Formal Constraint as an Artistic Principle in Hans Abrahamsen's Vocal Cycle "Let Me Tell You"

The article focuses its attention on the vocal cycle "Let me tell you" (2013) by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen composed on texts from the novel with the same title by Paul Griffiths. The composition is examined through the prism of a special type of artistic principle initiated by the Oulipian strategy of the writer, who constrained the verbal space of his book to the 483 words pronounced by Ophelia in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The technique of "formal constraints" turned out to be accordant to the composer's poetics. The work makes study of the multilevel connections between text and music and discloses the particularities of the composition's dramaturgy. Special attention is focused on analysis of the musical material, the compositional structure and the technique. The cycle shows the synthesis of historical and contemporary compositional techniques, the former including the turn to the concitato style and to the traditions of the cantus firmus technique, and the latter including the techniques of repetition, addition and subtraction. The effects of the principle of formal constraint are traced in their reliance on the use of a set of chosen intervals (octaves, fifths and major thirds in songs Nos. 1, 4 and 6), organizing the composition on one single melodic model, as expressed by a descending hexachord, in the application of palindromic constructions and the use of numerical sets. During the course of the analysis the intonational-thematic connection between the different numbers of the cycle is disclosed, it is demonstrated how the combination and transformation of the initial material takes place, a semantic interpretation of the structural conversions, and parallels are brought in with experiments in the field of literature.