They died in front of me. The patterns of repetition are grotesquely disrupted time and again as though the soldiers' agonies stab through the musical fabric. The form and material of this piece seem at each moment to be connected in one way or another to the text, or even derived from it. The exquisite Mesmerised , composed in late 1977, demonstrates further economizing of means and more far-reaching intensification of the relationship between text and music. In this piece Bank so successfully forges a synthesis between text and music that the whole is not only greater then the sum of its parts but yields, moreover, something entirely new and unforgettable.
Textual depiction is evident but at the same time the musical substance is fascinating.
The soprano reaches to just a minor second under the top tone of the first trumpet, but then a descending timpani glissando steals her breath away and an imposing silence follows. She has fallen short of the sublime peak of the highest tone, failed to gain redemption through religion. Here, he first demonstrated his new technique of composing, one that he continues to employ in a wide range of forms. The tone material is ordered in a six-tone row which is gradually transformed as one or another constituent is replaced by a new tone. In this way, the pitch reservoir is continually renewed and the addition of a new tone at an important expressive moment can be used for surprise.