Angel Shadows, for solo flute

• Date: 1993
• Composer: Augusta Read Thomas
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

Like so many of Thomas' works, the brief solo flute essay Angel Shadows carries a certain specific wish with it, to be attempted and realized through performing the work itself. One doesn't want to say it's a "supernatural" wish, as Thomas is not explicitly religious, nor a professed occultist. But like her other solo works Spring Song (for cello) and Incantation (for violin), Angel Shadows seems more spell than song, and its longing tenor seems to point less to a sentimental, personalized expression, than to a kind of ritualized spirit-raising enterprise. Nor is this at all a strange goal for a piece of "art-music": theRenaissance Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino imagined that music, when played well, would release a spirit, hovering exactly between the awed listeners and the possessed performers.

But a spell requires discipline, something Thomas has always brought to her scores, and Angel Shadows is no exception. As the composer writes, "Angel Shadows develops one short, lyrical, central-music-concern that, in the course of the piece, breaks into two divisions . . ." These divisions create the conflict of a vortex -- that is, a creative, inducing kind of conflict, which sets the work's fervor in motion. Thomas continues her metaphor, explaining that these two separate pieces are "threaded between and around one another, [and] oscillate until the work's final utterance -- an angel shadow."

It may remain a mystery to the listener exactly what an "angel shadow" is, but it seems clear that the score itself is a kind of musical sorcery, bent on stirring up and settling the soulful until, at the moment of high harmony, an apparition emerges from the tones. And it's interesting to note here Thomas' fascinating fusion of ancient, even pagan, attitudes with modernist techniques (of pitch, timbre, and rhythm manipulation) -- something perhaps not lost to earlier modernists like Kandinsky -- who wanted to "convey mystery by means of mystery" -- and Joyce, who felt that the artist's greatest role was that of magician for modern, disenchanted times. Here, magic arises on the reverse face of a carefully constricted, rigorous game -- perhaps the basic formula of musical performance itself. ~ Seth Brodsky, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Angel Shadows

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