Programme Notes – Wedding Breakfast (1993)

A tribute to Igor Stravinsky

Wedding Breakfast involves one performer who sings, plays the tambourine and does a few other things. The piece is inspired by, and takes its material from Stravinsky’s masterpiece ‘Les Noces’ (the wedding), at the end of which the bride goes up to her nuptial bedchamber to meet with and do whatever else necessary with her new husband on her first night of wedded ‘bliss.’ In this work I have tried to express how the bride might have felt the next morning, maybe after a bit too much vodka. The text is a jumble of syllables taken from the Stravinsky work, and makes no sense in Russian or English.