The Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned Angela Elizabeth Slater as one of its 2021/22 Composers to write this work for Ensemble 360 at Music in the Round’s Sheffield Chamber Music Festival.

The Light Blinds for clarinet quintet explores the drama in extremes of light and darkness, charting a path through the spaces created by the tension of these opposing states. It draws on a short poem that I wrote whilst travelling home from a Music in the Round concert in 2021, following a day exploring the natural landscape around Sheffield.

The first material I wrote for this work was a short solo clarinet fragment, which is heard in the opening of the second section, exploring the line ‘The Light Blinds’. I used this material to shape and construct the rest of the piece, with this short 7/8 material acting as a central organising principle; the entire structure and pitch content emerges from it. This clarinet material is essentially veiled through it being stretched and texturally displaced within the quartet before being revealed in crystalline contrast with the solo clarinet against pulsing harmonics in the quartet. This ‘light blinds’ material becomes increasingly agitated, collapsing in on itself to form and explore the line ‘the dark engulfs’. Here the quartet concentrates on the lowest tessituras of their instruments and is accompanied by the bass clarinet, moving between dramatic and fragile multiphonics and aggressive rumbling material that pulls us further into the depths.

The dark engulfs
and the light blinds
in neither a sight
is seen in clarity
a blur, desperate to find a firm grip
in focus

Poem by Angela Elizabeth Slater