The Fish and the Shadow

"She must speak of the time of Arnaut de Mareuil, I thought. . ."

Built around a medieval troubadour canso (see pg. 2 of the score), The Fish and the Shadow oscillates between Ezra Pound’s 20th century imagism, and Arnaut de Mareuil's 12th century melody.

Modern-romantic images of sun, water, and fish, give way gradually to the stark sound of heterophonic melody and organum over a drone. The violin makes the journey from modern imagism to the medieval via scordatura tuning down a whole tone, in order to better approximate the soft, warm drone of the medieval vielle.

Pound admired Arnaut de Mareuil for his "elegant simplicity of form and delicacy of sentiment," but Pound never heard examples of his music. It has since been discovered that six of Mareuil's melodies still survive. The Fish and the Shadow utilises the longest and most complete surviving melody (R 079v [R81v]), and the only one that features musica ficta.