The texts for this piece are taken from a famous 14th century Buddhist story ‘Aki no Yo no Nagamonogatari’ (A Lengthy Tale for an Autumn Night). They tell of the 12th century monk Sensai (sung by the biwa player), who fell in love with Prince Umewaka (sung by the koto player). They exchanged love letters and spent one night together before Umewaka was spirited away by a demon. This provoked a war between Sensai’s temple and some rival ones which resulted in many deaths and the burning of many temples. In the end, Umewaka is returned to this world by the demon, but upon seeing the destruction caused by his disappearance, he writes one last regretful poem to Sensai and then throws himself into a river. The final poem of the piece was written by Sensai to honour Umewaka’s memory.
As with all my recent music, the harmonic relationships are governed by quasi-serial matrices, in this case made up of numbers derived from the calligraphy of the original poems. Sensai and Umewaka have different matrices derived from their respective poems, so the melodic and harmonic content of their musics are different. At different times, one matrix or the other is used (mostly following the narrative structure of the poetry), but sometimes the two matrices are in counterpoint. The overall structure of the piece, in five large sections, roughly mirrors the traditional Japanese poetry syllabic structure: 5-7-5-7-7.
