Caught in the Web
I am always inspired to write music by a good storyline so turning to Shakespeare’s plays I was particularly caught by his imagery of the spider and the web. There is always some web of intrigue in Shakespeare’s plots, and the spider is generally represented as the malevolent character:
“why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?” Richard III
“My brain, more busy than the laboring spider,
Weaves tedious snares to trap mine enemies” Henry VI (The Duke of York)
It was the line:
“With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.” Othello (Iago)
that really set me to work.
I imagined the spider weaving its web, dreaming of its prey, lying in wait, catching a fly, and then dealing with it in its gruesome way which then prompted me to investigate various leads: The number eight (for the spider legs) set me to exploring the octatonic scale. I also wanted to look at various dance styles as I had some idea of the piece as a ballet with the principal characters being the Spider and the Fly. The tarantella was an obvious choice of dance closely relating to spiders, and I chose the pavane to portray the slow, stately dance for the funeral march of the fly. These two ideas I developed independently from each other but later sought to join them within a one-movement work - this was the ‘Web’ from within which the story between the two characters was played out.
Lesley Vincent