The Haddock, is a sonic portrayal of the story of a talking fish who slowly loses her mind. The piece’s plot focuses on a main character: a talking fish. The role of the fish is sung and spoken, but not acted, by the soprano. To illustrate her character contrasting and at times cognitively dissonant material is presented in various ways including the superimposing of one independent stream of music over another. Musical material with strong extra-musical associations (for example, a sea chanty) is introduced, and then undermined by the disruption of established rhythmic cycles and tonalities.
The piece features an introduction representing water, followed by a sea chanty representing our human presence in the sea. The bulk of the narrative occurs after the sea chanty in a series of interrupted tonal subsections. Formally the piece is in ternary form, with the subsections acting appearing in a modified arch form. Elements that have been established as having metaphorical content return transformed, often with the purpose of undermining the linear narrative structure. For example, at the opening material returns as an interruption to disrupt the narrative flow. The piece ends with the dissolving of tonality into atonality, followed immediately by the sea chanty re-imagined as a quasi-game-show theme.
Harmonically the atonal material of the piece, representing the ocean, focuses around material derived from two combinatorial hexatonic scales. The tonal material moves through the majority of the church modes (with the exception of mixolydian and locrean) to offer different shades of modal coloring to the often homogeneous and repetitive material that the soprano sings. Rhythmically the piece is largely built from additive units of two and three, juxtaposed at various tempi through augmentation and diminution.