Lyre was commissioned and premiered by the Toronto Chamber Choir, and first performed in May 2005 the Metamorphosis festival, conducted by David Fallis.

Toronto Chamber Choir performed the piece again in 2007.

Duration: ca. 6:00

SATB choir

Score includes optional piano part

Text by Alex Eddington (words phonetically related to "lyre”).

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Program Notes

Lyre was commissioned for the 2005 Metamorphosis festival in Toronto. The theme was Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the TCC chose to put together a concert of music inspired by the myth of Orpheus.

Rather than using an existing text, ancient or otherwise, my approach to this piece was to create a world of closely related phonic sounds. I began by deriving a list of “rhymes” (some of which are rather stretched) to the word for Orpheus’ instrument, the lyre. I found that some of these words fell quite naturally together, creating images and stories that are sometimes mythological, and sometimes mundane. I don’t expect the audience to hear the words, however: they are subtext rather than text, a private storyline for the choir to sing about when really, what the audience hears is a stream of related syllables. For this reason, I request in the score that the text not be printed in the program.

As for composing the music, I let the text-stories speak to me as I played around a scale that is somewhat octatonic and sounds “ancient” to me. The piece is framed by a choral imitation of a strummed instrument: the Lyre of the title.

- Alex Eddington, November 2007