Deep Dazzling Darkness

See a double bass and it’s hard not to be impressed by the imposing grandeur of it’s body. Hear one and there is a uniquely warm depth to the sonority, a gentle ‘boom’, whether plucked or bowed; something like a welcoming pool of water in which you want to fully immerse yourself. Of course it doesn’t only make one kind of sound - it’s a remarkably versatile instrument - but that basic sound-image is where I began trying understand what kind of a concerto I really wanted to write: a piece of warmth and resonance.

It was my wish that the orchestral sound should appear as if emanating from the music of the solo bass. The logic of the piece is not discursive, but is rooted rather in an idea of continual ‘emergence into being’ as one sonority grows from another. I imagine a sense of empathy between the sounds as they interact and form into blended layers, as if the sounds themselves have sentience. The title and initial inspiration for this piece came from the final stanza of Henry Vaughan’s (1621 - 1695) poem The Night (1650), and I supposed I was imagining the solo bass like the God of this musical world.:

There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night ! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

The most elementary expression - plucked open strings - defines the first movement, though the scordatura of the soloist (F# - B - E - G), with the lower three strings a tone higher than usual, but the top string unchanged, makes for a special sound with a hint of static E minor tonality (albeit with the 9th as the root). This low loop gradually evolves into a cycle with increasing numbers of notes, forming a background onto which the soloist paints with thick brush strokes across its range, eventually arriving at a thrice repeated yearning melody.

The second movement changes energy completely, with complex hocketed rhythms jumping between soloist and orchestra, everything held together by the continual presence of a decorated drone on G (the bottom string of the violins). The initial angularity of the solo part gives way to more lyrical melody, with the bass in the upper extremities of its range, as the orchestra continues with assertively syncopated pulsations below before another sudden change of character, now more mysterious, leads into a contemplative cadenza on the natural harmonics of the the G and E strings.

Following a raw introductory statement in which low, closely voiced three-note chords are stretched and connected by glissandi, the third movement becomes a kind of passacaglia with a steadily descending line, in the lamento tradition (I’m thinking of Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa, Dowland’s Lachrymae, Purcell’s Dido’s Lament, Ligeti’s Autumn in Warsaw). Initially the solo bass states this theme directly, with the orchestra sustaining the resonances like a piano pedal, but as the cycle repeats the we hear intricately ornamented melodies appearing in different registers, first low, then middle and high, with a corresponding acceleration of the tempo. Following a climactic moment in which the roles of the soloist and orchestra become indistinguishably entangled through canonically descending scales, a brief cadenza leads us to a moment of silence, followed by a contemplative coda: a call and response between solo and tutti, somewhat reminiscent of the rich heterophony of Gaelic psalm singing.

(Christian Mason, 18.09.2025)