Unquiet Sleepers

I’ve always loved ghost stories, especially the classics of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and for a while I wondered about writing one myself. Instead, I’ve composed one – or, rather, five, for an ensemble of five instruments: clarinet, horn, violin, cello and piano. Each of the five movements has a title alluding to one of my favourite stories: ‘”I will”, she said’ (Henry James/Benjamin Britten, The Turn of the Screw); ‘Who is this who is coming?’ (MR James, Oh, whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad); ‘I, who was beautiful…’ (Walter de la Mare, Ghost); ‘The Door Opens’ (Susan Hill, The Woman in Black); and finally ‘Quiet Earth’ – a reference to the beautiful final paragraph of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. In the latter, the narrator, Lockwood, standing in a half-overgrown graveyard, wonders how anyone could imagine ‘unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’

I imagined that the five instruments were five people, gathered round a warm fireplace on a stormy winter night, telling deliciously chilling tales. But the role-play isn’t so straightforward. After a short scene-setting Prologue, the clarinet relates the first story, then horn and violin enact the second, followed in the third by cello and piano, shadowed by the deeper basset clarinet. Then the piano, echoed by the other voices, opens the door on the fourth movement, and finally the instruments join as a true quintet to consider the possibility of resolution and release. But that doesn’t mean there can’t still be lingering memories…

…or at least those were the ideas in my mind as I wrote. You don’t have to follow them. Note the titles if you like, and let them, in combination with the music, form stories in your own imagination. There’s no better theatre for ghost stories than the theatre of the mind.