece’s incipient stages, for your work on the translation, your reflection on the piece as it developed, and (as ever) for your support, your love, your abundance, your kisses, your cups of tea. Thanks, finally, to my other partners and loved ones past, present and (ever in the service of anachronism) future, conditional, hypothetical, optative, subjunctive. ■