Philip Grange’s Cloud Atlas: structural eclipsing, narrative substitution, and the use of lacunae in the unfolding of implied alternative temporal trajectories

Abstract

In 1974 the composer Harrison Birtwistle commented to the author: 'On film you can show someone at the bottom of the stairs and then at the top.' This article explores the relevance of this statement to the compositional practices of Philip Grange. The focus is on Grange's Cloud Atlas (2009) for symphonic wind band, and how an adaption of the structure of David Mitchell's eponymous novel of 2004 is combined with a large-scale realisation of Birtwistle's statement to create a work employing structural eclipsing and narrative substitution that enables the 26 minutes of Grange's composition to suggest a duration twice as long. It forms the basis of a discussion involving Hertz's intertexturality to address the possible motivation for employing sources from other domains, while Jakobson's intersemiotic transmutation aids understanding of the processes involved. Finally, the desire to reveal non-musical sources is discussed using Eco's concept of 'resonances and echoes'.