City in the Sea

This piece takes its title from the eponymous poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Whittall had originally intended to keep his distance expressively from Poe's Gothic world, Poes central image a decaying city in the dimming West ruled by death, slowly sinking into watery oblivion was a powerful one. Perhaps inevitably, the piece took on shades of the slow-motion humanitarian disaster unfolding on Europes southern shores, bringing out undertones of desperation, pursuit, obsessive, elegiac reflection, and ultimately despair as it slides into the depths.

The City in the Sea was commissioned by the Finnish Viola Society for the 2017 Tampere National Viola Competition.