Ligeia, my new concerto for trombone and orchestra, channels the literary world of Edgar Allen Poe – hence the title, borrowed from one of the writer’s better-known stories.
The concerto reflects the nature of duality, or the double, a recurring theme in Poe’s Gothic tales of mystery and the macabre.
In turn, Poe’s exploration of duality presages aspects of Carl Jung’s work by nearly a century. Jung believed that we all wear a mask to convince others and ourselves that we are not a bad or hypocritical person. This is manifested In Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart in which an unnamed narrator endeavours to convince the reader of his sanity while simultaneously describing a murder he has committed.
Jung argued that we cannot escape the limitations of our persona – or mask – until we have incorporated into our character those darker traits which belong to what he called the “shadow self”.
Joe Chindamo.
Ligeia, in three movements, reflects this idea of psychic struggle through its highly energetic and virtuosic character for the orchestra and soloist (ASO Principal Trombone Colin Prichard) alike. The work is replete with quasi-operatic passages, full of drama,...
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