Description
John Cheshire Twilight Murmurs, or Reverie
Compositions by the English harpist John Cheshire’s are strewn through all the historical, personally bound collections of sheet music from the 19th to the early20th centuries kept in my archives. Nonetheless, because his music was on the lighter side, it seems that these pieces were ignored and never included in the teaching repertoire. This accidental neglect has now been remedied. I wish to share with you the pleasures of those little gems that ooze charm and showcase all the enchanting techniques harpists relied upon during la belle époque. Each piece brings a different character into play. All of them would be well received by the public in various performance situations. They were published either in England (around 1902), or posthumously in the United States in 1912.
Twilight Murmurs
Cheshire’s Twilight Murmurs, subtitled Reverie, is exactly that, a daydream taking the listener into an alternate reality that, after almost turning poignant, melts into the sunset. The main technique used here – repetitively – is the thumb slide, at first quite comfortably, then with gradually wider spans (of ninth, tenth and even eleventh or twelfth intervals) in the right-hand up-and-down figures. A first attempt at climaxing occurs on page 4 at the first a tempo, then a second attempt goes full-blown like an emotional peroration on page 5 at the fortissimo, as if to hammer the effect of the last rays into consciousness… Then, at the ritenuto, a soft and tender feel takes over with a descent into the blissful peace of Gb major.
