This set of five waiata (songs or chants in Maori culture) draws inspiration from the natural and spiritual worlds described in the poem Mercy by Greek-Armenian poet Olga Broumas. Like the poem, Adams' work similarly explores themes of love, loss and transcendence. The elegant arching structures and recurring motives derived from a 12-tone row make it a fascinating work for solo flute.
The opening stanza of Greek-Armenian poet Olga Broumas's poem Mercy describes "breaths of smoke" rising from the waters of a harbour, referring to them as the "breath of souls". To me, this perfectly describes a view I see often: the sea mist, with its associated bleached skies and filtered sunlight, a common occurrence on the water of Otago Harbour. The harbour borders the Otago Peninsula, home to the Otakou Marae, Taiaroa Head and the soaring albatross, so majestic in flight. All of these things were in some way behind the extramusical inspiration for this music.
The poem goes on to poignantly explore love and loss, tragedy and transcendence in human interaction. Breath of Souls: Five Waiata for Solo Flute similarly explores themes of love (Waiata Aroha), loss (Waiata Tangi) and transcendence (Moeraki) as well as musically depicting the rise of "sea smoke" and the "breath of souls" in the outer movements (Pounamu) that frame the set and act as prologue and epilogue.
This work had its beginnings in a set of three pieces composed in 2010 for treble recorder (Moeraki and the two Pounamu movements). In 2012 they were reworked for flute and received several performances in that form with Dunedin flutist Febriani Idris. Waiata Aroha and Waiata Tangi were written in late 2014.
Arch structures – with their intrinsic qualities of exposing and recapping material – are a feature of the set. The central third movement Moeraki is organised in a simple A-B-A arch and provides the midpoint of an arch spanning across the five movements. There is a sort of cyclic flow across the movements, due partially to the organic building blocks that construct them: most of the motifs have recurring rhythmic and melodic elements that are slowly transformed throughout the set. Nearly all of these motives are derived from a 12-note tone row that is stated explicitly in Waiata Tangi. The row contains two five-note segments, with each segment consisting of a chromatic collection of four pitches spanning a minor third, followed by an ascending perfect fifth (or its inversion as a descending fourth). The remaining two notes of the row are a further repetition of an ascending fifth interval.
The dissection of the minor third interval in this row into a major second and semitone also suggested to me the potential use of both the octatonic scale and Messiaen's second and third modes of limited transposition. The semiquaver and demisemiquaver "voices" in both Waiata Aroha and Waiata Tangi are constructed from these sources. The outer movements are both called Pounamu and are identical in their pitch content, which is made up of an incomplete statement of the tone row and a motivic focus on the chromatic segment and the fifth/fourth motif. Rhythmically the closing Pounamu movement has been transformed in light of the rhythmic developments in Waiata Aroha, Moeraki and Waiata Tangi. The result of this motivic recurrence and transformation is a perpetual sense of nostalgia – the subconscious feeling that the listener has heard these things before (because, indeed, they have) while the present setting is constantly mutating. As in life nothing stays still, everything keeps moving and growing, everything that is living has a soul and breathes.
