The Beginning And Also the End
— choral song

Like a storm on a mountain, leading into an awakening…

The opus number here is rather misleading, for this is an orchestration and slight expansion of an unaccompanied song for solo bass singer that I wrote in about 1979. Like the sketch I'd called Fantasia on a motif of Ralph Vaughan Williams, which was the seed that developed into the symphonic poem Golgotha to Rozabal, the music of this piece has a sound often like the more elemental 'face' of Vaughan Williams.

It would be impossible to tell to what extent this music is influenced by Vaughan Williams in the sense of imitating his style, however, as we're dealing with certain musical resonances that exist deep in my psyche; it's quite possible that roughly this same music might have emerged even if I'd never heard that composer's music at all. For more about that situation, please see Musical Influences on Philip Goddard's Music & Literary Works.

The vocal line in this choral song is nearly all the time in a modal three-part harmony (the harmonization sometimes taken over by the orchestra), giving a somewhat unremitting and even hectoring quality to the work. This is in absolute keeping with nature of the text. For the most part the choral and instrumental lines are homophonic, but where any canonic structuring does appear, the main melodic lines are still harmonized and therefore textures can become briefly very dense.

The text is a mysterious and somewhat tormented poem I wrote in 1973. To my current understanding, I think its vision is a flashback to something of my tormented state of mind when I was very young and was subjected to nightly hellish inner experiences throughout which I was desperately seeking company and closeness in a world in which any of that seemed to have been lost far in the past.

The type of experience involved is what I'd now describe as a second-level hell. The particular poem isn't exactly one of the first pieces I'd have expected to proffer to the world now, but the elemental quality and radiant energy of the music transform it from a dismal and bleak experience into something of elemental grandeur, like a storm on a mountain.

The character of the music changes at 'The questions ring unanswered still', bringing about resolution of the torment and agitation, and leading on into a final harmony as one contemplates the seemingly burning question — recognising it at last as unanswerable and thus no worry after all!

That's a theme that I returned to in the later and very different-sounding and much more refined The Unknown, for organ and tuba.

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With the questions begin and end the wind:
Wind of flowing, Wind of silence;
Wind of storming mountain violence;
Wind of losses passing changes streaming Ages winding byways of dissolving Causes desperate streaking millions of calling souls unanswered stampeding through urgent graveyards in layers of galloping time pressing torrents from millions of eyes of griefs uncounted
Wind of building breakers throw up racing castles turrets torn in ragments of cosmic hopes spin-off nebulous spirals of mountain silence calling
Wind of gravestones wildly rocky layers of fragmentation storming souls of silent space-light expectations driving spirals ever forward chariots grey with tears from Before through urgent passing
Wind of spacious grief across plains of plenty sweeping greyness bleak and cold stagnation howling;
Wind of weeping, Wind of sighing;
Wind of tearing, Wind of winding;
Wind of storming mountain violence;
Wind of flowing souls of silence
at the end
The questions ring unanswered still:
O Wind of Passing, perpetual dynamo,
Where do you go with nothing to blow?
And how do you blow with nowhere to go?