“Labyrinth (A Deep Sea Cave)” from the series “Silverpoints” (1920–1921). Roger Carpenter affirms that in this piece the harmonic influence of Debussy is strong4. Here we meet a favourite image by impressionists of mysterious underwater kingdom hidden under mighty a lot of water. During the whole piece its static character is attained by immutable figure, oscillating in upper voice, in slow tempo5. On this background the part of lower layer texture is a matter of bearer of the thematic idea: it means ascending octave tunes which are forming a factor of a structure (a simple binary form) and in a culmination are turning into two descending remarks, the last of them has features of a whole-tone scale. (Ex.4a, 4b)
Ex. 4a William Baines, Labyrinth, bars 1–10
Ex. 4 b William Baines, Labyrinth, page 3, culmination bars
We can observe similar solution in “Twilight Woods – a fragment” from the series “Twilight Pieces” (1921). Baines presents his impression of a dreamy image of wood, which stands in change to sleep. It doesn`t sleep yet but does no longer rustle, only sometimes a bird would respond or tops of the trees slightly would oscillate. A static mood is created by permanently incomplete tonic (a minor) triad with fourth repeating in a lower layer of a texture. Such evading of the third degree as the index of tonality passes the main role from clear functionality to phonic effect of chord a–d–e. During the piece this chord enriches by superposition of the incomplete second triad, the major triad of subdominant, the incomplete triad of dominant. Melodic basis utterly submits to texture: it means that melodic tunes were born in textural embroidering and in the same place dissolve. There are also some imitations of the bird`s warbles – the tunes with a grace-note, with triplet, and with jumps on the wide intervals. Here is absent a typical contrast because period form using does not foresee it. (Ex.5)
Ex. 5 William Baines, Twilight Woods
In the piece
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