The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveller

While I have written several concertos for solo instruments, I have always been suspicious of the medium that entices flashiness in the composer and meretriciousness in the performer, while the loyal orchestra is reduced to enthusiastically applauding everything uttered by the soloist.

I wanted to write a piece that would challenge these habits, so I decided to let the orchestra and the soloist each go more or less in their own way. Having given the work a title was helpful; the orchestra would be the ‘Darkly Splendid Earth’ and the violinist would be the ‘Lonely Traveller’ passing across its surface. The result was a dual rhapsody in which the orchestra and soloist would touch one another but never be controlled or influenced by one another’s activities. I avoided fixed moods, galvanized rhythms, rhetorical arguments and somnambulistic duets. I wanted nothing of the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’ in which nature is made to parallel human moods – a favorite device of opera composers: the heroine weeps and it rains, the hero draws his sword and it thunders. I wanted the soloist to live a life of isolation without reinforcement from the multitude, without the idiotic imitations and repetitions found in all conventional music. If there are friends in this music, they are remote. Only at the close does a solo horn distantly echo a few phrases pronounced earlier by the violinist. A friend?... Too late. The soloist moves off into the twilight. R. Murray Schafer