The black and hooded head is speaking • 2024
for bass clarinet, trombone, percussion, violin, cello, and double-bass.
Written for Concrète [Lab] Ensemble. Officially released as part of the album “Monolite”, through NovAntiqua Records.
“‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head” […] ‘speak mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.’”
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter „The Sphinx“
The Black and Hooded Head is Speaking presents an imagined response to this scene from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In the novel, Captain Ahab asks the severed head of a whale to reveal the secrets of the deep sea.
The music represents the whale’s imagined answer. It tells its journey through a distant underwater world, hidden far beneath the ocean’s surface and to which it will never return, all the way to a sunlit shore.