As I gingerly stretched and plucked, I listened to Peace Anthems, a self-explanatory collection by artists on the Red Hook Records roster. Its ten tracks (Moor Mother, Taylor Deupree, Kit Downes, Wadada Leo Smith, others) met my mood, but raised it too. Earlier in the day, I’d listened, in some discomfort, to Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer’s They Came Like Swallows: Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza. Discomfort because the aesthetic pleasure this music was giving me – Moore in ‘Diamond Sea’-esque reflective mode, entwining deliciously with Kramer’s reverb-heavy electronics and soft drum programming – jarred with the implications of the record’s subtitle. In contrast, Peace Anthems is music that does not tell, or even ask; it simply gives. Peace is too obvious a thing to demand; what there is space for, this music says, is the comfort we need as we long for it: the berries to store for later. I listened back to Moore/Kramer with these thoughts in mind, and heard in it a drive, an insistence, that is not in any of Peace Anthems’ tracks. Perhaps there lies the distinction? The plenitude of Peace Anthems, it seems to me, is in its absence of drive, and instead just presence. Like the brambles, it flourishes from darkness. And like them, it gives back.

Recording reviews

Just one this week while I take a short and much-needed break. A few months ago, I wrote a review for the Swedish magazine Nutida musik of George Barton, Siwan Rhys and Taylor MacLennan’s recording for another timbre of the Feldman trios for flute, piano and percussion. That review was published, in Swedish, in issue 304–5 of the magazine. With many thanks to the editors Magnus Bunnskog and Susanne Skog for their permission, here is the English version, slightly amended – including corrections gratefully received in the comments below from Paul Griffiths and, especially, Steven Swartz, who shares some beautiful memories of the first performance of Why Patterns?

Feldman, alone

In the late 1970s, Morton Feldman brought together a trio of musicians at the University of Buffalo. Eberhard Blum, flute, Jan Williams, percussion, and Feldman himself on piano comprised a combination of instruments that was unique and yet – in its breathy, shimmering delicacy – uniquely Feldmanian. For the group, Feldman composed a thirty-minute trio, Why Patterns? in 1978. Soon after, his seat in the trio was taken by another Buffalo associate, the recently graduated Niels Vigeland. So much did Feldman like what this group did that he followed Why Patterns? with two even longer works, the ninety-minute Crippled Symmetry in 1983 and the nearly five-hour For Philip Guston in 1984.

With a few decades’ distance, and in this, Feldman’s centenary year, we can see this trio as one of the most important performing partnerships of his career: up there with those he made with the singer Joan La Barbara and even the pianist David Tudor. By their titles alone, these three pieces map almost all of Feldman’s field of exploration. Into them, he poured all the fundamentals of his art.

But they are much more than this, too. Feldman’s evident preference for this group of instruments (apart from two pieces for string quartet, this would be the only chamber line-up he would write for more than once in his prolific last decade) tells us something about the kind of soundworld he had been searching for his entire life. Feldman often spoke of wanting to write a music of tones without beginnings, tones that would come into being just as gently as they would fade out. With the flute, certainly, he found an instrument capable of something close to this. But with piano, celesta and – exclusively, in these three pieces – tuned percussion, he settled on instruments with long decays but pronounced attacks. The tension between the two – that you cannot have one without the other; that there is no sound without bodies – was one of the primary themes of his late music.

Another was the push-and-pull relation that exists between clock time, subjective time and notated time. This was, in fact, a lifelong interest, from the early graphic scores, in which musical events are placed within boxes, to be played within a given time span but no more precisely than that, to works like Five Pianos (1972), in which the five players play every note of their score unsynchronized, timing them only according to how slowly they decay.

In his excellent sleevenote to this new recording of the three trios, percussionist George Barton highlights the importance played by similar processes of synchrony and asynchrony in these three trios. In Why Patterns?, the three parts are precisely notated but not rhythmically related to one another – except for the final pages which, when they lock the three musicians into a surprising alignment, throw into question everything that has come before. A similar strategy is used in Crippled Symmetry (without the concluding synchronization), but with the twist that at two moments the three musicians are given identical music. On the page, it appears that they should be playing in unison, but because of the desynchronization of their parts, they each reach this point at different times, perhaps even minutes apart. And in For Philip Guston, the music unfolds in shorter, periodic waves of synchrony and asynchrony, the three instruments continually coalescing and separating. This piece would be the last time Feldman used such a technique; after it, he wrote only for coordinated ensembles.

It is possible to hear in Why Patterns? and Crippled Symmetry a continuation of that abstract, experimental mode that gave rise to Feldman’s early music. But in For Philip Guston, the subjectivity of time is brought to bear on the subjectivity of human relations. We can hear this in all his late For … pieces, but it is most poignant here in this memorial to his late and long-estranged friend. There is a sad irony in the fact that Feldman and Guston’s friendship ended over the latter’s decision to move away from abstract and towards figurative painting, and that in his reflection on that loss, Feldman came the closest he ever did to musical portraiture. It is impossible not to hear the slow, ever-tentative coming together and moving apart of his three instruments as an expression of regret at this great failing of human connection.

That is what is contained in Feldman’s notation, at least. And with this magnificent, definitive and utterly essential boxset by Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys of the GBSR duo and Explore Ensemble’s flautist Taylor MacLennan, it has been properly realised for the first time. Among the other groups to have committed at least some of this music to disc, only two have tackled all three pieces: the original Morton Feldman and Soloists trio (spread across a pair of Hat ART releases) and the California EAR Unit (across three recordings, variously for New Albion and Bridge). Already, the GBSR/MacLennan recording has an advantage in having been recorded across a single set of sessions and under the same conditions, giving one a unique sense of the lines of development between these pieces.

But it sets new standards beyond this practical distinction. There is a unique balance to how Barton, Rhys and MacLennan play together. Not only balance in the conventional sense of their relative volume (although this is exceptionally well handled by both players and recording engineer Simon Reynell), but also in their negotiation of the line between a group of soloists and an ensemble. Feldman’s dialectic of synchrony and asynchrony depends on this, and it is immaculately managed – through almost super-human levels of concentration, attention and control – across all six of these discs. By comparison, I find the Blum/Eberhard/Williams recordings much flatter and drier, the voices more forcibly separated, as though they were almost playing in defiance of one another. While the EAR recordings are gentler on the whole (although the recording of Crippled Symmetry for Bridge has a harshness to it), there is still little sense of the players thinking not only in terms of their independence but also of what they can bring to an overall group sound.

By contrast, from the very first moments of Why Patterns? one has the sense that Barton, Rhys and MacLennan are not only attending to the phrasing of their individual parts but also have at least one ear on each other to shape larger group gestures or continuities. There is a warmth and a fluidity to their playing – a sense of mutual support and companionship – that I do not hear in the other recordings. For this reason alone, these are the versions of Why Patterns? and Crippled Symmetry I would want to keep. But the trio’s approach becomes truly revelatory on For Philip Guston, to my mind Feldman’s magnum opus.

As the scholar Ryan Dohoney has noted in his book Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde, the first half of Feldman’s career was defined by its circles of friendship and artistic camaraderie, while the second was defined by their disintegration – whether by death, estrangement or simply the sad distancing effect of age. Feldman, however, seems to have felt this disintegration most acutely: the recurring names in his stories, the succession of pieces written for his friends – all point to this. The loss of Guston seems to have affected him most strongly of all.

None of which is news. But I had not appreciated Feldman’s devastation quite so deeply until I heard these performers play For Philip Guston. There are in this music some of the most subtly constructed passages Feldman ever wrote. But there are an equal number of passages of mind-numbing banality: dumbest of all, those one-note groups of crotchets for flute that crop up from time to time. Yet in MacLennan’s hands these are the truly heartbreaking moments. There is an absolute blankness to them, as if one can feel Feldman’s inspiration draining away from his pen at the prospect of how many hours he still has left to write, how many hundreds of pages. And there is a momentum too, that one feels as MacLennan breathes fully through each note. The heroism of utter despair and of utter resolution. ‘I can’t go on’, as another of his artistic brothers, Samuel Beckett would write. ‘I’ll go on’. God, one mutters to oneself as the CDs continue to spin, Feldman must have been lonely.

Alex Ross

Readers will no doubt have seen the recent announcements from Alex Ross that he is hanging up his boots as a New Yorker columnist after three decades on the job. As he has been keen to point out, reports of his retirement, to say nothing of his demise, have been greatly exaggerated: he remains on staff at the New Yorker, and will continue to write, if perhaps less regularly but certainly with a greater purview. (He has himself mentioned interests in essays on ‘literature, philosophy, film, émigré stories, California stories, ancient landscapes, and new regions’.) Nevertheless, the closure of his regular New Yorker column is something to be mourned. In an age when extended critical discussion of new music has been squeezed to and beyond the margins of mainstream public discourse, it was under Alex’s pen a last, brilliantly hopeful bastion.

Will Robin, Ross’s long-time mentee, has written a fulsome encomium, beyond which I have little to add. Except to draw attention to the thing I admire most about Alex’s writing, beyond its obvious elegance: the effortless way in which it zooms from the micro to the macro, from a detail in a score (and Alex, for all that he is positioned as a mainstream author, has never been afraid to use the proper names of notes and chords) to its fullest context; to find the resonance of a singular experience in the auditorium of history. Read the last few paragraphs of ‘Great Soul’, his essay on Schubert, and feel its sweep from harmonic analysis to the collapse of Romantic idealism that the composer’s last years foretold. ‘Musical language is almost torn apart by memories of its past as well as by premonitions of its future.’ One day I will pull apart his words apart to find out how he does it. It’s something to do with storytelling, I will bet: often, Alex has seemed to me really a storyteller blessed with a musician’s ears. (‘What was he like?’, the first line of that Schubert essay, is a novelist’s opening.) For now, though, I will preserve those writings as the magic trick that they are.

Recording reviews

This week, I’ve had some thoughts on Valentin Silvestrov and the music of history on the back of a new double album of piano music performed by Evgeny Gromov; enjoyed a recording of music by Michael Finnissy and Cassandra Miller by Joseph Havlat; been pleasingly perplexed by Tim Parkinson; and returned once more to Samuel Vriezen’s 94 Fantasias.

Valentin Silvestrov: Moments of Silvertones (Kyiv Dispatch)

Readings of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s music are apparently inextricable from its history, and the history of his country. In the 1960s, finding his voice within the Soviet Union and at least partially aware of trends in the West, he wrote as part of Ukraine’s nascent avant garde, one based on imitation and secrecy, on the study of scores but almost never direct contact with the sounds they suggested. As for many of his colleagues, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and elsewhere, it is easy to hear the productive misreadings and unencumbered vivacity of this music only within the Cold War framework in which it was made: the West free, innovative, path-breaking; the East imitative, backward, a kind of cargo cult of avant-gardism.

Such patronising Euro-orientalism is tricky to sustain, though. For one thing, the Western European model that is held up was itself too young, too raw, too diverse to have settled into an established practice. It’s hard to accuse Eastern European composers of being ersatz serialists when there wasn’t yet an established ‘right’ way of doing things. (Kreuzspiel features a percussive groove; is that ersatz? Il canto sospeso is poignantly lyrical; is that?)

And for another, this situation holds up – at best – for only a few years. By the mid-1970s, most of these composers (think Penderecki’s First Symphony, Górecki’s Second) had moved on entirely from serial experimentation. So it was with Silvestrov. By 1975, he was developing a more certain voice of his own, out of the concepts of aftermaths, meta-music and the postlude. Conceiving of musical history as at an end (a decade and a half before Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, although not before Danto’s ‘end of art’), Silvestrov came to view the present day as its potentially endless coda – a space of reflection, memory and decay – and creation as the eternal teasing out of after-effects and fading scraps. By the 1990s, he was writing music in which ‘one is, in effect, experiencing the future of an event long gone’. His elegiac Post scriptum for violin and piano (1991) is perhaps the emblematic work of this type, one that steps happily into the divide between past and present but without wishing either to drive futilely into the future or to drag the past into the present. ‘The text has already been written’, Silvestrov once explained of his piece. ‘We simply add our annotations, thoughts, questions, consternation, astonishment and regret.’

The turning point between these two conditions is marked by (indeed can be heard happening within, in real time) his Piano Sonata no.2 of 1975. That work, a pretty chunky sixteen minutes, forms the appropriate pivot point of this two-disc, chronological sampling of Silvestrov’s piano music by the Ukrainian pianist Evgeny Gromov.

Either side of it are positioned three works from the sixties (Five Piano Pieces [1961], Triad [1962] and Elegy [1967]) and three from the 2000s (Moments [2003], Bagatelles [2005–6] and Postludium [2006]). In contrast to the Sonata, they are all fragmentary, fleeting; many of them are rarely heard. Music on the brink of extinction, we might say. Recording and release were hastened, according to Sasha Andrusyk’s accompanying notes, by Silvestrov’s late-in-life departure from his home country in 2022, forced on him by the Russian invasion. ‘The sense of urgency’, Andrusyk explains, ‘is not just because Silvestrov is approaching ninety years old but also out of the daily sense of mortality felt by all those living in Kyiv’. Thus, once more, our reception of Silvestrov’s music is inextricably bound to its historical context.

Such a view raises an awkward question, however. This album is presented as an attempt to reclaim or recontextualise Silvestrov’s music for Ukraine’s present moment. But with history having rushed definitively, violently back in, does it merely expose an unfortunate complacency to Silvestrov’s end-of-history attitude of the 1990s and 2000s? I’m not the one to say, except that perhaps this music (all of it) is better served by some distance from its historical context, rather than only in reference to it. Certainly there is a sad, fragile uncertainty to the late Moments or Bagatelles that endures: the shattering of security may come from many directions; the feeling itself remains universal.

(If I may be permitted a facetious comparison for a moment, I am listening to this record on the morning after England’s semi-final defeat to Argentina in the World Cup. Silvestrov’s music, it turns out, makes a devastating accompaniment to my mind’s loop of Jude Bellingham’s face rushing out, knowing he’s not in time to make that block. Walls and securities collapse in the same ways everywhere, it seems.)

From a similarly post-historical stance, I find the early works here fascinating, imbued as they have become, retrospectively, with the sense of a future that had not yet happened. (As they are also with the sense of a past that no longer exists.) For all their atonal grittiness, they are full of emotionally loaded what-ifs, of echoes and returns. The way that the first of the Five Piano Pieces keeps wanting to slip into ostinato; the way that Triad occasionally forgets that it’s not Fauré. The title of Elegy obviously foreshadows Silvestrov’s later preoccupations, even if its means of expression are less transparent. But I keep coming back to the Second Sonata, which begins in low, Mussorgskian tolling (over-written with an elaborate, almost Finnissy-esque filligree) and ends in high, Debussian tinkling. One an after-effect of the other, the music playing out over a quarter of an hour a slow tipping of the balance from former to latter.

I find it a remarkable piece: desolate, chameleon, always surprising, even as its overall arc is so strongly inscribed. I am aware of one other recording, made by Alexei Lubimov for Erato in 1992. Gromov gives it a slightly starker dynamic profile, heightening the music’s drama and its trajectory towards loss; Lubimov dwells a couple of minutes longer – speaking, in a work like this, more to a sense of spaciousness than to tempo per se. Otherwise, there is not much to choose between them. What sets the Gromov apart is its inclusion in a wider programme: hearing the Sonata in the context of what came before and what came after really sets its searching, transitional ambitions into relief. History again.

Joseph Havlat: Sinner, don’t let this harvest pass (Métier)

Talking of Finnissy … I can’t think of many examples of genuine X + Y collaborations between art music composers. Even in post-self 2026, the binding of a singular composer to a singular work – at least within a white, European tradition – is so strong that it’s a shock to see it formulated in any other way. Trust Finnissy to have done something different, though. And with whom else but Cassandra Miller, an artist who sees all musical identities in mercurial terms? That the composers of Folklore and About Bach should enter into collaboration with each other seems not only inevitable, but a fundamental property of the musical universe.

In simplistic terms, the nature of that collaboration on Sinner, don’t let this harvest pass, is a straightforward division of labour. Four movements, based on the four verses of a spiritual, ‘Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass’, sung by the great Marian Anderson. (Finnissy and Miller drop the ‘please’ to increase urgency and shift their title’s emphasis onto ‘harvest’.) Two verses each, in the palindromic order Miller–Finnissy–Finnissy–Miller. But, as revealed by the album’s sleevenotes – another rarity, a reprint of the correspondence between the two musicians as they were writing – the interactions run deeper than that. Sinner began as a short piano work by Miller for Finnissy to play at the CoMA summer school of August 2014. This would become movement 1 of the final piece.

In fact, that whole concert is available to watch; Miller’s piece is at 24:36, but it’s fun to watch Finnissy working the crowd so I can recommend the whole thing if you’re inclined.

Finnissy plays his first response to Miller immediately after her piece. As he describes it in his spoken introduction, he and Miller shared the original recording, Miller making her version first and then he writing his version using both her materials and Anderson’s. As the correspondence preserved in the album booklet reveals, though, the process was a little more ad hoc than that suggests: Finnissy received Miller’s piece just over a fortnight before the concert (she had assumed it was too late to be played by then); eight days later (less than a week before performance), he emailed her back to say he had written a follow-up: ‘I started with your opening chord (not one I could have dreamt up for myself) and also stole a few more bits of material from you (grace-note Bs) as well as Marian Anderson, and had one or two scrapes along the way …’ Already, we can see the truly improvisatory, entangled way of working unfold – a chord ‘I could not have dreamt up for myself’ is selected as a problem to be creatively resolved, in partnership with both Anderson and Miller’s materials.1 This would become movement 2 of the final piece.

The impetus to continue followed quite naturally – Miller: ‘This is a fantastic exercise we’ve started – let’s keep at it!’ She wrote a putative third movement that borrowed elements of Finnissy’s second (a melody from its final section, an emphasis on line over harmony) and he wrote a fourth. A couple of years later (following a suggestion from the pianist Jonathan Powell), the order of the last two movements was switched, and the complete piece settled into its finished form.

I say all this partly for the inherent interest I find in it, but also because I feel like the nuts and bolts of its making are integral to our experience of the music. On one level, Sinner is of course a celebration of the brilliant Anderson – her life as well as her voice. On another, it is music about the nature of spirituality, faith, resilience and hope. But on another – inseparable from these – it is music about music’s functioning as a kind of social glue. I mentioned above the challenge a work by ‘Composer X and Composer Y’ presents to a white, European, art music model of authority, and it is no coincidence that Miller and Finnissy should turn to an African American spiritual, and its interpretation by a performer (rather than its reification as a score), as the basis of their own experiment. This is music that gains strength, not dilution, from variation and adaptation. It is music as a communal, rather than solitary act. As their renderings extend to the limits of form – the scattered pointillism with which Finnissy’s first version concludes, the etiolated melody of Miller’s second – Anderson’s presence seems to grow to fill that space, even as it is barely audible.

The album includes two more works of creative transcription, one by each composer. Miller’s Philip the Wanderer, while one of the earliest works in her output, is still emblematic of so much of it – a looped and layered transcription for piano of the playing of Mozambican musician Zhukake Masingi. Finnissy’s RS Geistervariationen are in fact a version on a version – transcriptions of Brahms’s four-hand Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, themselves a version of Schumann’s two-handed Geistervariationen (itself an elaboration on a melody that, legend has it, Schumann heard sung by an angel). And the set is finished off with the Schumann itself.

Tim Parkinson: The Projects (self-released)

‘Ah well familiar things, (like pencils, paperclips, bottle caps, or something), in a row, hold the line, suspended …’ – so begin Tim Parkinson’s enigmatic sleevenotes to his latest and no less enigmatic release. The words are meant to apply to the first of four pieces here, untitled 2021a for piano, but they could be applied cleanly to perhaps all of Parkinson’s music. Familiar things – chords, scraps of melody, gestures – isolated, placed in a row, held in suspense. The suspense is the key, I think. There’s something radically timeless about Parkinson’s music: it exists in relation to history, of course. (All those fleetingly familiar elements have to have come from somewhere.) But it constructs a self that is firmly, almost aggressively present. Things enter into these works without anticipation or consequence. In a row, but never on a path. This does strange things to our own sense of time. As when listening to Feldman, say, we become unmoored from time, but not, as in the case of Feldman, in a sort of passive drift within time, but rather as if time itself has disappeared. Feldman makes one question where one is, in time; listening to Parkinson one knows exactly where one is, it’s everything else that is thrown into doubt.

While its anti-developmental stance can make it somewhat austere in form, Parkinson’s music has always had space for reassuringly quotidian sounds – from as far back as 2003’s two cardboard boxes. untitled 2021a contains some lushly impressionistic moments, as if caught in a glitching hotel lobby (or perhaps the on-hold phone call referenced elsewhere in the sleevenotes); Project 3 includes a drum machine and, in its third movement, some minimalistic, pulsing electronica; and Project 9000 casts us all the way back to 2004’s septet with the hauntological sounds of a ballroom Wurlitzer (or something impersonating one). Meanwhile, untitled 2021b features Parkinson reciting a slow countdown over a limping piano part whose two voices seem to be forever on the brink of drifting apart in coordination and tuning. For those new to Parkinson’s assuredly odd, yet oddly welcoming world, this album would not be a bad place to begin. There is enough here to draw you in, and never enough to answer all your questions. Performers Siwan Rhys, George Barton, Travis Just and Parkinson himself play with just the right balance of warmth and devoted disinterest.

Samuel Vriezen: 94 Fantasias for 31 voices (tracks 61–77)

We’re into the penultimate batch of these, and the algorithms are still throwing up surprises. No. 54 – Avantgarde Music is predictably spiky to begin with, but features some long glissandi to keep things interesting. No. 56 – Alt-Subtilior is unusually subdued, shrouded in a crepuscular fog of distortion. One of the longest of the collection, No. 58 – Trade Winds, turns dense knots of counterpoint into fields of attenuated harmony.

But there is a sense, too, of Vriezen finding, or coming to terms with, what he has made. In the short notes he attaches to each piece we start to see call-backs (No. 37 – Leaves echoes No. 7 – Snow, for example). An overview of the whole is becoming possible, in which individual Fantasias can be seen as outliers or representative. The note for No. 104 – Natural Precision (To Webern) captures a lot of what this project appears to have been about, the commonalities between early polyphony and algorithmic composition, a sort of exploration of the limits of rigor and arbitrary discipline, and their power nevertheless to touch history, emotion and the sensual. It is worth reproducing in full:

Like nr. 54 (Avant-Garde Music), this one evoked for me the spirit of the great moderns, although in no way related to their tonal language. Though, come to think of it, I often felt a connection with Webern in how he was always thinking of the polyphony of the 15th/16th century – which these pieces relate to as well, though in a very different fashion. Here, it is a sense of motivic austerity with large jumps that evoked some of Webern’s spirit. Of course, the harmonic principle in these Fantasias is abundant flourishing rather than symmetry; nature refusing to be contained – until the end returns the work to just a handful of bare, simple intervals.

It was the day before I heard Schubert’s dactyls in the gears of my IV pump. I was at home and calling the hospital’s bed manager. A late Wednesday morning, my patience had cracked from days of waiting. Under blue skies the pavements and walls were already overspilling with heat and fatigue, despite it only being May. ‘I know who you are’, the bed manager said. ‘You’re coming in today.’ There had been three discharges on the ward that morning, and I was the third on his list to take their places. In fact, he said, he had been just about to call me.

Three weeks ago, I had gone into hospital for a routine check-up. Depending on how well I am, this is a journey I take every two or three months – across London to a former TB hospital, situated like a skull amidst the whitewashed terraces and luxury cars of the super-rich. It’s an irony-rich environment, and I can’t say I don’t enjoy walking my troubled body through the streets of those who live without friction. But the visits themselves are always anxious. Clinic appointments for chronic illness are like sitting exams, but ones for which you don’t get a certificate and in which you can never do well. A scraped pass is your best result: you haven’t got worse; come back in three months and we’ll try it again.

Or maybe it’s like defending yourself in court. The prosecution compiles data, conducts analyses of tests and trend lines. In defence, you have only your words. A lot hinges on how honestly you describe your symptoms, how you have been feeling and how well you have been looking after yourself. In this upside-down world, it is in your interests to get caught. Yes, your honour, the prosecution’s case is correct; things are as bad as they seem. Please do what you can to make them better. But unlike court, you don’t swear an oath. The only agreement you make is with yourself: the bargain of your long-term health against your immediate future. And the incentives are to be economical with that truth: to try to stay out of hospital, conceal how unwell you really feel, how hard things have become, how little you’ve done to look after yourself. Convince your doctors that you are OK – that the results they are seeing on their screen are a temporary blip, that they don’t signal a worsening of symptoms, that you’re pretty sure that with some more care to your physio and exercise (which you will definitely do, definitely beginning as soon as you get home) – and they will send you home, maybe with some oral medication and a stern word, and no need to be admitted.

This was not one of those times. My test numbers and my scans showed unmistakably that I was not doing well. At my last appointment, I had been prescribed a course of Co-trimoxazole – an antibiotic used in CF cases to treat the infection Burkholderia cepacia – in response to a more productive cough and a drop in my lung function. I was already taking spoonfuls of a revoltingly sticky, foul-tasting anti-fungal medicine called Itraconazole to fight an infection of aspergillus. And that, as well as performing its own ravages, was eliciting in me an allergic response called ABPA (allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis) that responded to aspergillus spores by asthmatically tightening and inflaming my airways, making them even harder than usual to clear. And less than a year ago, I had been admitted for a course of IV antibiotics, my first in five years, to try to control a flare-up of my recurring Pseudomonas infection.

None of this seemed to have had much effect. Reviewing the wreckage, my consultant described to me the multifactorial nature of what was happening. The aspergillus infection was bad enough, but my allergic response was creating opportunities for my Pseudomonas as well. Progress meant tackling all three. Summarising the situation to my GP, he noted ‘I think he is heading towards a further course of IV antibiotics but I also feel that poor control of his ABPA is likely to be contributing’. In addition to IV antibiotics, he suggested adding Caspofungin, a relatively new heavy-duty antifungal, as well as a high-intensity blast of hydrocortisone to bring down the inflammation. Both would also be delivered intravenously. In clinic we agreed that, pending the results of some blood tests to check on the state of my infections, I would come onto the ward for at least two weeks of these drugs and some intensive physio. I could already see my days spooling out in an unending attachment to an IV pump.

It was a tough blow. I had avoided hospital for most of my thirties, coming in just once that decade. And now it was only a year since my last admission. Twice in my forties, and I was only forty-one. On the train home I made dark notes to myself on my phone, about the ‘drip drip of slightly bad news’, the ‘unwavering state of deception’ required in the face of shortened life expectancy. ‘Hospitals are where people usually go to do one of two things’, I wrote. ‘I go for neither. [Still] alive, but a little worse. And every time, I pick myself up, consider some lifestyle changes, a little extra treatment, resolve to do better. It’s like New Year’s Day every eight weeks.’ Nothing we’d thrown at the problem in the last year had made a difference, and a sense of inevitability was starting to descend. Once is wobble; twice is pattern.

A few days later, my blood work confirmed that, although the fungal infection was not as bad as feared, I should still come in. I told those who needed to know, and tensed.

Apart from all the other parts, the worst part of a hospital admission is the waiting. Bed space is unpredictable and for patients with CF – who need single occupancy, isolated rooms so we don’t give ourselves exciting new pathogens to deal with – very limited. To add to the complexity, admissions might be required for long-term maintenance reasons, like mine, or for emergencies. Emergencies get to jump the queue. Planning takes place daily, in the narrow window between late morning, when consultants sign patients out for discharge, and early afternoon, when people might be able to leave home in time to arrive at the hospital before the end of the day.

‘So shall I come in, then?’ I asked, wrong-footed. For all the waiting, I still felt unprepared. ‘Yes’, came the reply. ‘Definitely.’

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I’m writing the morning after returning home from two weekends on the Suffolk coast. I was partly there to write: to get into that unique space that a few days alone can bring, to see a whole project at once and to organise its parts. The project was Schubert Dub, and paying subscribers (why not become one!) will see some of the fruits of that work before long. But in addition to getting words on the board, the main outcome was clarity about several of the larger structural issues that I’ve been tangling with.

And I was partly there for the Aldeburgh Festival – at which I hosted two pre-concert talks this year, with mezzo Dame Sarah Connolly and conductor Ryan Bancroft on a baking hot Friday, and with composer/conductor Ryan Wigglesworth and violist Lawrence Power on a cooler Saturday before the premiere of Wigglesworth’s lyrical, chiming, beautifully constructed Viola Concerto. Two other concerts were the real highlights for me, though. On Thursday, I got to see the brilliant Sean Shibe on the Hepworth lawn, with the reedbeds behind him and hirundines overhead, play down the midsummer sun with music by Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and others. Wolfe’s LAD has come across my radar a few times this year, but it wasn’t until hearing it live in Shibe’s arrangement for electric guitar and loopstation that I recognised it as the missing link between the bagpipes and Steve Hillage. Absolutely tremendous.

And the previous weekend, I was fortunate to see Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s afternoon recital of Schubert Ländler and Kurtág Játékok. On stage were three pianos (two grands, one upright) and one celesta. A small number of audience chairs arranged in a drift between them and across the stage. This was a concert with magic in every corner, beginning with the moment Aimard stood up from the first of the two grands – the one upstage left – and its strings continued to ring with the last notes of Kurtág he had just played. OK, I thought, he’s positioned himself so he can stand with his foot still on the pedal. But then, as he started to walk slowly to the other grand, downstage right, it started to play by itself: automated, of course, but the effect achieved seamlessly. It stopped as he sat at the second grand and began to play Schubert. And so on: for more than an hour, a dialogue and dance between instruments and composers. In their different ways, both the Schubert and Kurtág collections are versions of the same piece turned over and over. And Aimard leaned into this, making his moves through changes and similarities of texture, gesture or simply tone. The afternoon acquired the qualities of a dream: had we heard this before? Had we heard this?

And then he left the stage, silently, without applause, as the player piano continued once more on its way. A beautiful moment, but it was trumped by the coup-de-théâtre as Aimard reappeared, at a piano none of us had noticed behind our seats. A gasp at the prestige, a twist of the head and a little more Kurtág before we awoke.

Interview with Heloïse Werner

For this issue, I’m delighted to give you an interview with the brilliant singer and composer Heloïse Werner. I spoke to Heloïse over Zoom from her home, and she was generous with her time and thoughts – and with a really close editorial read, for which I am very grateful!

For anyone who has been paying attention to new music in the UK over the last ten years, Werner needs little introduction. Born in France but resident here since winning a choral scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge in 2010, she went on to study at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. In 2016, she appeared with the Multi-Story Orchestra in a performance of Steve Reich’s Music for Large Ensemble as part of the extended BBC Proms programme, and since then has made a career as a soloist, ensemble singer and composer. Her first group, the Hermes Experiment, was formed in 2013 with harpist Anne Denholm, clarinettist Oliver Pashley and bassist Marianne Schofield; in 2021, it won the Young Artist Award of the RPS. More recently, she has formed a trio, miré, with her husband, cellist Colin Alexander and pianist/organist Kit Downes. Their debut EP, Revelries, was released on Delphian at the start of the year.

As a composer, perhaps Werner’s breakout work was her one-woman opera, The Other Side of the Sea, developed in part during a week-long residency in 2018 at Snape Maltings, with her librettist Octavia Bright and cellist Zoë Martlew. Since then, she has written for the Manchester Collective, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Aurora Orchestra, CBSO and many others. This summer, she makes her Proms debut as a composer, with The Wood Pigeon, a BBC commission for Evelyn Glennie, the BBC Singers and the Fantasia Orchestra. That work can be heard on 11 August, and it gave me an excuse to talk to Heloïse about this and her multi-hyphenate career.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Could we start with your way into contemporary music? Were there gateway composers or gateway pieces that pulled you into it?

Heloïse Werner: When I was a teenager, I was a member of the French radio children’s choir, La Maîtrise de Radio France. I think I was about twelve when I joined. It was a special choir in which we had five hours of normal school every morning, and then every afternoon we’d have choir and also piano lessons, singing lessons, and we would do a lot of concerts.

So actually from a very young age, I was introduced without really realising it to lots of new music. Because as the children’s choir of French radio, we were often asked to premiere new works as part of quite big concerts. There was an array of mostly French living composers who we would perform and premiere. So I was straight into it without really realising. More recently, I’ve been thinking about how lucky I’ve been to have had this exposure to lots of different types of music quite early on. Some of it quite tricky to perform; we were really pushed in all directions.

TRJ: Can you remember any of that repertory?

HW: Yeah – Edith Canat de Chizey, Isabelle Aboulker, Thierry Machuel. There are loads. Also sometimes more jazz stuff, like a composer called Thierry Lalo, who wrote a children’s opera that we performed; a composer from Catalonia called Bernat Vivancos with very beautiful stuff.

TRJ: A real range then, not just the odd thing here or there.

HW: It was a lot. And regularly, I would say. Sometimes there were concerts where it was, I don’t know, five or six new commissions that we were premiering as part of a big new music festival. That was my introduction to contemporary music.

TRJ: When you came over to the UK to be a choral scholar, I imagine you were probably not doing as much new music then?

HW: I was in the choir of Clare College, Cambridge and we did a mixture. We did do some contemporary music and new pieces. I also studied composition as part of my degree; I took that as one of my main modules when I could choose it in my second and third years. My teacher was Giles Swayne, and he was at the time also composer in residence at the college. So we would also sing quite a lot of his music, which was great.

And because I was studying composition, part of that was that you’d get your student friends to record your pieces for your portfolios, or to organise new music concerts. So I was involved in it at the university level, let’s say.

TRJ: And you were already composing at that point as well, then?

HW: Actually, I started composing when I was in La Maîtrise. They had the opportunity to enter a little composition competition. I entered it twice and I won both times; the prize was that the choir would perform the piece in a concert. So that was my first proper experience. The first time, I think I was about fourteen. And when I was growing up, I also liked to write songs. I would sing and play at the piano. So I’d always written stuff.

And then when I went to university I was singing and also still playing the cello quite a lot and doing other things, but composition was also part of the portfolio.

TRJ: I’m interested in this idea of being a singer-composer. Obviously, historically, there are a lot of pianist-composers, and there’s a clear way in which sitting down at the piano, working out harmonies or whatever, feeds very easily into composing. But as a singer, do you sing into your compositions, as it were? Or are you writing on paper and then some bits you might sing? How do the two things connect for you when you’re writing?

HW: I definitely use my voice a lot. I would say I come up with a lot of the material singing it, I’ll record it into my phone and then transcribe it and orchestrate it. Even when it’s not a vocal piece necessarily, like an orchestra piece or a quartet piece, I’ll often get ideas for melodic lines or motifs with my voice and then transcribe it, arrange it and orchestrate it so that it fits whatever instruments I’m using.

Obviously when I am writing for voice, whether it’s for my voice or another singer’s, then I also sing everything I write. But then also, my first instrument was the cello. I started the cello when I was very young. And when I was a teenager, as well as being in the choir, I did a lot of cello – which I still did a bit at university and then now I don’t really. But during my upbringing, the cello was definitely a big part of my identity.

So I love writing for strings, and I understand string writing quite well because I am a cellist as well.

TRJ: If you’re composing, as it were, from the voice, do you feel that gives you access to certain compositional approaches or materials? If you’re writing at the piano, for example, you can understand how you’re going to be led by a certain harmonic or contrapuntal way of thinking. But if you’re starting from the voice, does that give you certain affordances that you might not get from somewhere else?

HW: I think with the voice stuff, I use it more for melodic lines and motifs and earworms. But I also spend quite a while at the piano working out the harmony and the chords. I don’t do that all on paper. I don’t have that ability. Once I’ve got the harmonic structure and the chords, the melodic lines and also the concept of the piece, then I’ll sit down and try to put everything together.

But with the voice, I think there’s something quite nice … I’ll often have an idea and sing it into my phone, and generally that ends up in the piece. I quite like the immediacy of it – that I can just sing something that feels good to me, singing it, I might tweak it a little bit, but often the first idea ends up in the final piece.

And when it is a piece that involves voice or voices, and especially when it involves my voice, I can experiment with certain sounds and techniques, and more unusual sounds and effects. I definitely workshop a lot, just on my own. And then try to notate things in a formal notation that I’ve worked out by performing or practising. Some kind of cool sound that I can do, and then I try to explain that on a score.

TRJ: A lot of your music has voices in it somewhere, whether it’s as a soloist or chorus. When you’re writing for voice, do you feel like you’re composing for your own voice or are you trying to be a bit more neutral – particularly in a piece that’s not necessarily going to be sung by you?

HW: I would say it depends if I know that the piece is going to be sung by me at least the first time, or if it’s a commission for another singer. There are two kinds of cases. Sometimes the singer might ask me to write them a song cycle, or a choir will ask me to write a piece. I would approach that differently to a piece that I’m writing for myself or myself plus other people, when I know I’ll be in the room and I’ll be able to demonstrate certain things.

But obviously, even if it’s a piece like that when I’m going to be the person recording it or premiering, I am trying to notate it as specifically as possible so that another singer could perform it. When it’s a piece that I’m premiering, I’m very much writing for my voice. But when it’s for other singers, then I have the other singer’s voice in mind.

And when it’s for choir, I would say, I guess it’s sort of a middle ground. Because even if I’m writing for another singer I’ll still have my style and I’ll still probably put some of my tricks in it. But I might not go as far … I might try to write something that would also suit the performer’s performing style or voice. For instance, I’ve written a song cycle for the wonderful Helen Charlston, who’s a beautiful mezzo-soprano, and the pianist Sholto Kynoch [Knight’s Dream, 2023]. The brief was quite open, but they wanted a companion piece to Dichterliebe. So that’s quite a big task, but I could do what I wanted within that.

So I wrote a cycle in five movements, setting the prologue from Heine’s poems, which Schumann didn’t set, as a sort of prologue to Dichterliebe. That’s just been released actually, so it’s available to listen.

https://open.qobuz.com/track/397207889

And if you listen it, there’s definitely my style in it. There’s a fast movement that’s got more of the virtuoso, acrobatic vocal things, and the outer movements are more folky and pure. I tried to do something that I’m very satisfied with, but that suits Helen’s voice as well and her beautiful, lush timbre and very rich mezzo voice. So it’s a mixture.

And when I write for choir, equally, depending on which choir it is that’s commissioning me and how experienced they are, how much rehearsal time they’ll have or how comfortable they are with experimental sounds, then I’ll adapt. And of course, depending on the text I’m setting and the concept of the piece.

So there’s quite a wide range, I would say. From quite nice and folky to some quite out there, and everything in between.

TRJ: Who would you say are your compositional inspirations?

HW: Well Giles Swayne is really the first one. He was a wonderful teacher in that he didn’t tell you what to do, but he really encouraged you to pull things apart – to go into the material and into the sound. He was definitely an inspiration. Also, his music was an inspiration for me at the time and still is.

And then Errollyn Wallen has been quite a big mentor for me. She’s just been very kind in my career, supporting me and putting me forward for things. And again, never telling me what to do, but just supporting me in my choices and my compositional voice.

Obviously, Meredith Monk comes to mind as a big figure of a composer-performer who uses their voice ...

TRJ: … someone who really is in that space.

HW: … in an exciting way. I’m also very inspired by all my colleagues. I love going to see new things – people like Oliver Leith or Josephine Stevenson, who are friends of mine but who also have quite distinctive musical voices. Or someone like Lara Agar, or Soosan Lolavar; just great people who have interesting things to say in music.

I think I’m always inspired by hearing the music of today and people creating new things. But I love early music as well, and I grew up with lots of early music. Lots of Bach. Also lots of French singer-songwriters from a previous era. People who, again, were so multi-talented at writing lyrics, beautiful singing, accompanying themselves on the piano, and just able to be very direct with their music.

I wouldn’t say I’m trying to be anyone or to copy anything, but obviously everything that I hear informs what I do in some ways.

TRJ: I wondered about someone Georges Aperghis, that jumping between registers of voice and so on …

HW: Definitely, definitely a big inspiration. Actually, he’s someone that I discovered quite young as well. I was still at the Maîtrise. It was towards the end of my time there and one of the teachers, who’s a a great singer, did a recital of various unaccompanied vocal things, including quite a lot of his Récitations, and I remember being really blown away by it. I’d never heard anything like it.

And then I started performing them and they definitely inspired me. Hugely, I would say. Also just to realise that this is something you can do. Also the visual element of the scores, and the theatrical element of his music is something that I’ve been really attracted to, how to bring theatre into music in a very intertwined way.

TRJ: I really felt that from close-ups. Where obviously the style owes something to Aperghis, with that chopping and changing kind of thing, but also you’re doing a lot – actually, you and your partner – you’re doing a lot of acting as well as singing. That’s a very Aperghis thing to build in as well.

In that piece, how much of the visual expression is written in? Or is it you putting that in as the performer?

HW: The idea with this piece is essentially exploring different characters. There are four characters. And it is trying to explore those characters just through sounds without words. So there’s a character who’s super overly keen and excited, the sort of person who talks too much and always wants to help. The second character is the sort of person that you’d meet in a very admin job who is constantly unable to help or will be like, ‘No, you have to come back tomorrow’, or ‘No, we cannot help you’.

And then there’s a character who’s really posh and so posh that they can’t really talk at all. And the final character is someone super chilled – a bit like Ollie Leith [laughs]. Just a very, very chilled out character.

The idea is that we meet the different characters and we switch from character one to character three, back to character one, and the violin is also part of the character. They add to the character musically, but also with the actions they have to do.

So yes, there are specific actions written in the score. When, for instance, for the chilled character, the violinist has to sit down on a high stool, and it says where exactly they sit down and so on. And I’ve got hand-held percussions for different characters, and that’s all kind of in the score, timed rhythmically, it’s all fixed.

And then, I guess, in terms of my facial expressions, it just goes with the characters, so I know I’m trying to be that kind of character. I’ve tried to kind of do that musically, but then I’m also imagining being that character, so I guess it affects the theatricality of it in my face.

TRJ: There’s enough in the score already that that’s going to come out more or less naturally.

HW: Yeah.

TRJ: I wanted to go back to one of your first major pieces, which is The Other Side of the Sea. Within that piece, I think there’s a lot of stuff about your experience of becoming bilingual, of coming to England, learning English and then working out who you are within that duality from a linguistic point of view. What was it in particular about that experience that made you want to not only write about it, but also write about it on such a big scale?

HW: I think I’ve always loved acting and theatre. But something that I feel frustrated with living in the UK is that as someone who is a native French speaker and having learnt English – not from birth but much later – I find it very difficult to act in English because speaking in English is already a sort of performance. Accessing real emotions, reading a text in English – I feel very comfortable reading a script in French, but doing it in English I find very difficult. So deciding to write a solo opera about it explores that tension. I guess music has a way of bridging that tension. Because it’s kind of a performance within a performance. But it’s not just speaking, it’s obviously with sound and music added, and that allows me to get to the real emotions.

TRJ: It’s interesting what you say about the difficulty you have in acting in English. Have you been here long enough now that you sing in English?

HW: Yeah. I can definitely sing in English, and actually, I find it much easier to sing a song in English than just to say those words straight without the music, if that makes sense. Because adding the music adds a level of performance, so, I don’t know, it makes it more performative …

TRJ: The performer part of your brain engages and takes over?

HW: Yeah, exactly. There’s a performative state that’s heightened. But what I did with The Other Side of the Sea is essentially … throughout the piece the idea, roughly anyway, is that I try to teach the audience a language that’s made of kind of abstract sounds. It’s kind of trying to create a universal language that people will understand that is not with words, but actually with sounds and music.

I did a condensed version of the opera called Confessional, which gradually replaces words with sounds and then creates a new sort of lexicon of sounds. And then the audience can sort of understand what I’m saying, because they can connect a sound with the meaning.

And so what happens – as well as other things – in The Other Side of the Sea is that this happens gradually, and at the end I perform the whole thing with just sounds. And actually, when I do perform that piece, I feel very comfortable and very myself because it feels very kind of raw and direct. I can really just do the actions and perform the task. There’s nothing that gets in the way.

TRJ: I really love Confessional because it does, as you say, do something that’s quite easy to follow in terms of the linguistic substitution of actions for words. But then it’s also doing something quite specifically sonic and musical in the way that those words are fitted into a timbral and rhythmic space.

It reminded me of an essay I wrote for Marie Schreer last year. She had an album that was related to her experience of being a German musician in the UK and again, not really knowing where she was from, as it were. And told me about how her violin became kind of an extension of her voice and her language – it was a space that was always her, but it didn’t need to be attached to a place, as it were. I’m not saying your experience is necessarily the same as Marie’s, but her instrument is a violin, so it’s external, whereas yours is a voice, so it’s very internal and very much more closely attached to language. I wondered how you thought of that relationship of voice, text and everything?

HW: Definitely. Actually, in close-ups, those characters without words are made up of quite raw sounds or effects, quite guttural things that I can do with my voice that are really connected to my body and feel very anchored to the emotion I’m trying to convey or the character I’m trying to convey. And in some of my other pieces, I just love playing around with my voice, with sounds not attached to words. And that feels very connected to what I’m trying to do. Yeah, it’s a very physical sensation, as well as being a mental one.

TRJ: It kind of sidesteps the language question and just becomes a more direct kind of doing?

HW: Exactly, yeah. And then, of course, I also love using words. I’m not a writer myself, so I collaborate with other writers who write the words and I love setting words and playing with words in different ways. For instance, I wrote this piece for Lawrence Power and me, a duo piece called Mixed Phrases, and I used a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. The structure is that there are two worlds within the poem, there’s the world of earth and then there’s a world in the sky that is more ethereal. And so the world that’s on earth is a familiar place, and so that’s where Lawrence plays his viola. It’s his first instrument and also it’s the Rimbaud poem in its normal form in French, so the language I know.

And then the other world is the more unknown ethereal world, so for that Lawrence switches to violin, which is almost his second language and the text there, what I did was I cut all the text up. Mixed it all together and created made-up words. So it’s kind of nonsensical. I also based the music, or at least the effect of the voice, on my little half-sister who was about three at the time, and she was learning to speak and making all kinds of wonderful sounds. So some of the intonation of this made-up language is based on her learning a new language. That piece plays with a kind of text, but also a deconstructed and reconstructed text, and also the intonation of a young child learning to speak.

TRJ: We started this by talking about a piece that’s now eight years old. Is this engagement with language – and particularly with two languages at once – still a big theme in your work?

HW: I think probably less than it used to be at the beginning. I think this is what was on my mind eight years ago, more than it is now, because now I feel a lot more familiar. But I still have the same problem with reading text in English or reading a script. I still find that really hard.

But yeah, I don’t think I only write about that now. I guess generally, I’m always interested in language, and in words and text and sounds and how they interact and that. And characters and how, like with close-ups, you can create characters or a story or emotions with sounds, not with words or with reconstructed words. I guess that’s still part of what I’m interested in, but now not just based on my own experience, more generally.

TRJ: That seems like a good place to turn to The Wood Pigeon, then. Again this piece has a chorus in it, so there’s a vocal element, but you’ve also got Evelyn Glennie. What is the basic summary of the piece?

HW: I guess there are a few things. One thing is to say is that I was really keen to write something funny. I wanted to write a comedy piece. Because I love comedy and it’s something I’m thinking about quite a lot – humour and music and comedy and music.

So that’s one thing. And then it’s not very long, it’s like five minutes. So the question is how to do something that has an impact in such a short amount of time – but also for quite a lot of forces because it’s got orchestra, choir and solo percussion. So the concept, roughly, is that it is like a rehearsal for the concert. I’m pre-recording a tape part as the composer. Commenting on it in hopefully quite a funny way and with quite a lot of in jokes about the new music world and everything that goes with it; but also not having enough time to rehearse stuff, and the general things that people do in rehearsals or how orchestral musicians or singers behave – without being rude and offensive! [laughs] And also with my inner voice of the composer in the room slightly freaking out and just trying to give good instructions to everyone in front of you, but with not that much time.

There’s a tape part, which I’m actually doing at the moment, that would be triggered by one of the percussionists at very specific times. And it’s basically me – there are maybe eight times where the tape part is triggered, so it’s not constantly – when I say, okay, let’s go from letter A or I suggest, can we hear this? And then it goes wrong on purpose ... And by the end of the piece, when we get to the end, I ask if we can now run it and they say, no, we’ve run out of time and then I say, okay, cool, see you at the gig. And that’s how the piece ends.

But the actual music is totally composed within that. It’s a setting of a poem by a friend of mine, Ali Lewis, called ‘The Wood Pigeon’. It’s a very cute, short poem, and basically, I’ve set it so that we do hear the whole poem. I’ve divided the poems into three sections, three short movements almost. And so we do get to hear the whole poem set to music in a very specific way, but it’s all within this sort of theatrical thing of it being a rehearsal. The two outer parts are completely set and orchestrated in a very specific way. The first part is quite playful and the last part starts with just a choir, singing this kind of counterpoint, like a chorale, and then everyone jumps in and it finishes.

And the middle bit is like a game. It sets the two middle lines of the poem about the pigeon fluffing his wings and stuff. And the idea is something I love to do. I’ve done it on a smaller scale, the idea where there’s one person who leads what happens. So one person will have a set of musical material, like box 1, box 2, box 3. Everyone else will have the corresponding material for box 1, for box 2, for box 3. And you have to catch them. So if Evelyn is on box one, everyone needs to play box one, musical material. And if Evelyn then jumps to box 3, everyone has to jump as quickly as possible to the musical material of box 3.

So for box 1 is like she’s on vibraphone. The second one, she’s on the rototoms, and the 3rd one on the tam-tam. So she’s switching between them and she’s got very specific things to do, and everyone has to follow her as quickly as possible. It’s hopefully quite fun!

And by the end, it gets really, really hard and then hopefully it just falls apart and then the tape part says, okay, well, that’ll be all right on the night sort of thing and then we move on. The whole piece should be quite fun, light, hopefully funny, quite surprising.

We’ll see how it goes. With the tape part, I’m finding it hard to know what will people laugh at and what they won’t, because I need to imagine leaving a long enough gap after I’ve said something for potentially people laughing or not, and then how long to leave between my sentences so the laughter doesn’t cover what I’m saying. But maybe no one’s going to laugh, in which case you don’t want to leave long pauses, so ...

TRJ: Very hard to do if it’s all recorded.

HW: I was semi-wondering whether I wanted to do it live, but actually I think it’s more cool if it’s pre-recorded and kind of planned. It’s part of the piece that it’s like a performance within the rehearsal, within the performance; it’s kind of weird. And I like the idea of a tape part, I’ve never really done that before.

TRJ: The way you were describing it also feels, with those interjections of ‘Let’s go back to section A’ or whatever, that you’re doing something with the linearity of the poem. You could just do it straight and it would have its own musical arc. But this format is a way to chop up the timeline similarly to how the characters in close-ups cut across each other.

HW: Yes. The first two minutes are the first two verses of the poem, but the text is quite broken down. The first line is ‘Breaking cover’, but you hear brr–k–co-ver, the text appears gradually. And the middle bit is ‘Its flutter of greys and browns’, and again I’m dissecting the text, you don’t hear just the words.

And then at the very end, I’ve done it so that this kind of you hear the final lines of the poem and then you hear basically the whole poem again, but with a kind of hocketing thing where one voice will do a syllable and then the next voice will do the next syllable. So you hear the whole poem but no one’s saying any whole word. And so at the end, you do have the whole poem in one go, but not just one voice saying the poem, it’s across the choir, with added bells and kind of other soundscapes.

I really like the poem. It’s really sweet and quite cute, and at the end the final line is ‘Like the piano keys, you only see when they’re played’, and so the poem also worked with the whole idea of it being a rehearsal and being inside a rehearsal, a performance within a performance, and hidden things.

TRJ: Have you done a lot of work yet with Evelyn Glennie herself?

HW: I had a workshop with her, back in March I think, I went to her studio. I basically had the structure in my head and I’d written roughly her part. I’ve never really written for percussion before. A lot of it is on vibraphone, and then for the middle section there’s the tam-tam and the rototoms. So working out how quickly she can go from one to the other for the game section and also experimenting with different sticks and clever ways to switch, to use the same stick from one to the other. But yeah, she was super nice and really warm and very up for anything, really.

TRJ: Presumably a lot of the comedy element is going to rely on her timing?

HW: That’s something I wanted to be careful about because I didn’t want the comedy element to just rely on the audio tape part because Evelyn won’t be able to hear that. So I wanted to give her a leading role in the middle section. She’s very performative and her task is to make it as hard as possible for the orchestra.

I mean, the middle part is literally only two minutes in total. So each game is fifteen seconds maximum. She needs to surprise people every time, to make it as performative and fun as possible and I think she’ll be great at that.

I wanted to give her that role so that she’s in charge of the comedy in that section. And then the outer sections, she’s on vibraphone and she has like a solo part, but it’s more, I don’t know, like accompanying the choir. And in the last section, she’s playing these bell-like things on the vibraphone, this tune that’s still a solo part, but less virtuosic.

And also in the first part, in the ‘breaking cover’ section, it’s kind of playful and quite virtuosic for the singers, and it’s quite fun, light orchestration. And then I say, Okay, great. Could we now hear it again? Could we hear the version that I sent through last night? And I’ve written an alternate version that’s really, really bad, in which Evelyn has this really annoying virtuoso part, repeated semiquavers that keep going up in semi-tones, and which is really, really irritating. I can’t really explain it. The orchestra and the singers play what they were doing before, but Evelyn does this other part, and it sounds totally different and hilarious and really bad.

And then I say, stop, stop, okay? Bin that, that was terrible!

So she has her moments in the limelight and also carrying the comedy.

TRJ: Is it all basically written now?

HW: The only thing that I’m finalising is the tape part, and just getting my husband [cellist Colin Alexander] to help me a bit. We’ve got a little recording setup at home so I can record it all upstairs. Just getting the tone right and tweaking the wording as well. And then the final text because I’m putting the text in the full score.

I’ve sort of written a draft of the text, but until I record it I’m not quite sure of the exact wording until I’ve tried it out.

TRJ: The last thing I wanted to ask you about was goes back to being a singer. I realised that you will be the third soprano that I’ve interviewed here.

I spoke to Stephanie Lamprea last year and then Juliet Fraser earlier this year, and now you. And Stephanie and Juliet have written and thought a lot about the position of the singer within contemporary music, in particular. And I was curious as to whether you had thoughts on this. Because a lot of new music is ensemble-based, but a singer, even if they’re in the ensemble, looks like a soloist and behaves (at least musically) like a soloist. But new music is not necessarily a kind of diva-ish sort of space. It tends to be a much flatter hierarchy. So I was just curious as to how you think about that and how you negotiate that world.

HW: Maybe because some singers – more on the operatic stage or in that kind of world – there’s this thing where they’ve always wanted to be a singer growing up. And for me, that wasn’t really ever a thing. I loved singing and obviously I was in this amazing choir. But … I wanted to be a musician. I think that I knew. Even though I also liked other things, I decided that I needed to be a musician.

But then within that … obviously singing I did more and more, then my voice developed, you know, at university and everything, and then I ended up singing a lot. But in my head, it was always being a musician more than just being a singer. And obviously the composition stuff was also part of that. And when I used to play the cello as well, it was all part of the same type of work in a way.

And obviously I’m not really into the diva vibe! [laughs]

But I suppose the reason why singing was attractive to me as well was the theatrical aspect and the fact that I love going to the theatre, I love acting. So singing was naturally something that crosses some of these skills or interests.

But what’s quite nice … I have been in a few new operas, and obviously when I did my solo show – but that was a bit different because, while it is an opera in a way, it was just me on stage, so it’s different – I have enjoyed being in opera, in bigger productions, but what I found is that the creativity was often rather limited. I think that depends on the production and the director, but I didn’t have particularly amazing experiences. The few experiences I’ve had in new operas where I was just a puppet and being used for just a tiny bit of my skills were quite frustrating.

What I’ve really enjoyed as a singer is that I’m really lucky in the sense that I do a lot of chamber music. So with the Hermes Experiment, even though I am the singer in that group, and of course, I will often carry the story or will have the words, it does feel like in that group, we are four equal voices, which is why I love it so much. I don’t think anyone who sees Hermes will see it as voice-plus-instruments. It’s very equal. That feels really, really good, that environment.

I also love performing more improvised stuff. We’ve been playing together for a while, but we recently properly formed as a trio, with Colin and Kit Downes as miré. We perform like our own staff and it’s semi-improvised, but we each bring a tune and then we compose it together in a semi-improvised way. And that also feels super-exciting because again, when I’m performing on stage with them, I never feel like I’m on the forefront at all, it very much feels like three equal voices. And also in that setting, I’m often using my voice quite instrumentally. Sometimes we do arrangements of folk songs or set pieces, but often it’s more sonic. Wordless things or just creating a soundscape –exciting sounds together that I never feel like I’m the singer. I just feel like we are all equal voices in it. That’s why I love, I love, performing with them.

Obviously, I have also done stuff with like orchestra where I’m the soloist, and obviously that’s more like I’m at the front and I’m the soloist, but even then when I’ve done that often it’s been for my pieces that I’ve written and the way I’ve written them is that there’s a lot of interaction with the orchestra, and again, I don’t always use my voice purely as a kind of storyteller, but it can also be more instrumental, with lots of interactions with lots of different instruments in the orchestra. That feels more like soloistic, but I still don’t feel like a singer, I’m more like a musician.

TRJ: I suppose if you’re the singer of your own things, you get a bit more of a pass.

HW: And I think that’s why I’ve never been attracted to – well, maybe because it’s incredibly competitive and there are so many people who do it so much better than me – but singing more standard repertoire with orchestra or oratorios or classical things. I never had that desire. And also it wasn’t something I was particularly good at, or interested in working on and perfecting. There are plenty of people who do that amazingly. So in a way, I am definitely a singer, and I consider myself a singer and a composer, but I guess because of the writing as well, it’s quite linked with being a creator rather than just a singer.

TRJ: When I spoke to Stephanie, because she’d been trained in opera, she’d been trained with a bel canto voice. And then encountered the Aperghis Récitaitons, and then went, ‘Oh, I have to completely rethink what I can and should be doing with my voice’. But it sounds like you never really had that, maybe because you’d come through a choral tradition.

HW: I did still train classically; I did a master’s in singing. But I never felt totally comfortable in just doing that. And actually, I still do perform quite a lot of early stuff. I’ve got this Wigmore Hall concert coming up on 17 July that I’ve curated with four other singers [Ema Nikolovska, Adèle Charvet, Karim Sulayman and James Newby] and three cellists [Alexander, Peteris Sokolovskis and Stephanie Tress]. And the programme I’ve created is mixed, with very old music: madrigals and songs of Monteverdi, Josquin, Ockeghem and Dunstaple – that kind of repertoire, which I really enjoy singing – as well as new things, including a new piece I’ve written for everybody.

But I think probably, if you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be at Wigmore singing that repertoire, I would have been like, there’s no way, I would have felt so out of place doing that. But now I feel totally comfortable singing that sort of repertoire. I’ve found a way to feel very comfortable, vocally, and without trying to be this or that, just finding my voice. And technically feel confident that I can do that repertoire, and I can sing with the singers I’ve invited – they are really amazing singers who do a lot of opera, but are also really interesting and do not only opera but also other things and have amazing, flexible voices. I think it’ll be really exciting.

But yeah, I think I would not have imagined that I would be doing this kind of work with these kinds of top international singers. But actually doing a programme that has a mixture of old things and very new things and finding a way to tie it together in a kind of coherent way … the programme is very thought through. This whole package is not just about singing, it’s about presenting a whole concert that will make an experience for the audience.

So yeah, I think about all these things when I perform – not just turning up and singing. I think that helps me feel confident about presenting something if I’ve really thought it through. And I think it’s going to work.

TRJ: It sounds brilliant. You’re one of lots of musicians who work in contemporary music but also do some early music as well. And then there’s a two-hundred-year gap of repertory that you don’t touch. And as someone who does that, why do you find that you’re comfortable in an early music environment, whereas you wouldn’t be singing, I don’t know, Schubert, Schumann, things in the middle?

HW: I’m not sure. Obviously, not all the romantic repertoire is big, but some of it is bigger and I don’t have a big voice. There are certain things that I can’t sing. But I think with the early stuff as well, I mean, some of it is quite bonkers harmonically and stuff, you feel like you’re seeing contemporary music anyway!

You know, the harmony in Machaut and Dunstable is quite wild, actually. What I think I like about that kind of music, though, the really early stuff, is that you’re just serving the music. There’s no ego behind it or trying to prove how beautiful you sing or how great it is. There’s a certain focus that I really like: just perform this beautiful madrigal and just really enjoy the harmony and the kind of crazy shifts. And also the fact that with this type of repertoire as well, because a lot of it is so old and maybe some of it is not really well known or done a lot, you can arrange it and you can do cool things with it.

So with this concert that I’m doing in July, the whole concert is for five voices and three cellos. So we’ve arranged some of the madrigals to add three cellos, so that some of the Monteverdi madrigals will be with five voices plus three cellos, some of them shadowing some of the vocal parts and hopefully doing cool things with it.

So I think with that repertoire, it’s obviously well out of copyright, but it’s also so unusual in places and harmonically so rich, there are ways to bring it to life in a new light that I really enjoy doing. On my album close-ups, there’s a beautiful arrangement by Marianne Schofield, who’s Hermes’ bass. She’s a brilliant arranger, and she arranged this song by the Baroque composer Julie Pinel, who’s very, very unknown. I just discovered her tunes by chance – really amazing, amazing melodies and basslines. And Marianne just created out of the bassline a whole arrangement, really kind of a composition, really reimagining this music. And I love what she did with it. With that repertoire, it feels like there’s also scope for that, which to me is really exciting.

https://open.qobuz.com/track/261234444

TRJ: There’s not quite such a rigid performance practice. So in the same way with new music, you can just come at it – Let’s just read the score and play it.

HW: And perhaps also the sort of style of singing. I think when I was at music college, I was – or at least I thought I was – encouraged a bit to … not that my teacher would encourage me, but the general vibe is to try to sound very lush with lots of round sound and big sound and vibrato and all this stuff, trying to sound like a proper singer. But actually I found that doesn’t work for me, but instead finding the core of your sound and then expanding from that very pure kind of natural sound that you can make.

And with this kind of repertoire, it’s really fun to go to the really pure and simple, just produce a really nice sound. So in the Wigmore programme there’s a really nice Dunstaple three-part song, it’s just really sweet and uplifting and really fun. It’s just a little song, but obviously we’re singing it with amazing singers. Yeah, I’m really excited for that.

Invite your friends!

Reviews of some great recordings to follow below, but before those, a quick note about a new feature I’ve just switched on here: reader referrals. I’m so grateful to everyone who has followed, subscribed and read over the last eight months or so. The number of names I don’t already recognise as readers of my previous blog, or from the wider new music community, makes me think that there’s a much bigger audience for the artists whose work I celebrate here than I previously thought.

Which is why I’ve switched on Substack’s reader referrals tool. It’s a simple way for you to spread the word, introduce more people to these wonderful artists (and, ahem, me) and earn your way to some neat rewards.

How to participate

1. Share Purposeful Listening. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

Refer a friend

2. Earn benefits. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll receive special benefits:

• three referrals gets you one month of free PL;

• five referrals gets you three months of free PL; and

• fifteen referrals gets you six months of free PL.

At the moment, these are pretty vanilla, but maybe I’ll jazz them up a bit with some signed books or whatever as we go along.

There’s even a leaderboard, if that’s your thing:

Visit the leaderboard

To learn more, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Word of mouth is golden: thank you for helping out!

Recording reviews

OK, to business. This week, a fascinating project by Canadian Michael Cloud Duguay, the latest release in greyfade’s innovative FOLIO series and a pairing of Errollyn Wallen and Schubert on Delphian that I just couldn’t resist.

Michael Cloud Duguay: Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go (Watch that Ends the Night)

Originating out of a scheme to drive recording engineer Jake Nicolls’ solar-powered, RV-housed recording studio from Newfoundland to Ontario, Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go (out 10 July) is a kind of audio documentary/archive/road movie of the coastal and island settlements of Canada’s far northeast. With composer Michael Cloud Duguay, the idea was hatched to thread their route amongst seven churches located on Newfoundland island and some of the smaller islands off its north Atlantic coast. These were wooden clapboard buildings, with white walls, modest, four-sided spires, unstained glass – perhaps some criss-cross leading and a pointed or arched top to the windows the only adornments marking them as religious buildings.

Inside them, Cloud Duguay, Nicolls and their collaborators Andrew MacKelvie (composer, instrumentalist) and Dave Grenon (field recordist, engineer, co-producer) found organs in a variety of states of repair, from one buried beneath the rubble of deconsecration and abandonment to others updated with amplification and digital keyboards. Whatever their condition, they would record these instruments, as well as the voices of local residents and any other local sounds of interest (nesting birds, creaking pews, whitsling winds, etc). Kingdom Come thus recalls, in its collaging of materials, the sonic documentary work of Luc Ferrari’s Far West News, or (more of a stretch) Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin series – although I don’t hear in Cloud Duguay’s work anything of either the post-serial aesthetic in Ferrari’s work (its attachment to problematising our linear experience of real-world sound), or the use of sonic excavation and cross-pollination as a path to political realisation that is in Roberts’ albums.

What I do hear is something gentler, focused more on letting the instruments, people and places speak than on realising an aesthetic agenda. The album’s eleven tracks don’t so much outline the road trip itself as provide various perspectives on it, highlighting some of the stories it elicited. One of the best, ‘Little Seldom’ (named after a tiny settlement on Fogo Island), preserves a charming improvisation given when the group (joined by Newfoundland violinist Maria Peddle) were met unexpectedly by a small audience at the church. ‘Damnable Island’, by contrast, superimposes a single held note played on all seven organs: I think it’s an E, although with the various tunings, stops and states of repair of each instrument, it’s hard to be sure. Over this shimmeringly dissonant, Radigue-like drone, a local resident talks, in tones equally hopeful and pessimistic, of the precarity of island congregations. In its best moments, Kingdom Come suggests the comfort of community, the pleasure in small things and a humbleness that comes from wide horizons and a challenging environment.

Yet for all the album’s many attractive moments, I found it hard to be genuinely transported by it. There is, despite the stories, despite the specificities of voices and sounds and places, a curious anonymity to the sounds here. As if they have been flattened in production or by composition. Maybe that’s part of the point – when the organs strike up in particularly church-y fashion (as on the second track, ‘River of Ponds’, or the last, ‘Pond 3’), those tiny island churches off the northeast coast of Canada could be almost anywhere around the world. Acknowledging that universality or network of sonic/social connectivity is part of the story, to be sure. Yet I’m reminded of another example of sonic documentary: Annea Lockwood’s Sound Map of the Hudson River. That too combines a kind of universal sound – the movement of water – with the voices and sounds of the people, animals and settlements around it. But Lockwood brings us into those places, by the way she records the sounds of the river (here a trickling stream, there a vast estuary) and by the stories – so connected to the river and its lives – she captures in her interviews. By contrast, there’s a cosiness to Kingdom Come that rubs the edges off what I imagine to be a set of pretty extraordinary locations.

Josh Mason: kicking a dark horse (greyfade)

This is the third release in greyfade’s FOLIO imprint, launched in 2024. Starting with Kenneth Kirschner’s three cellos – a transcription by Branciforte for overdubbed cello of Kirschner’s all-electronic July 7, 2010 – the idea behind FOLIO has been to explore the interaction of analogue and digital across both music and media. To this end, all its releases so far (the second was Taylor Deupree’s sti.ll) have been issued in the form of clothbound, hardback books, with the music accessed via a QR code inside. It makes for a dualistic tactile space that feels very contemporary: one chunky in your hands, printed on heavy paper stock; the other requiring almost no tactile engagement at all.

Josh Mason’s kicking a dark horse (out 26 June) may be the most experimental of these releases so far. Whereas three cellos, for example, contained essays by Kirschner, Branciforte and cellist Christopher Gross, for kicking dark horses, Mason has written an experimental, 100-page novella/diary/poem. Fragmented, mixing registers, settings and storylines, it contains memories of home, conversations with family, cloudbursts, bridges, sunlight … Its early recurring images of rain and circuity marry well with the music’s liquid, crackling language. Gently articulated, but detailed enough to hold the attention, this is a beatless space of hums and echoes, shimmering like light on ripples.

Writing sleevenotes, writing programme notes, one dreams of creating a kind of multimedia experience for your reader/listener, in which the two creations dialogue with one another. Realistically, I don’t think that’s ever the case. It’s a difficult thing to pull off, a kind of solitary, internal opera for the home or head. But it seems exactly the kind of thing an imprint like FOLIO is designed for, and Mason has come close to a truly complementary reading/listening experience, in which the music’s recursive structures, its play of artifice and reality are reflected in his text’s collage of cryptic observation, poetry and text messages.

Dialogues: Schubert | Errollyn Wallen (Delphian)

Julien Van Mellaerts, baritone; Dylan Perez, piano

Recital discs that pair Schubert with more modern contributions are hardly rare; only last year, Benjamin Appl recorded a great example, Lines of Life, that brought together Schubert and Kurtág. On the whole, though, those conversations are contrived from a mix of Schubert with existing contemporary compositions, chosen by the performer. I know of one recording, by the Irish pianist Michael McHale, that features pieces by Schubert (the four Impromptus, D899) alternated with three newly commissioned responses (by Simon Connor, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and Garrett Sholdice). But this pairing of Schubert’s posthumously compiled Schwanengesang and Errollyn Wallen’s The Lake (out 3 July) is the only one I can bring to mind in which both composer and performers have worked together to create not so much a counterpoint or response to Schubert but a genuinely new thing of which his music forms part. I may be wrong, of course – and please let me know in the comments if I am.

The idea came about from the programme that Van Mellaerts and Perez devised for the 2022 Holland Park Opera summer concert series: three cycles by Schubert, each with a twist. For Die schöne Müllerin, Christopher Purves added recitations of the poems Schubert didn’t set; for Winterreise, Roderick Williams sang in an English translation by Jeremy Sams; and for Schwanengesang, a cycle of five songs was commissioned that would reflect on and could be performed alongside the Schubert. The final step, though, was Van Mellaerts’ and Perez’s realisation, on receiving Wallen’s score, that it and the non-narrative Schubert collection could be re-ordered and combined to create a loose story. ‘The whole idea was to reinvent something that we’ve heard a hundred times, and to change the idea of what a Schubert song recital could be’, Van Mellaerts is quoted as saying in Katy Hamilton’s detailed sleevenote.

That story is evidently very flexible: the two performers admit to altering the order of songs almost every time they give them, and this disc is no exception, with the choice being made to begin with Wallen for once, rather than Schubert. ‘I wanted to set up a soundworld that’s different’, is Van Mellaert’s explanation.

In truth, the soundworld of the first of Wallen’s songs is not that far from Schubert’s: hushed, resonant, a simple melody coloured by kaleidoscoping harmonic changes; we are not a million miles away from ‘Ihr Bild’, to come later in the cycle. When Wallen’s ‘The Lake’ is thus followed by Schubert’s ‘Liebesbotschaft’, despite the contrasting effervescence of the latter, the move seems entirely logical. This is a gift Schubert gives to projects like this – so certainly does every song of his establish itself, and with such immediacy – but nevertheless, this is a project whose parts are made to work by connection rather than contrast.

The danger with such interleaving is that the transitions from Schubert back to the contemporary work can be unpleasantly jarring; I feel a little of this with the Appl disc mentioned above: at the very least, ears and mind are made to work harder going from Schubert to Kurtág than vice versa. I don’t know how much thought Wallen gave to this when composing The Lake, but on Dialogues, her music grows just as naturally out of Schubert’s as his sheds illumination on hers. The emergence of her ‘Ready’ out of Schubert’s ‘Kriegers Ahnung’, as if colouring the echoes of the warrior’s anxious cries into the night, is simply gorgeous. The shift in viewpoint, from that of a soldier to that of an uncertain artist, that Wallen’s words provide is pregnant with suggestion. Just as important to effects like these, of course, is Mellaerts’ and Perez’s sequencing, which is throughout attuned to continuities of tone, texture and mood.

There have been musically more radical approaches to this kind of Schubert+ recital; I’m looking forward to hearing how Pierre-Laurent Aimard does it at Aldeburgh next weekend. But few have done it quite as sensitively or as thoughtfully as Wallen, Van Mellaerts and Perez do here.

Writing (and speaking) elsewhere

I had such a lovely time reading from Schubert Dub at this year’s SPARC symposium at City St George’s University. A select but discerning audience, and I was really moved and grateful for the feedback that was offered. Something about the experiences I was sharing seemed to encourage people to open up about their own stories, which I wasn’t expecting and which I found profoundly touching. Thanks to everyone who came; I’m motivated to keep pushing deeper into this stuff.

If you’re coming to the Aldeburgh Festival this year, you’ve got a chance to see/hear me again, when I will be moderating a pre-concert conversation with Ryan Wigglesworth and Lawrence Power about Ryan’s new Viola Concerto, on Saturday 27 June. (I’ll be popping in the previous weekend too, to catch Aimard’s recital of Kurtág and Schubert mentioned above.) Do say hi if you see me.

Elsewhere, I’ve just sent reviews to Gramophone of Robert Laidlow’s forthcoming debut for NMC and Wild Up’s absolutely barnstorming recording of Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla. There was also a programme note for Riot’s Kings Place concert of Martland, Streich and Rzewski: that can be read here (and see also last week’s bonus episode).

Five years ago, we created a very different version of Rzewski’s masterpiece, CassetteBoy style, using the speeches and press conferences of Boris Johnson in relation to Brexit and the Covid pandemic. One of the many jokes was that the word ‘truthfully’, so prominent in Sam Melville’s letter that provides the work’s text, could not be found in any of Johnson’s speeches. As the group’s sole non-playing member, I was tasked with recording a few takes of myself – in various states of urgency/rage – that could be dropped in where needed. Those bits of footage were all shot in and around my new house, into which my family and I had only recently moved. We were navigating the double dislocation of intermittent lockdowns and a new setting; I think a little of that comes across, even in my tiny clips.

The video caused a bit of a stir at the time, although we had Rzewski’s approval to do it this way. Looking back on it now, it’s a time capsule, an attempt to make sense of a very weird time. Whereas Rzewski’s piece (in its more typical renditions) triumphantly transcends the moment – the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 – that inspired its creation.

I wrote a text to accompany the video too, although the page on which it was hosted seems to have been lost to the ether. It too is a bit of a time capsule, but I think still worth sharing – not least because it prototypes some of the lines of thought that would eventually become the Schubert Dub project. Here, as a little bonus, it is.

I think …

Most years, I find, are coloured by a single piece of music: something I have written about several times, or that I have seen live on multiple occasions, or that turned my ears towards something completely new. This year, that piece has been Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together of 1971. I haven’t yet had occasion to write about it this year. I haven’t seen it live, obviously. And it is a piece I have known and loved for two decades. Yet nothing has captured 2020 quite like Rzewski’s visceral setting of a letter by the incarcerated Civil Rights radical and anti-Vietnam bomber Sam Melville – organiser of the Attica Uprising, the bloodiest prison protest in US history. I first played it this year at the start of March. I had just been admitted to hospital for ten days (for treatment for a chronic respiratory condition), and when this happens, as it does from time to time, Coming Together is perfect for getting me through a day of infection-controlled isolation, exercise, drugs and brutal physiotherapy.

… it’s six months now and I can tell you, truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly …

I came out of hospital on the day London’s theatres closed and I didn’t go outside again for nearly twelve weeks. I exercised at home, running hundreds of laps around my kitchen, following online yoga courses and designing my own HITT routines. I listened to Coming Together almost every morning as I worked out. Soon, Melville’s letter about imprisonment and discipline and hope started to sound eerily prescient. It’s ten months now, and everyone has experienced that same strange collapse of time – time without moments, just continuity, time flowing like treacle and a torrent.

… I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead but I feel secure and ready …

As lockdown’s spring progressed into an even darker summer, Coming Together continued to resonate: the indifferent brutality that killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the incessant noise of Twitter and discontent, the experimental chemistry of food (all those Insta-ready sourdoughs), and the ravings of lost hysterical men (too many to mention). Rzewski’s piece seemed to be everywhere: a document of prison life so precise it could predict the future. I took to reciting its words like a mantra, or an affirmation, and it seeped into my bones: a source of structure and depth when everything was foreground.

… I can act with clarity and meaning …

Of course the form of Rzewski’s work – with its constructivist musical cells, its restricted options, its unsettling near-stasis on the edge of boredom – directly reflects the experience of prison (and Covid isolation). But there is another side, too. Because in the approachability of its four-to-the-floor rhythm, its pentatonic scales and its cresting, accumulating waves of instrumentation, Coming Together is also a piece about collectivity and empowerment. The prompts are in Melville’s words but they are backed up by Rzewski’s music – no less when, as in this recording by Riot Ensemble, every part has been made in isolation against a shared click track. It is a work whose unceasing, centrifugal energy four walls (or a Zoom split-screen or a Tier 4 boundary; choose your own chamber) can barely confine. Through ten months in which everything took on an unbearable significance, Coming Together continued to speak, empower and console. What a way to conclude this incredible, awful year and look forward to a new one.

… I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 28 December 2020

Those two chords in nacht und träume still echoed. Searching for meaning, I discovered at least where they were from: the Adagio of the C minor sonata, D958. There, they echo eerily behind all that movement’s nostalgic tread; when I ask him, Barrett tells me it was their occurence at the movement’s end, as part of its harmonically unravelling coda, that was of particular importance. ‘It’s obviously not just any two chords’, he says. ‘It’s a turning point where the music seems to enter another world at a certain moment. A pivot to some other state of consciousness, perhaps.’

Schubert’s appearance in nacht und träume had been foreshadowed more than decade earlier, in Barrett’s first work for orchestra, Vanity, composed between 1990 and 1994. Vast in concept and proportion, this monumental work ends on the head of a pin: a hushed cadence, played by string quartet, taken unmistakably and utterly disarmingly from – yes – ‘Death and the Maiden’. There are clues that it’s coming: the processional last movement coalesces with an almost inevitable momentum onto that dactyl rhythm. But even then, that final gesture comes as a shock, its tonal sweetness sounding truly like another world.

And again: why Schubert? Why here?

Like me, Barrett came to Schubert late. Beckett was the catalyst, he tells me, the playwright’s fascination suggesting he should take more notice himself. And ‘Death and the Maiden’ was his way in, Beckett having had a particular fondness for the theme. In the 1956 radio play All that Fall, the elderly Maddy Rooney hears a recording of the quartet as she trudges down to Boghill station to surprise her husband on his birthday. The theme also appears on an LP, MacGowran Speaking Beckett, on which an arrangement of Schubert’s theme played on harmonium and flute by Beckett’s cousin, John, and nephew, Edward, bookends extracts from Endgame, Molloy, The Unnamable and other texts read by the renowned Irish actor Jack MacGowran. A perfect complement to MacGowran’s crisp enunciations, the music is cool, expressively expressionless. Between tracks, the playwright himself adds the ping of a soft, high gong.

Barrett knew both these creations. But the clincher on his journey to Schubert was a very different record. In the mid-80s, and temporarily homeless, Barrett lodged for a few months in Rotterdam with his friend Steve Martland, a composer of muscular, dance-inspired music pitched somewhere between Purcell and Manchester’s Hacienda nightclub. Martland was nearing the end of his studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. His teacher was the iconoclastic Louis Andriessen – known for his politically radical, peculiarly Dutch takes on minimalism: 68-er revolutionism bound in crisp, parallel lines – and when Andriessen was on tour, Barrett would cat-sit for him. The accommodation was welcome, but the prize was Andriessen’s record collection. Between feeding the cats, Barrett copied as much of it as he could onto tape.

Read more

Flare features six pieces for small forces, all of them focused in form but written with lightness rather than density. The earliest are the titular flare, for solo piano and same but different, for two guitars, both composed in 2021. The newest, shadowfolds, is a commission by Simon Reynell and another timbre, for a quintet of piano, vibraphone, violin, clarinet and cello.

This is undemonstrative music, gentle in expression, not given to drama or even loud dynamics. Yet this is not to say that it is in any way casual. There is an attentiveness to it, but it never feels overbearing or pedantic. It does things well without insisting they be done correctly, is how it feels to me. I think that accounts for some of the ‘handmade’ quality that I get from it as well, and that I mention below: it is music made with the care of a well-tended garden, but with an openness to allow things to happen and grow as they wish, once they have been chosen and placed. And so, in same but different, there is a kind of stripped-down repeated waltz rhythm, but played on prepared strings, so it hovers always on the edge of collapse. In flare, gentle tremolos are played through fingered harmonics that alter the balance and tilt of their spectra: music that lives only in the delicacy of the pianist’s touch. (Ben Smith, incidentally, is excellent on this.)

You might well protest that isn’t there already a lot of music that already does this? That explores the decaying edges of sound, the fuzzy, liminal spaces of instrumental technique, a rhetoric of absence and abnegation? And to some extent you would be right. What I think sets Lim’s music apart – one of the things that sets it apart – is its evident desire to do more than strike a pose or conjure an atmosphere. All these pieces come to centre themselves on an object, rather than settle for a vague shrug and a wave towards all this. They are making with – not under – the conditions of fragility, contingency, uncertainty. You hear this best, I think, in the remarkable Grafting, a piece that seems to fashion wistful bass clarinet solos out of the vapours of a reticent violin and cello, as if sculpting fog.

I mentioned that Flare is Lim’s second album. Her first was sounds which grow richer as they decay, released on Sawyer Editions in 2022. This features music written around or in the wake of her PhD and, as we touch on below, is perhaps concerned with slightly different themes from those of her more recent music. It is recognisably continuous with it, though, sharing many of the same qualities, and is well worth a listen.

The interview was conducted over Zoom and was edited in usual way. Lim responded to the transcript with some additional sentences to her last answer, plus a couple of other minor amendments.

Interview with Sylvia Lim

TRJ: In the interview that you did with Simon, you mention Edmund Finnis’s Unfolds as being important to your origin story as a composer. What was it about that particular piece that was so meaningful to you at that moment?

SL: I think it was about his attention to the details of the sounds. Particularly these beautiful glistening textures. He’s got a really strong relationship with the visual arts and architecture. There was an exhibition at the Barbican around that time on Junya Ishigami’s architecture – Architecture as Air – which I was also quite struck by. I think Ed also mentioned one of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, on lightness. So there were all these different sources.

And then with the music itself, there was a lot of energy and these flickering textures, but it was so unbelievably light. There was just so much materiality in there that mirrored those different resources that he was drawing on. I loved how he reflected those things that he was interested in, but also how the sounds were so mesmerising in themselves.

TRJ: From what I know of your music, it feels like what you describe as energy and substance – when there’s not very much there, you’ve taken almost everything away but there’s still that kind of flickering, airy kind of momentum and weight – has been an ongoing aesthetic impulse in your work?

SL: I think that’s true. It’s strange and a bit hard to describe, but I’ve been drawn to the idea of richness and depth and a sense of weight in richness, but not weight in terms of mass. Maybe I’m not so drawn to opaque sounds, but I seem to be drawn to sounds which have multiple layers or internal behaviours, in which there’s complexity within this living thing.

TRJ: Do you start from one of those sounds when you’ve got a blank sheet? Do you find one of those sounds on an instrument or something, and then take it from there?

SL: Yeah, I think often I start with a very tangible sound that I hear in the room. Or that someone’s recorded – for example, on Heather Roche’s blog! [laughs] And then I’m working with something really tangible, trying to inhabit that sound and work from within it. I very rarely come to a blank page with something I’ve imagined, I find that really difficult.

That’s why I love working with players as early on in the process as I can. I feel like the possibilities somehow expand when they’re in the room, and we can see the physical body of the instrument and what sounds are adjacent or contrasting. And we can try what might happen if we do this, or what happens if you catch this string as well, or if you position the bow that way. It’s much more tangible.

TRJ: When you’re collecting those sounds – or, as you say, finding sounds that are in relation to them – what are the most important parameters of a sound for you? Is it the pitch, or might it be the noisiness of it? Or is it something else?

SL: I think my knee-jerk reaction to that question is whether I, in the moment, in a very subjective sense, connect with the sound on an emotional level.

For instance, with Field of Play, I co-composed this with the cellist Natasha Zielazinski. And in those moments, the sounds that stood out to us, for which we were like, yes, let’s keep going with this one, seemed to be the ones where we felt like there was a lot of possibility. Or the focus that it offered: a sense of identity of what it was and maybe a sense that there was more to do with it. So I guess curiosity.

For example, the sound for the ‘seesaw’ miniature: we came across it, and I remember saying, ‘Oh, we could just have a piece of just this sound [made by rocking a cork on the cello’s strings]. Let’s try.’ And then I think we thought about what came to mind, what were the images for us. For Natasha, it was this image of a seesaw, because of how she was manipulating the cork on the strings. Which then influenced the structure. For her, it was like a wide tipping of the cork on the strings, moving towards an even distribution of the cork, like we were walking towards the middle of a seesaw, and then outwards again – this narrative thing.

I think these metaphors or connections to lived experience draw us to certain sounds. But maybe on a very practical level for me as a composer, I am drawn to things that seem to have a clear identity, but also, if they change and are unstable the different versions of the sound are still as interesting.

TRJ: So they have a lot of continuity amongst different versions, a kind of family resemblance?

SL: Like a robustness, even though it is a robustness in their instability, somehow.

TRJ: In the piece for two trombones and harp, sounds which grow richer as they decay, you’ve got the prepared harp that is twanging, and every time it does that, it’s obviously not going to be exactly the same, but it is basically the same.

It sounds to me like your attraction to a sound also has to do with how it is played, and the physical object itself. One of those miniatures uses a hair clip from Natasha’s daughter: that is obviously an object with some symbolic resonance as well. It seems like there’s a whole mix of things going into this thought process.

So I suppose the question then is – and this is something that I ask a lot of people – how do you develop this? What is that process of taking one of these sounds and then making it into an actual piece?

SL: I think it depends on the piece. And also the creative constraints at the start. Writing shadowfolds was very different. That’s the polyphonic piece. It’s different from the cello piece just because there was more of a creative goal that I had to hit.1

That was a very winding process. I got stuck many times, it took several months. I think I restarted the piece three times, just trying to work out the sounds and where they were meant to go. I had a lot of structural issues; I knew I needed lines, and I knew that they needed continuity – and also structural continuity – but I was having problems with continuing the sounds and then also thinking about the balance between ensemble unity as a texture and independence of lines. I felt that I was just writing chunks of material that were really static, and then chunks of stuff that were more linear, and it was a very incoherent piece.

I had to rework it so many times, but once I reframed it enough for it to be satisfying for what I wanted to do with it, I found that what helped was zooming in on fewer sounds that I really liked, and trying to focus all my attention on those sounds and just think, what can I hear? What pitches can I hear within this multiphonic? Can I hear a melody that might come out of it, rather than writing a melody and making the multiphonic accompany it?

TRJ: Bringing it back to the inherent quality of the sound.

SL: I think so. I think that’s what’s important to me. Particularly because I think these sounds are so rich and they hold whole universes within them already. The most natural thing to me is just to draw them out and make them more audible, by amplifying them with other instruments.

TRJ: Is that one of the first polyphonic pieces that you’ve written? You don’t tend to write polyphony.

SL: Yes, I felt very insecure about it. [laughs] I felt like I was hitting a wall and had so much imposter syndrome!

TRJ: Well, we all have that! But what did you learn from the process?

SL: I think singing as a method of creating. Improvising is an important part of the creative process anyway for me, but I think singing in order to stick with lines and follow them was helpful.

There was also a question about my method of composing, about whether I write straight into Sibelius or start with instruments and improvise on them. I used to think one method was more helpful to me than another. But actually, I don’t think that’s true so much. The middle section of shadowfolds, where there’s a duet between the piano and the vibraphone, was written directly into Sibelius. I think what actually helps me in the process is just clarity and obsessive single-mindedness2 in working with and refining material, rather than how I get it down or where it comes from.

TRJ: It’s interesting you say that singing was, was so important as the way to manage line. Why do you think singing works when, say, piano wouldn’t work so well for you? Is it to do with the physicality of it, or is it something else?

SL: I think so. Yes, with breath as continuous. I think also in the context of that piece, there are lots of glissandos, and I guess it was more practical to sing rather than play the piano. Also, I feel like singing … I work on Logic Pro as well, and I record things and then listen back to them. When I’m trying to add layers and trying to create an environment for the piece, the most direct way to do that is by singing.

TRJ: Listening to your music, it feels very acoustic, very handmade, and it lives with the imperfections of that. That seems central to what it is. But you’ve mentioned now both Logic and Sibelius as being part of your creative process. I’m intrigued to know what the process looks like of going from playing around with a cork on a string to then going into the computer, and then coming out again with something that still sounds like it’s handcrafted. What does the software allow you to do that you want to keep in that process?

SL: I think the software for me is purely for the sounds. I use Sibelius in the process more often just to hear what’s happening. Because above all what I want is direct contact with the sounds, making them as tangible as I can.

So for instance, with shadowfolds, I didn’t really have access to most of the players during the process, so I needed something that would allow me to hear what I was composing. And because some sections were more pitch-led, I didn’t want to do that in Logic because of my limited skills.

But this humanness that you talk about … Right now, I am trying to finish up the scores for Field of Play. Everything’s handwritten because we are composing together in the room. Things like the form of the piece or details of how to produce the sounds are very embodied and unwritten. Or there’s just a really rough diagram or a coloured sketch or a picture, like a little drawing of a finger pointing down. [laughs] Something like that, very light, just what we needed to remember what we were doing.

Now going back into it to write the score, there seem to be tables of things, which I’m not sure is the right way to go about it. It seems too formalised, but at the moment as a work in progress that’s what it looks like. For one of the pieces, ‘hidden place’, there’s a table of six different kinds of sounds with descriptions of how to make them sound and what we’re aiming for. And then we filmed little videos of how to produce the sound.

It’s hard because it seems so rigid in its appearance. But it’s a piece that’s driven by curiosity, and we’re trying to nurture the player’s own relationship with their sounds. Trying to explore potentially different types of the same preparation. They won’t have access to the hair clip, for example. They need other hair clips, different sizes, different numbers of teeth. Working out what the priorities are takes some time, but I think there is a tension in trying to capture the variabilities of it and framing that as a really positive, searching thing while also communicating that these were the things that we were interested in that we found. And maybe within that dialogue somewhere, there will be sounds that the player might find that are different or more interesting, or that suit them and their own methods a bit more appropriately.

TRJ: It sounds like a process that admits a lot of variation, or potential variation. Is that normally the way that your scores end up? You start from a very particular sound that interests you: how insistent are you that that’s the sound that ends up getting made?

SL: I think the sounds tend to be quite specific. Again, it depends on the piece. I feel like there are different strands of my practice. It’s always about the detail of the sound, but with varying degrees of openness.

Making these scores, I think the sounds tend to be very, very specific, and maybe it’s the form that tends to be more open. The exception is things we overheard. The players for that one choose their own sounds. So I’m starting from a different place with that one.

TRJ: Is that the piece where they are listening to field recordings and responding to those?

SL: Yeah.

TRJ: So how does that work?

SL: It’s a cue-based score, and it’s mainly a text score. Each player is listening to a different kind of recording. So there’s one with traffic noises, one with water ... And there’s a soloist and a little ensemble. The soloist is given these bell sounds.

They’re all recordings I made on a walk. I just walked around the neighbourhood one day. The players are collectively recreating an environment, these different layers of sounds. The soloist’s material is a bit more prescriptive, in that there’s an invitation to choose some specific pitches, but in different octaves. And to alter those colouristically. And there’s one player in the ensemble who doesn’t have a field recording, but they’re listening to the other players and choosing to echo and translate what they find interesting. So in a way, there are different layers to things that they’re overhearing and where those sounds are coming from.

There is a loose form in that there’s an order of things and when they come in, but they are cued either by the track that they’re listening to or each other.

TRJ: Let’s talk about the subject of your thesis, which I acknowledge is from a few years ago now, but I have an ongoing obsession with decay and resonance as a kind of musical material. I wonder if you could just outline for me what the idea of decay is musically for you, and what kind of expressive resonance it has?

SL: I think I was interested in dynamic processes of decay. It seems like with my doctorate, that’s where I landed. More in exploring different relationships within decay: things which grow out of decay, or growth in spite of decay. I was really interested in the visual artist Anya Gallaccio, and her work with rotting flowers. Her work was really interesting to me because before it, I was interested in decay as absence or emptiness, but with her work, there was something quite gritty about what happened as a result of the process.

It also raised questions of control and collaboration with your material – not knowing what would happen as a result. Which I thought was really interesting. I was also drawing on wabi-sabi aesthetics, particularly the idea of earthiness, and the idea that you can find materials that are raw and unrefined and in their natural state. I think Leonard Koren talks about it and how it shows minimal craftsmanship.

I guess I saw my role as a composer as finding these timbrally rich sounds from instruments that were raw and that came with their own properties. And what those can and can’t do, what their possibilities are. That was why I was drawn to those sounds. I guess I was taking decay as a poetic framework for my pieces. The kinds of things I was writing at the time were very overtly exploring the idea of decay – like the piece that you mentioned before for two trombones and harp.

I was really interested in an article by Linda Sandino on how rust is an active thing, like the object is living, and we see the history of that object lived out through rust. I really liked that parallel in sound. I was also looking at mould and coral bleaching and all of that.

But then towards the end of my doctorate, I found, again, an issue with form. I was placing too much emphasis on … maybe not narrative necessarily, but the conceptual framework. I was trying to communicate something very specific, but it often went against what the sounds wanted to do. It felt like too much of a burden to place on them. And so, increasingly, I tried to locate the exploration of decay on a much more abstract, behind-the-scenes level. I became more interested in letting the sounds be the whole thing and being led by what the sounds were doing. Which is where I am now, I guess.

Decay and fragility are still important to me, but they come as second nature. They’re buried under the ground, and I’m on the surface, just hanging out with the sounds. Occasionally one or two of my pieces will have this offshoot from the ground that’s very like, ‘Oh, this is definitely about renewal and transformation and decay’, but when I’m writing the piece I’m not really thinking about those things explicitly. I’m just following my nose a little, with the sounds.

TRJ: Can you give me an example of when you were using sound too specifically for a kind of a narrative, and that moment of stepping back and saying no, let’s make it more abstract?

SL: There were maybe two pieces that didn’t really work so well. There was one about coral bleaching. I think I was just trying to depict something. And by depicting something, it led me to think of forms that were of a particular kind, maybe reiterative or maybe with more landmarks for listeners to latch onto. But it didn’t need that, and it was quite distracting.

I think I’m after forms in which there’s a sense of formlessness, or there’s a sense where it’s more like a space, or we move on from one thing to another without knowing or maybe knowing in hindsight. I think that’s what I’m aiming for nowadays, more flexibility. I don’t necessarily want the listener to know unless it’s for a very specific thing.

I reworked that piece as an electronic piece. I had recorded workshops with the players. There were snippets that I really liked, and I thought, why can’t the piece just be this thing? We just did that instead, and it was way better! [laughs]

TRJ: In your conversation with Simon, you relate these ideas of decay to your experiences of migration. And I’m really interested to hear more about how you’ve explored that idea.

SL: Again, I think it’s relating to past pieces.

I think part of moving from Sydney to here meant that I was just thinking a lot about home, and the significance of places that were meaningful to me. And around the time I was listening to Ed Finnis’s Unfolds, I was also encountering artists who really resonated with me, like Do Ho Suh, who has these light switches and a gate that he grew up with, but it’s hovering really high up in the ceiling and it’s made out of this really translucent fabric. They’re these memories of home, but isolated from their context – sort of carrying bits of home with him in different exhibitions.

And the same for Shi Jindian, who I think had motorcycles, but he’s covered them in mesh and then extracted the object, so we’re just left with a shell.

I was writing pieces about using those processes. There was a piece in my second year of undergrad about a place that I used to go to in Australia called Collaroy Beach that really stuck with me, and I loved it so much. I also found this anthology of poems by Amanda Dalton called How to Disappear, and the piece drew on one of her poems about place. I was just connecting all these different references together. Maybe it was a way of processing what was happening for me personally.

There were other artists as well. I feel like I often go to visual artists as a way to make sense of what’s happening, in the way they work with their materials and in their creative processes as well, and how they make something happen.

TRJ: Is that still the case?

SL: Very much so. And also writings by other people.

On the migration thing, for my master’s, I also wrote a piece called landscape fragments. I wrote it for EXAUDI, who workshop and perform the master’s vocal pieces at Guildhall, which is amazing. The text was formed by my home addresses from across my life, but filtered so they were not so public. But some of the addresses are quite poetic, actually. Putting them together, there was some sort of poetic depth that drew me to that text.

But, in terms of migration, I’ve been here for sixteen years now, which is a really long time. I still really miss home. And maybe now it seems to be me reading poetic essays by people like Jessica J. Lee; she has a book called Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging that I really love. And also Nina Mingya Powles, who is from New Zealand with Chinese-Malaysian heritage, and she writes about food. I really love food, and I want to explore that in a piece somehow. I just don’t quite know how to do it yet. It would be a really different expression.

I was also reading Tender Maps by Alice Maddicott. Reading that book made me increasingly aware that atmosphere is really important to me. An atmosphere from place. Maddicott talks about atmosphere as a collaboration with place; I really like that. Reflecting on that in my pieces, I think with each one I write, there is – hidden somewhere in my subconscious – a particular atmosphere that is suggested to me through the sounds that I’m trying to lean into and communicate and make tangible.

Sometimes these atmospheres are imagined spaces in which I’m thinking about artworks, or memories that I’ve had encountering artworks. So flare, for instance, the piano piece, all throughout that process I had this sense of submergence and resurfacing. I kept coming back to a Bill Viola exhibition at the Royal Academy. There was this huge room with his massive video installation, Five Angels for the Millennium. Huge screens of underwater slow-mo, beautiful, dark videos, and then every now and then there would just be a person emerging from the surface with lights. The atmosphere that that created in the room for me was so impactful. That’s what stayed with me and is what coloured that whole piece for me, even if it wasn’t specifically about it.

TRJ: I love that idea of atmosphere being a collaboration with place, because it strikes me that place, in a slightly abstract way, is quite important to your music.

Obviously there’s a piece like things we overheard where there are literally field recordings of a place, and then your own life experiences, but also the idea of instrumental resonances being, in a small way, to do with place as well. And it seems to me that sound is also a collaboration with place.

Sounds don’t exist in this abstract vacuum. That was a thought that struck me when listening to your music, and I wondered whether you have thoughts like that when you’re writing it or even listening to it.

SL: I liked what you were saying about the instrument as a mini location. I think that’s so true: the instrument as an ecosystem or an environment. There are just so many factors in creating that sound.

I was reading your interview with Timothy McCormack and Marco Fusi, and I

love the way they articulate what’s happening in the room with the sounds. And I really resonate with that. I feel it’s very close to how I think about sounds too, just the physicality of it and what’s happening in all the different parameters or zones.

The second thing was that I think the room in which I am working, and the atmosphere of that – that really affects what’s happening.

Field of Play, for instance, was a very different setup. We were really lucky to receive some research funding that meant we were able to dedicate more time to it. I would meet Natasha in her home to do workshops. The fact that we were in someone’s home was just really different. There was warmth and hospitality, and it meant we could take afternoon walks and make lunch. The first thing I did whenever I got there – because it’s quite a long journey for me – I would just collapse on her sofa, and she would give me tea. Often we’d have pastries, and that’s how we would start our sessions: we would just chat about what’s happened in our lives and then gradually think about what we were going to do that day. We’d spend a couple of hours there each day with her instrument, doing the work.

One could say, if one were trying to be super efficient, that you could do that in a studio and be done with it really quickly. But I don’t think we would have created the same kind of work. I think the friendship and that space really shaped what we were doing and how we were communicating. We felt like we were able to bring our whole selves to the creative process and share and build a shared language from what we were saying about our lived experiences or what our hopes were for our project together. Also, just the way we were communicating these thoughts … we did a lot of drawings and mapmaking in terms of how we understood the sounds. And there was a vulnerability to that, I think.

TRJ: The idea of making maps, as a way to understand the sound, as you describe it, is similar to what I was asking you before about the parameters along which you understand sound. Presumably that fed into those maps? I’m guessing that Natasha’s maps were not the same as yours … so what were your reactions to each other’s maps?

SL: Really fascinating. For one of the maps, she drew this circular thing. There were different objects and colours in a circle, and this spinny arrow thing. And she said, this is how I see the piece: it’s tipping, and we’re landing on different sounds. This kind of motion is how I’m approaching it and how I’m seeing the relationships.

And then for me, I had a network map of, like, third string, microphonic. It was a very literal family tree of the sounds and how you can access other sounds; it was like a branching. It was just really pragmatic.

But for me, that was important because it was an overview of where we were and what the landscape was and what we could do.

It was interesting seeing how both our brains worked and also what we were prioritising in our listening, or what we were thinking about at the time. But it also shows how knowledge exists in different ways.

But also, because we were really interested in this salad and soup making, we also wrote these little recipes for how we navigated the creative process. So we wrote down what kind of questions we might ask ourselves, but as a way of documenting rather than doing it in the moment.

We were having a very open dialogue, sharing our emotions very openly. We were building on each other’s enthusiasm and trying to find a way to remember what we had done.

TRJ: Had you worked in very close collaboration like that with a performer before?

SL: Not to this extent. I think that’s the kind of energy I try to bring to workshops, but sometimes it’s a different dynamic when you’re doing that with a whole group of people at the same time. But I would like to do that more. It’s so different, isn’t it? The structure of developing a piece in that way is so different from what might be on offer from an ensemble. And it’s tricky to work out how to navigate that.

TRJ: You were talking about the idea of atmosphere and trying to capture that, or use it as a context for the work. Obviously, in those meetings you were having with Natasha, it’s clear how that works. But presumably when you’re sat in your studio or when you’re doing a three-hour workshop with an ensemble, the atmosphere is a little bit different. How are you kind of trying to get that into the work when it doesn’t come as naturally?

SL: I think when time is tight, I rely much more on what I’m recording. I record the whole workshop anyway. But then that reflection time after the workshop with just me and these sounds, and I’m just logging what’s happened, that time is really important. I think that happens at home, but it happens in other places too. Then it becomes less about the physical place for me and more about the sonic place, or the imagined space. Then I become much more attuned to the atmosphere of the sounds, and I kind of shut off. I put my blinkers on, go inwards, and then think about the spaces of artworks or places where I’ve been before.

TRJ: Yeah, it becomes much more of a memory, or memory plays a much bigger role in it.

SL: I think so, yeah.

TRJ: Continuing on from this idea of fragility that you talk about in relation to your more recent pieces, I was also looking at the little programme note that you wrote for your Tectonics piece, Moss that holds. You talk about moss and cracks, and the kintsugi thing of sticking broken vases back together and leaving the marks in there.

And it made me think that the idea of resilience is fundamental to that as well. When we say resilient, we often think of strength and solidity, but perhaps the resilience that you’re looking for in your music is different. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that?

SL: What I liked about moss was that it’s a soft covering over cracked spaces. It’s soft, gentle and gracious – the crack might be big, but over time it covers over. There is a hopefulness to it, but also something understated about it. A lot of this thinking came from reading a chapter on moss in Lee’s Dispersals.

So thinking about resilience in Moss that holds, it’s like a soft, comforting resilience. Like an invitation to sit in warmth, looking for hope, while we are all too aware of the cracks. Rather than being already resilient and strong. I think wrapped up in that is a sense of tenderness, maybe, and gentleness. Maybe that’s linked to the kinds of sounds that I’m drawn to, but it’s maybe also to do with people and the ways that I’ve seen other people care for others, and how I’m struck by that. Also, for me personally – although the piece is not explicitly about this – it is privately linked to my own experiences of where I find my own hope, which is in Jesus, and the kind of tenderness that is shown there.

But also maybe just in terms of the natural unfolding of my pieces, perhaps it would feel too contrasting or too jarring if it was a bit more opaque or more persistent. I say that, but maybe I should try harder! [laughs] For instance, with that orchestral piece, just thinking formally, the opening comes back in bigger force. It’s a very strong recapitulation, Tim! I don’t know how I feel about it! [laughs]

But my intention is that even though it’s more fully orchestrated and it’s thicker, it’s also richer and deeper and maybe more present. Maybe it’s about presence, rather than anything else. Yeah, it’s warmth and intimacy. There is some intensity behind it, but I hope that that’s of a friend revisiting you rather than something very climactic or dramatic in its entrance. Although I do think it comes back quite climactically in that piece, actually. Because in my lived experience there was a sense of a yearning for it, and that ended up coming through in the structure!

TRJ: It’s an emotional space that I hear a lot of composers in at the moment, particularly, I guess, composers of your generation. You mentioned Timothy McCormack as an obvious example, but do you have a thought as to why that might be the case?

There may be very obvious answers to that, but it does seem like it’s also to do with a wider opening up towards composer–performer relations. Not so much, ‘I’m the composer, I do this; you’re the performer, you do that’. And then once that gets built into the music, you get a much more nurturing kind of emotional space

SL: I sense this thread as well. I feel like it’s something I need to think about more. But there is maybe a sense of ... It feels like there’s more freedom to do that, but also there’s a way … I hear people talking about metamodernism a lot.

You know, I really admire Oliver Leith’s music or Robin Haigh’s music, for instance. And there is a lot of emotional intensity in that, but the way it’s presented sounds really refreshing; it’s like there is permission to share. Not that we need permission, but I feel like it’s okay to write these emotional passages, but in a way that feels of our time.

TRJ: It seems like there’s a greater space for vulnerability, maybe.

SL: Yes, I think so. And then also, I’m thinking about the Wandelweiser composers and their approaches, very diverse approaches within them, about gentleness and tenderness, and also that thread coming through in caring about the player’s experience and centring them. I feel like that dynamic is really important too: of, yeah, vulnerability, but also a joint searching for things that are important. And I know that’s linked to a hopefulness of what communities could look like as well. Aaron Lockhart’s ending.beginning.interludes and Georgia Denham’s kindly, softly were also huge influences on me as examples of music that explores graciousness and care.

But maybe, for me anyway, I feel like it’s all of these different things in the atmosphere that mean that I feel very comfortable being able to dip into things that might feel a bit more, maybe not personal, but leaning into that kind of expressiveness. And that’s okay.

Here’s a bit of the blurb that I sent in, to give you a flavour:

This reading features two episodes from the middle of the book: one about the author's attempts to learn Schubert's C minor Impromptu, op. 90, no.1; the other about the role of listening in the diagnosis and treatment of CF. Within the larger context of the book, these two episodes act as the pivot along a journey towards understanding both Schubert and CF, arriving at the roles of resonance, reverberation, bodies and friction as a means of connection and self-realization.

They’re quite fun episodes, I think, about fumbling fingers, pedal tones, physiotherapy, auscultation and the search for emotional extremity. If you’re thinking in terms of a classic five-act structure (which I kind of am), they make up the ‘drink the elixir’ moment in the middle of Act 3.

Tickets for SPARC are free, but registration is required. Full details are here. Let me know if you are planning on going, and come and say hi if you do!

Andreas Engström in memoriam

In much sadder news, new music criticism mourns this month the passing of Andreas Engström, whose death was announced on 4 May after a long illness. Born in Sweden but resident in Berlin for many years, Andreas was an energising force in European new music, as an editor, promoter, curator and, not least of all, perceptive and incisive critic. Too often, the world of new music seems too fragile to withstand the criticism good art needs to keep it sharp and honest. Writers (I’m as guilty as anyone) pull their punches. Andreas was fearless in this respect, never shy of calling out ‘spade’ when he saw one. He was also extraordinarily knowledgeable, as capable of filling you in on the latest developments in southeast Asian sound art as the goings on at Musikfabrik or Klangforum Wien.

And he was a brilliant and seemingly indefatigable organizer and creator, the kind of unsung hero who greases the wheels of creative industry: as (first) editor of the ISCM’s World New Music Magazine, the Swedish magazine Nutida musik (through which I first got to know him), and then of Positionen, in Germany, taking over from Gisela Nauck and relaunching the journal to international success. He also curated festivals and events, not least the renowned series KONTRAKLANG in Berlin. I spoke at one such event he organised, in Stockholm, in 2015. Andreas invited me over to talk about Music after the Fall, which was then very much in progress. He was an exemplary host: I had expected to stay with him in his apartment, but he vacated it completely and left me to myself. Andreas’s existence – as a gentleman editor of cultural reviews, in print and for a small but dedicated readership – was always something of a counter-cultural throwback, and all the better for it. That apartment was exactly what you would expect it to be: bookish, writing desk with recent journals and CDs, plants, an architectural tilt towards light, space and the view over the courtyard, kitchen a bit of an afterthought. It was a lovely place. I would bump into him from time to time at festivals after this, but that apartment will be how I think of him.

I know of two obituaries so far, posted by Andreas’s colleagues at Positionen and initiative neue musik Berlin, and seismograf. They are both worth a read.

Recording reviews

Just weeks after reviewing volumes 1 and 2 of Laura Cannell’s The Medieval Drone Society on these pages – and finding myself seasonally unsynced to get the most out of them – I’ve been listening to a freshly released third volume in the series. Distinctly more spring-adjacent (track titles include ‘The Ornamentation of the Sun’ and ‘Flower Crown Procession’), this one chimes more readily with the view of hawthorn blossom and budding beech from my window. The chosen release of Beltane, 1 May, does not seem accidental, either.

Is there something about Cannell’s reinvigoration of Medieval sounds that makes these three albums sound and feel so seasonal? Intuitively, you’d have to say yes, but I’m hard-pushed to say exactly what that is. Volume 3 is more major mode-coded than the other two, for sure. Its melodies are more lively (see the really lovely ‘An Antiphon after Hildegard’). But these in themselves aren’t Medieval qualities. Instead, there’s something about the way Cannell strips back to musical basics that opens a pathway to the temporal, existential basics of the turning year, the cycle of hibernation and renewal.

A part is also played by her use of electronic decays and reverbs. I’m still thinking here, but it feels as if the sense of location they create – that you are in a particular place, with the music – is a part of that. I’m going to have to come back round to that; the musical functions and meanings of resonance, reverb and decay have become something of a fixation of mine recently, and it feels like Cannell is using them in a very particular way on these three records. (And in a subtly different way between them, too.)

Anyway, in between tramping the fields listening to reverbed recorders and overbowed violins, I’ve got some more suggestions for your listening attention. First, a couple of highlights from the latest batch of another timbre releases (I will have more to say about Sylvia Lim’s new album as part of that batch in the next issue, which will also feature an interview with Lim), then a great NMC portrait of Seán Clancy, and, to end, the next episode in my quest to listen to all of Samuel Vriezen’s 94 Fantasias.

Jürg Frey: Clarinet Quintet (another timbre)

another timbre at256

Is this something new? I can’t pretend to know every byway of Frey’s prolific output, but I went back through the half dozen or so CDs that I have and couldn’t find anything comparable, not even on the last another timbre/Frey CD but one, 2024’s Longing Landscapes, played by the Prague Quiet Music Collective. (I don’t think I ever had the most recent, Je laisse à la nuit sons poids d’ombre, or I have misplaced it; but listening to the extract posted by the label I would place it closer to the Frey of Fleetingness or ephemeral constructions than that of the Clarinet Quintet.)

Departures: Solidity, coming from a focusing of attention onto the centre of the sound rather than its edges (top, bottom, front and back). A vocabulary primarily of pitch rather than noise. Voice-leading, of a sort. Rhythm, just about. The use of textural contrasts to create drama, and hence momentum.

Continuities: Time as succession. Harmony as timbre, timbre as harmony. Form as accumulation, but also enquiry: why this? Why that? Deliberation: the placing of objects as much as the making of them.

Inferences: Like Frey’s music on a molecular level, Clarinet Quintet is more of the same but never the same. (Mark E. Smith: How can you have the same again?) The harmonic/rhythmic/melodic language seems to have taken a leaf out of Laurence Crane’s book, albeit without Crane’s ironic distance. I get the sense that Frey (not to say that Crane isn’t, in his way) is invested in the long-range implications of the harmonic tensions he is creating. This is music with an altogether different relationship to time than any other Frey I have yet heard: pitched forward into it, rather than deliberately pulling back on it. That is all very normal, of course; what I think is special about this piece is the relation in which it stands to Frey’s typical approach. You can hear it/him teetering, wanting to tug on the reins, to stand still; but at the same time wanting to inch forward. Apartment House, with Heather Roche playing the solo role (although this is really more of a duet, for clarinet and stringquartet), are masters of this space, of the profundities of the straightforward. Frey has long transcended the hoary old Wandelweiser tropes, but so much of that music was about locating edge states, between this and that. With his Clarinet Quintet, he appears to have found another, and one so much harder to tread.

P.S. If you are in London on 29 May, you can hear Heather and Apartment House play Frey’s Clarinet Quintet at St Mary at Hill, Lovat Lane as part of this year’s Music We’d Like to Hear.

James M. Creed: Tending (another timbre)

Not long after I put this on, I wondered whether it was high time we got over the slow/quiet/gently overlapping/watercoloury cloudscape music of recent years. What was once a gesture of resistance or reclamation is in danger of becoming one of acquiescence and repetition. Opening piece Double Quintet and Duo put me in that frame of mind: soft string harmonies haloed by piano chimes; later with the addition of soft, foghorning bass clarinets. Very pretty, not yet distinctive. I thought.

But the cleverness of this CD is in how it subverts expectations, each successive piece shedding something of the last. So Piano(s) and String Quartet keeps the slow pace, the droneyness of Double Quintet and Duo, but throws a little of its caution to the winds. The pair of differently tuned pianos are our first clue,1 the source of shimmering, synth-like splashes over a tautly held string chord: the basic idea is similar to that at the start of Double Quintet and Duo, but the effect is much weirder and more compelling. And then the music finds a different groove altogether – a sudden and unexpected drop away into just the drones. Even after several listenings, this moment still catches me out: it’s like the music has begun in the wrong order, like the first couple of minutes weren’t really meant to be there. They create a weight, an expectation, that is simply negated. Now this is something. And so when the pianos return, on a quietly stuttering tremolo that is itself soon left on its own, it’s clear we’ve been on the wrong foot all along.

And then with the third piece, Sextet and Solo, the pretences of harmony and movement are gone altogether, and we are into softly throbbing, Radigue-ish territory: seventeen minutes of it, the last four a sort of dissipated chorale of overlapping tones that bring us more or less full circle to where we began at the start of Double Quintet and Piano.

What isn’t clear from the CD (with its typically minimalist annotations), or from the interview Creed gives to Simon Reynell on the another timbre website, is that these three pieces are all developed from an evolving collection of open scores Creed calls Tending. From the score to another of these, Trio: ‘Tending is the things I tend to do when making music, written down and so becoming their own score objects; Trio is composed after reading a handful of these tendings in combination.’ Scores for all the pieces on this album are available on Creed’s website, and they are worth a look – there is both more and less going on in there than one necessarily hears at first.

The final piece, Octet: after five bars by Rebecca Clarke, composer (those bars being five separate moments from Clarke’s Morpheus of 1917–18), is the most dynamic of the four (dynamic being a relative term), although it shares with them an interest in the preservation and dilation of single moments, stretching them past the point of dissolution to where they re-plasticise into something new. Clarke’s harmonic colours remain, although the Ravelian flow of her piece is here crystallized into a sombre tension. I do rather like it, though; it reminds me of the effect a sepia tint and a fixed expression have on a photograph taken in Clarke’s time – when one knows there will have been as much gaiety in those rooms as in any other, despite what the pictures appear to show. This is, I’m forced to conclude, a notable and continually surprising release; highly recommended.

Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End (NMC)

NMC Recordings, D296

Let’s put Seán Clancy in the same box as Peter Ablinger, Joanna Bailie and others - composers whose music begins often in field recordings and emerges out of their transcription for acoustic instruments. Plus-Minus Ensemble – with Bailie as one of their founder members – are experts in this sort of repertory and ably negotiate the necessary balances that elevate this kind of work into something more than a sonic conjuring trick.

Where Clancy’s own music stands apart – on this collection of compositions, at least – is in his selection of base materials, and the covert (or overt) emotional resonances that they bring to his work. Title piece, Where the Paths End, is seven, quite distinct movements based on walks taken around London, Birmingham and Edinburgh. They pair field recordings (sometimes obscure; sometimes identifiable, if general; sometimes, as in the bagpipes and voice of the Edinburgh tour guide with which the seventh movement ends, quite precisely placeable) with instrumental music that highlights certain frequencies within the recordings, creates counterpoints to them, constructs new spaces in which they can develop strange and sometimes illuminating resonances. Christine Dyser’s excellent sleevenotes mark here a pair of mournful echoes: first, the therapeutic practice of walking uniquely empty soundscapes during the pandemic; and second, the scouring forces of gentrification affecting all three cities. In both cases, Clancy’s recordings speak of places no longer populated or reverberant in the ways that they were.

Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greetings Cards, a musical reflection on the simple but affective video work Deepest Sympathy by David Theobald, follows in sound the story of a life, much like Theobald’s animation does through a series of Hallmark cards. Clancy’s score is marked with the captions of these various cards (‘A Baby Boy’, ‘Ahoy Matey, You’re 7’, ‘You’ve Had Twins’, ‘On Your Divorce’ etc), but to the listener these remain hidden: one must instead infer points in the life-course from the accumulation or falling away of contrapuntal voices (against an indefatigable, if flickering, piano ostinato), intrusions of dissonance, abrupt changes in texture and so on.

In both works, Clancy raises by now familiar questions of the persistence of and value of meaning in a digital era of transmediation and translation: in what way is our experience of the fictional life outlined in Theobald’s video work different when cute greetings card captions are replaced with more ambiguous musical gestures? What does the selective transcription of a cityscape to acoustic instruments add to that sound, tell us about it, stand in for?

Dyser’s note argues that Clancy’s practice points ‘towards the tacit socialities and universalities that are embedded in even our most private, hyper-personal day-to-day experience’; reading her words put me in the place of a musician playing this music more than it did a listener or even the composer. It is in bridging that gap between instrument and recording – from piano to dripping tap, cello to street voices – that those socialities are made and, I suppose, those universalities too, in that there is arguably something more ‘universal’ about a piano or a cello than the sound of people outside a pub or the beeping doors of a train. Again, this is a kind of music in which Plus-Minus really have form; recording engineer John ‘Spud’ Murphy deserves credit too for so carefully balancing and placing all the sounds here.

Dyser calls Clancy’s a ‘deadpan aesthetic’, and I get where she finds that; but I hear in it something altogether too engaged for that to ring true. I could call Bailie’s music deadpan; certainly Ablinger’s. But the stakes for Clancy, one feels, are higher than this. This comes across in part as a consequence of genuine lyricism in his music that goes beyond the tonal-ish resonances he draws out of his source materials and leans into swells of dynamic and texture too. But it is also to do with the way (on Where the Paths End in particular) that the recordings don’t just initiate the instrumental music, but the way in which the instruments speak back to the recordings, and so on. It really does feel personal. Perhaps most eloquent of all is the album’s concluding work: Five Lines of Music Slow Down and Eventually Stop, its title giving you more or less all you need to know, but its placement here, in the wake of works like Where the Paths End and Fourteen Minutes, gives it a much greater emotional import.

Samuel Vriezen: 94 Fantasias for 31 voices (tracks 49–60)

In which we approach the final third. (Previous posts in this series here, here and, to begin with, here.)

It sounds daft to say it, having now listened to sixty of them, but this was the first time I really thought about the way in which Vriezen titles these pieces. Or rather, the role that title selection plays in the aesthetic game that’s going on here. For example, No. 84 – Fourth World (To Vizenor) gets its title from the prominent perfect fourths at the start of its theme, which give it a fanfare-esque quality, at least to begin with, before the by-now familiar path towards congealment and dissolution. The origin of that interval is an accidental occurrence of the compositional algorithm, and within the rules of this game of no greater or lesser import than any other musical feature. But it leads Vriezen to a pun, on the idea of a ‘fourth world’ in The Heirship Chronicles of Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, and from there, to an homage to Vizenor and his work. Which is to say, as obvious as it is, that everything expressive in these works, everything referential or programmatic, is emergent rather than played. But it is also something to be sought and found: and that seeking, that sifting through the abstract data stream in (possibly futile, possibly quixotic) search for meaning is the point. Of No.77 – Lament Weft, Vriezen writes, ‘his one always remained mysterious to me. Originally I heard it in vaguely cosmological terms – some of these Fantasias strike me less as an unfolding of voices than an unfolding of a sound universe. This one is clearly woven out of strands with a clear character, which I’m now hearing as lament-like: descending figures, expressive (plaintive?) vibratos.’

With that in mind, what I’m starting to become aware of in these pieces is their instability: they may each contain moments of apparent significance (clustered around the beginning, when the character of a new theme is introduced, such as those perfect fourths; or around the end, in the coda or fade out, when a mood of reflection, exhaustion or devastation prevails), but these are always illusory, undone as they are by the relentless of the process itself. What we get, then, are moments, attempts, and the void. Vriezen’s practice of listening to the results of his experiments, trying to decode what they might mean so as to give them titles, is as much a part of this expression as are the sounds themselves.

Having said that, there are still exceptions, No.93 – Battle Songs being a notable example among this set. Vriezen says he assigned its title based on the ‘rich, intense polyphony that happens in the first half of the piece, where voices ascend to outdo one another in emphatic expression’, but notes also that the second half – slow and deeply rumbling – may resemble an ‘after-image of whatever it was that has taken place’. A rare example, then, of one of these pieces whose title speaks to its complete form.

Words elsewhere

Not so much this month; editing gigs have been keeping me busy. Still, I wrote wrote a short accompanying essay to Riot Ensemble’s video release of Alexander Tillegreen’s Phantom Miniatures … A review for Gramophone of a CD of orchestral works by the Spanish composer Raquel García Tomás … And a short preview text for hcmf// on the composer Lauri Supponen.

Of all the speculative historical cases of CF, perhaps the one we can be most sure of is that of a seven-month-old foetus, stillborn in Vienna in 1838. No one important, born of no one important, history remembers them only because of an autopsy carried out by one Carl von Rokitansky, who noted his findings for posterity.

Rokitansky – round-faced, bespectacled, his cheeks framed by prominent mutton chops and joined by a thin moustache – was in fact one of the leading physicians of his age. Born in 1804 in the city of Hradec Králové in northern Bohemia, he went to Charles University in Prague, initially studying with the renowned liberal philosopher Bernardo Bolzano before focusing his attention on medicine. At the age of twenty, he moved to Vienna to continue his education at the University of Vienna, where in 1828 he obtained his doctorate. His thesis was on the smallpox vaccination, but his primary focus was already on pathology. He was the first to apply systematic, scientific procedures to the discipline, establishing the correlations between outward symptoms and internal organ disease, and thus making possible for the first time diagnoses and treatments based on the underlying condition rather than surface symptoms. Along the way, he developed a methodology and set of standards – published as the three-volume Handbuch der pathologischen Anatomie (1842–6) – that remains the foundation of modern practice. Over the course of his life, Rokitansky is believed to have performed almost 60,000 autopsies. Yet it was his very first that made his name and outshone them all.

On 27 March 1827, Rokitansky – still a doctoral student – hurried with his teacher, Dr Johann Wagner, to an apartment just outside the city gates, in the district of Alservorstadt. The day before, Vienna had been buffeted by a wintry storm, and the streets were presumably damp, chill and eerily calm. Ludwig van Beethoven, hitherto Vienna’s greatest living musician, had died at the height of the storm, at the age of fifty-six: if (sensationalist) legend is to be believed, shaking his fist at the thundering heavens. Rokitansky and Wagner were summoned to attend to his body.

It is unclear why an autopsy was ordered, although the scientific impulse to interrogate the body of one of the most famous and complex individuals in Europe will have been reason enough. A line in the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament – a letter written by Beethoven to his brothers in 1802 that detailed his despair at losing his hearing – has been suggested as a prompt. Lamenting the ill temper, stubbornness and misanthropy occasioned by his failing health, Beethoven urges Carl and Johann, ‘as soon as I am dead if Dr Schmid is still alive ask him in my name to describe my malady and attach this document to the history of my illness so that as far as possible at least the world may become reconciled with me after my death’. However, this document was only discovered after Wagner and Rokitansky had begun work, hidden as it was among other papers in a concealed cupboard drawer.

Reflecting their experimental practice, Wagner and Rokitansky concentrated on finding explanations for known clinical problems. Among the focus of their examinations were therefore Beethoven’s ears (where they noted shrivelled auditory nerves, if not sufficient evidence to establish conclusively the reason for the composer’s deafness), pancreas (evidence of chronic pancreatitis, no doubt the cause of his lifelong bowel problems) and liver (cirrhosis of which, likely due to excessive drinking, was the cause of his death). While their methods were not as complete or informed as those of today, their observations remain detailed enough to provide endless grounds for speculation by musicologists and historians of medicine alike.

A decade after working on Beethoven’s cadaver, Rokitansky was now an established pathologist at the Vienna General Hospital, one of the leading European figures in his field. Studying the stillborn foetus lying on his operating table that day, he discovered a perforation in the infant’s intestine that had led meconium (the baby’s first stool) to leak into the abdominal cavity. Today, we call this condition meconium ileus, and it happens when the meconium is thicker and stickier than usual, causing a blockage to the lower intestine and, in cases like Rokitansky’s, a potentially fatal rupturing of the bowel. Rokitansky appears to have been the first person to describe the phenomenon; today it is recognised as an almost certain indicator of CF. Nearly a century and a half later, my brother Matthew was born with the same condition. Thanks to a chain of knowledge that begins in Rokitansky’s laboratory, Matt’s life was saved by immediate and major abdominal surgery.

Read more

Anyway, the composers from that initial group were all from that year’s call for scores shortlist. Once we had the money to make the commissions, it was simply a case of players putting their hands up to request who they wanted a piece from. The brilliant violinist, Sarah Saviet, wasted no time in tagging Soosan, and the piece that came out of that partnership, Undone, has gone on to be one of the most successful works of the whole series. As we’ll get into in the interview below, it was something of a turning point for Soosan’s music, marking a new moment on her journey into her own double consciousness as both a British and an Iranian artist. It also spawned a little star system of related pieces: a four-part work, Every strand of thread and rope, for solo violin (recorded by Sarah for all that dust in 2023), of which Undone forms the second movement, and a concerto-like orchestration, also called Undone, for soloist and chamber ensemble. The ensemble version was recorded for Nonclassical in 2024 by Saviet and Ruthless Jabiru, conducted by Kelly Lovelady, and nominated for a 2024 Ivor’s Classical Award in the chamber ensemble composition category.

My small part in this was to ping Soosan a handful of generic questions about her piece and her experience of lockdown (as I did for many of the early Zeitgeist composers), her answers to which we edited into a couple of accompanying videos. I was struck at the time by her answers, which neatly tied together not just the playing conditions of her work, its background and its relationship to her Iranian heritage (via her use of a santur, a type of Iranian hammered dulcimer, to generate its tuning system and some of its material), but also her present psychological state and the conditions of the world at that moment.

Fast forward a few years, and I next met Soosan at Juliet Fraser’s eavesdropping festival in 2024. There, she gave a talk as part of the weekend’s forum component under the title ‘Notes on Failure’. In it, she talked at length about Undone, the process of making it, and the pieces that had come out of it since. But she also talked about her recent, and ongoing, struggle with cancer, how debilitating it had been, and how it had forced her to find a new, more economical and less draining way to compose. Some of this manifested in her new-found propensity to reuse or elaborate upon her own material; some of it came through in the greater sense of looseness – occasionally bordering on improvisation – that she had begun to admit into her work. Suddenly, to the dimensions of Undone she had already talked about in 2020, was added yet another, perhaps the most consequential of all.

All of which is an intoxicating set of ideas for any music critic to get their teeth into. Yet somehow it took me another two years to set up a proper chance with Soosan to dig into them more deeply. As I hope is clear, the US-Israel war with Iran had nothing to do with my wish to talk to her about her music, yet it inevitably cast a shadow over our conversation. We spoke on Thursday 9 April over Zoom, two days after the US president threatened the total destruction of Iranian civilisation and only the morning after a fragile ceasefire of sorts was brokered. Soosan’s father is Iranian and she has extended family in the country; I am therefore extremely grateful to her for still wanting to talk to me, and for the generosity, humour and insight that she brought to our conversation. I deliberately left it to her to say what she wanted, if anything, about the war. In the event, we didn’t go into it much, but as you’ll see, her diasporic perspective is deeply interwoven with her creative practice.

Soosan’s music can be heard on Every strand of thread and rope, released on all that dust, and on Girl, released on Nonclassical. Her book, which we refer to a few times below, is Disrupting Diaspora: Embodied Research through Music Composition and Evocative Life-Writing, and it is published by Routledge.

Interview with Soosan Lolavar

TRJ: Your music has a lot going on in it, and hopefully we will come on to some of that. But I wanted to start with Undone, if that’s okay. Partly because I think that’s the first time I really became aware of you and your music. But also – and tell me if I’m wrong – it feels like it’s a kind of turning point or a pivot of some sort.

I wonder if you could start by explaining how you see it as a pivot: what were you doing before then, and what afterwards?

SL: Yeah, I feel really connected to that piece. I love it and that set of pieces, and I think you’re right. It is a turning point.

I think that was when I started to really loosen my relationship to technique … I never wrote complex music, as it were, but there was a lot of detail, and I was often trying to explore things in a very clearly thought-through way, trying to add lots of intricacy. And then Undone – slightly facilitated by the fact that it was just for one instrument – was just where everything started to loosen. And that is both literally: I did this detuning, so the violin was really loose; but my control over things started to really loosen too.

The four pieces on that album range from totally written to really vaguely written and with a lot of improvisation. Undone probably sits in the middle. And it was written first. I think it’s interesting that it’s the one that opened up the spreading in each direction.

I think it was partly that I had finished or was coming up to finishing my PhD, and the works in that had been about this gradual loosening of control. But it was also working with Sarah Saviet, who’s a really amazing violinist, a really, really accomplished improviser and just a very giving and generous performer. So yeah, I started to loosen control of everything a lot. And I found that the kinds of things I was interested in came much more to the surface when I just let go a little bit.

TRJ: And was it the first piece in which you used the santur as a compositional tool?

SL: It probably was, actually. That was partly because it was lockdown, everything had gone a bit weird. I was in my house, couldn’t really go anywhere. Maybe that forced me to be like, OK, what can I do just here by myself? And then that opened up this whole new way of working, which has persisted since.

TRJ: I know that the tunings that you were getting from the santur were very important in the violin piece.

SL: Yeah.

TRJ: … Whereas before – I don’t know all your music before this – but it strikes me that it’s more written in equal temperament.

SL: I’d use the odd note here and there. But yeah, probably more or less everything was either equally tempered or it was in an Iranian mode. Iranian modes, although they don’t use the twelve notes, they’re very fixed. They’re very solid. The tunings in Undone are pretty random, actually. I think I was just tuning my santur and fiddling around, and I found a tuning that I liked the sound of and then measured it all with a tuning fork. So it was very instinctive. But as a result, it has this kind of instability, which really feels like lockdown to me. [laughs]

TRJ: You said something about that on that video you did for Riot that it was the undoing of not – as you say now – a kind of control of the music, but more a general social undoing.

Since then, you’ve started performing on the santur, and it has become a much more central part of your musical practice. How is that folded in with the double consciousness idea that you talk about in your book – this dual identity as both British and Iranian? Because that is one of the central things that you are exploring in your music, right?

SL: Definitely. And the journey I’ve gone on with the santur really reflects that, I think. I started playing it ten years ago, when I went to the US to study Iranian music. There was also a santur teacher there, in the community, and the guy I was studying with basically said: you need to buy a santur. So I got one shipped over from Iran. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing; I had these very austere and slightly terrifying lessons with this guy who every week was like, I cannot believe how bad you are! [laughs]

For that year, I studied the Radif. It’s what you study in Iranian music. It’s a collected volume of about 300 melodies that are divided into these twelve modes, and you memorise them. They are notated, but you can’t use the notation to play from. That’s just to refer to, and really, the notation is so unhelpful that it’s much better just to listen to them.

Then once you’ve memorised all of them and can recognise them and move between them – you know, understand them really well – then you use them as the basis for improvisation. You would never play any of these melodies in performance, it would be like playing a scale. They’re a kind of route to performance.

Anyway, I did this for a year, and in a year I learnt one of the twelve modes, but not even that well. Because I was mostly doing composition, this was a side thing, but I found it very difficult and dispiriting and didn’t really get into it. And when I came back [to the UK] I put the santur away and ignored it for a bit.

And then a project came up where I thought, oh, maybe I’ll give it a go. It was a thing with a dancer. I watched that piece again the other day and it was interesting, because I definitely had limitations – massive limitations in terms of technique – but I guess the composer in me had found an interesting way around them.

I also had this massive, massive fear and anxiety about being allowed to play this instrument. It felt very Iranian, it felt very traditional. It felt very like the kind of thing that people like me – i.e., these middle, in-between, double consciousness people – aren’t allowed to do, and you’re only allowed to do it traditionally. And people did say to me, ‘Why are you playing it weirdly? It’s not very good.’

In that period, I had quite a violent relationship with the instrument. I prepared it, I tied strings to it. I attached paper clips and safety pins. I really bashed it up, actually, and I think there was a desire to slightly damage it, maybe.

And then gradually over time that relationship has loosened – still being really interested in those kinds of prepared things, but just feeling like I’m allowed to play it in any way I want. Exploring that has really made me reflect on … This is not a new idea, but Western classical – all classical music, not just Western, Iranian, all different kinds – is obsessed with a singular ideal type of sound. And this idea that to be good is to do this and to be bad is to not do that. To greater or lesser degrees. And actually, there’s loads and loads and loads of music in the world that just isn’t interested in that, or in which that just isn’t a factor. It has been interesting that that relationship with the santur has allowed me to unpick that in Western music, and in other music, and to start to approach things from this different view of not perfection but more community and experience and exploration. What is new, what is interesting to me and what is expressing what I want to say?

TRJ: From the Western classical point of view, that’s the Lachenmann thing of, let’s look at an instrument. Here’s what it’s supposed to do: let’s amplify all the stuff that you’re not supposed to hear. You know, key slaps and breath and all this, and dig into that. It sounds like you were doing similar things with your santur: finding what it did that wasn’t the ‘correct’ thing to be doing with it.

SL: I think when I started, I can see that I was still really firmly based in this European new music tradition, so I was definitely doing what you describe as the more Lachenmann approach to things. The kinds of sounds I was aiming for had a new European new music foundation, for sure. Because I think that felt familiar to me; it felt safe.

It also felt like it would be taken seriously if I followed that route. Which is a great route still, but it’s interesting that that has massively loosened now, and I don’t feel the need to make the santur sound new and modern and contemporary and difficult. It’s almost as if when there was tradition, it felt like my option against tradition – or to not be within tradition – was to be new and dangerous and contemporary. Whereas now I don’t feel I have to.

It’s having that confidence in Iranian tradition, but that’s also another tradition that I’m being tied to a little bit. I’m feeling slowly, slowly a bit more confident to just do something that I want to do.

TRJ: It sounds like as if, to begin with, your relationship to the instrument had an almost Freudian side to it. Like you say, you had to bash it around. You had to come to a familiarity with it in a confrontational kind of way.

That’s your point of view. Thinking of the instrument as a living thing, has it come towards you in a similar direction?

SL: I think so. I think we’ve come together. We started as this slightly antagonistic pair, and I treated it quite badly, and it felt difficult and uncompromising and remote. It was almost like – and this echoes my life a bit – it was this bastion of Iranian culture, and I was a teenager rebelling against it.

And then it’s like we’ve grown up a bit, and I’ve realised that it isn’t a bastion of anything. It doesn’t mean anything. Well, it does. But the meaning isn’t inherent in it. What it fundamentally is, is some wood and some strings. The ‘meaning’ is strong and important and deep and two-and-a-half thousand years old, but it’s not inherent in the thing. I can take it or leave it. I can be part of that, or I can be something else, and that’s okay.

The santur and I together create this cyclical unit of a kind of Iranianness that is mine and isn’t ‘traditional’ as such, but is real and important and is its own thing.

TRJ: Do you have feedback from more traditional Iranian musicians about how you play now?

SL: Oh god, it’s the most terrifying thing in the whole world! [laughs] It’s interesting, because like any musical tradition, you’ve got to find your people. And when you’re new to a musical tradition, you’re maybe not that good at reading the signals of, this is my kind of person or we agree or we don’t agree.

In Western music, I can spot people very quickly and be like, we’re on a level, we’re a bit different. In Iranian music, it took me a bit longer. So I had a few challenging experiences with people who had a very particular idea of what things should be, and I just was not in that whatsoever – and it would be frustrating for them. But now I’ve found my people, and they tend to be really high-quality, incredible traditional Iranian musicians, who are also very comfortable in lots of other things, whether it be Western music or contemporary music or experimental things or whatever.

And those people, they’re pretty open. They don’t tend to have the Radif as the singular way of approaching everything. They are interested in sound, basically. And I’m sure they don’t like every single thing I do, but we approach it as sound, as community, as playing together, and then it kind of opens things up.

TRJ: Your book comes round to this idea of sound as a medium of thought, or at least sound as a way of thinking about things: that there’s a sonic kind of thought as well as a visual, literary kind of thought. And I was curious about what are the parameters for you in which you think sound does think? Is it through, for example, traditional references to things? Or is it through harmony? Is it through timbre? Is it, you know, not just in the santur, but extending beyond that into your wider compositional practice?

SL: I think part of it is in the doing and the making and the … what you asked about thinking about the santur as a living thing. And this idea of making as a cycle that moves between maker and material. So it could be Soosan and the santur, but it could also be Soosan and a melody, or it could be Tim and a harmony, or whatever. For me, it’s in that connection between the two, and that constant moving back and forth. Because when I’m playing the santur – and that’s actually been something that’s been really nice as I’ve developed more and as I’ve stopped beating it up – it pushes back on me, and it pushes me down certain directions. It opens up certain things and it closes other things down. I think Undone was the first exploration of that. And then when that became the ensemble version, it became more obvious what the santur was affording and what it was closing down.

So I think, for me, it’s in that iterative relationship of the person trying to imprint on the sound and then the sound pushing back in a certain way. That’s where the ‘thinking’ occurs; it’s never solely in me and it’s never solely in the music, it’s in the connection between the two of us. Because melodies – this is going to sound a bit hippie-dippy – but melodies tell you where they need to go.

TRJ: Yeah.

SL: And harmonies do the same, and rhythms and textures. That’s not to say that you always follow exactly what they want, but you’re constantly having that conversation between the two of you about where things need to move.

Just going back to the santur, what that has really opened up in my practice is improvisation becoming a central aspect of it. I think that that cycle exists in all musical experimentation, but you can really see it in improvisation in a way that sometimes can be more hidden when you’re composing. Not that those two are the opposite of each other, but let’s just say you’re not improvising as such.

TRJ: Presumably, when you’re composing, those kinds of iterative processes are happening, and then you write down the results.

SL: Sure.

TRJ: Thinking about the affordances of the santur, presumably those are to do with things like resonance and reverberation, and the decay of a sound … If you were going to try to play, say, I don’t know, a Bach fugue on it …

SL: It would be fun!

TRJ … It would be fun, but it’s going to come out very differently. You’re going to have to think, okay, do I want this huge wall of echoing noise or do I slow it down or pick things out? I imagine that’s how the instrument is talking back to you – saying, ‘No, I don’t want to do that, stretch it out a bit.’

SL: Yeah, totally. And I love that. So, technically on the santur, you can only play a maximum of two notes at the same time. But obviously you can move quickly and obviously there’s massive resonance. So that causes harmony to become a kind of outcome of melody. Which is something quite interesting. And harmony’s always disappearing. Which is nice.

And then also, the santur has nine pitches, basically, and each pitch has four strings. And then those pitches are at three different octaves. So even though it has these infinite tuning capacities, and you can tune it to more or less anything – and I’ve done more microtonal music on the santur – it’s actually really tonal. It lends itself to a kind of eight-note scale. And once you’ve made your scale, those notes are pretty fixed. So my music has gone down this route that has more ‘microtonal’ pitches in it, but is actually very, very tonal and very solid. I like those restrictions because the more restrictions, the more you have to dive in and find new things and really explore them.

TRJ: Another aspect of your musical practice is this idea of embodiment – that the relationship between a performer and their instrument is embodied one. Obviously there’s been lots of work done on this around, say, a cello or a piano, or with Sarah and her violin. What is the kind of embodied relationship with the santur? Because, you know, from the outside, you’re just someone with a couple of beaters and there doesn’t seem much to it. But presumably there is much more.

SL: I guess what’s nice about it, is it’s always developing and it’s always changing according to what you’re doing and how you’re playing it. Especially because I don’t play with the most traditional technique. I still bow it, I still use my fingers on it, I do different things with it. So I’m always interested in finding new ways of relating to it in an embodied way.

I think what playing the santur has really solidified for me is that connection between an idea of sound, a physical movement and then the sounding, the hearing of a sound. Those things feel truly connected now. And even though the tuning of the santur is always changing, that feeling of knowing how moving your body will move the sound creates this deeper embodiment. Even when you’re not playing the santur, even when you’re just composing things or doing things in different ways.

And I also think that, obviously with everything that’s going on right now, it being an Iranian instrument has this much deeper importance now. I haven’t been able to travel to Iran for a few years because of … politics, basically. But I went to Berlin recently to do this project with Juliet Fraser [Lament: A ritual of letting go]. And the church was absolutely freezing, like literally Arctic. We’d go outside to warm up. And unsurprisingly, just before the concert, three of my strings snapped. It was not in a happy place.

And right now, with the war and everything going on – I haven’t really been able to contact my family for like a month – it’s hard not to feel like my santur breaking was a representation of my connections to Iran falling apart. I got really upset when it happened. But then playing it is really important as well. Playing it is a connection, playing it is an act of remembering.

So yeah, these things become so much more important. There’s an Instagram video of an Iranian guy sitting in the ruins of his bombed-out music school in Tehran playing the kamencheh. And I found it so moving. I’ve watched it like twenty times.

I think sometimes people can overstate and be like, ‘Oh, music will save us. If we just play music together, then the world will be okay.’ And I don’t think that. When there’s a war going on, what is important becomes very narrow. And it’s really horrendous what’s going on. But there’s also that sense of, no, this is a real country with real people and a culture and a lineage and a history that is very long. I suppose maybe the one thing I try to hold on to is the idea of what lasts and what falls away. What I’m hoping is that this war will fall away and disappear, and we will not remember it. But what will be remembered is the stuff that actually matters and remains. Partly that’s family and friendships and the people you love, but it’s also music as well.

TRJ: Building on that, you’ve used your compositional practice as a way of – not navigating, but kind of understanding your diasporic identity. In general, how has that worked? And does that project feel different now than it did two months ago?

SL: That’s a really good question. In terms of the first one, because I’ve been doing it for twelve years, something like that, since a couple of years before I went to the US, I can definitely see that I was just feeling my way as I went. It has obviously gone through these different stages and, you know, like anything when you start, it’s a bit basic and maybe a bit naive and then it complexifies … It’s actually quite nice to see that you do really get somewhere if you continue to explore something for quite a long time. That’s a worthwhile thing to do, and this idea of just jumping in and doing something for a bit and then jumping out is not as interesting to me.

So yeah, in the very beginning when it started out, I think it was just like, ‘Ooh, this will be interesting [laughs], let’s do a bit of this’. And I can see that there was maybe a slight naivety in it, and I was dealing in these slightly fixed categories of ‘this is Iranian’ and ‘this is Western’. That was all I’d ever been given growing up: that was the labelling that I had been operating under for my whole life. Also, there were undercurrents of a little bit of exoticism here and there – which again I was doing because that was all I had, really. This sort of fixed other that was kind of combining with Western stuff. I look back and some of that feels a little bit awkward to me now. But I can see how it had a clarity for other people, and maybe for funders, for commissioners and people like that. It was like, ‘Oh, she does this thing’. Which is fine, but from my vantage point now, I look back and think, OK, that’s interesting, but I probably wouldn’t do that kind of stuff now.

Then, yeah, as you say, it has developed and moved on. I think my PhD and the book were really exercises in how I could move away from this. Is it Paul Gilroy who talks about culture not being like mixing cocktails? It’s not like you take this pure thing and this pure thing and you mix them and you get half of each. That’s not how things work.

Although I’m sure there’s more progression to go, I feel like now I’m more in this space of creating something that feels kind of uniquely diasporic. And it is a mix, it is a combination of all the things that I have experienced. But it can’t really be neatly separated into bits, whereas I think my earlier music could. You know, sometimes it was literally like, these three instruments are in equal temperament, this instrument is in Iranian dastgāh. You could literally separate them out. Whereas now it’s a lot more vague.

And Undone is a good starting point for that because that piece was a bit Iranian, but really not; the tuning was nothing to do with Iranian music. It was just something else. And that’s what really interests me, I think: creating the new stuff. I think I worked out that if I was cosplaying as a traditional Iranian, I would fail. I’m not a traditional, proper, authentic Iranian musician. There are people who do that and I’m not one of them. But if I was trying to say, ‘I am Britishness’, that’s also not true. I’m not really either of those things. I’m just something else.

And whether that has changed now? One of the big challenges right now, amongst everything else, is that the Iranian diaspora is a very, very, very politically divided group. There is huge disagreement, and it’s not casual. It’s really very virulent, visceral, angry disagreement. And if you are on either side of it, you call the other people fascists, basically, about this war, about its legitimacy, about the future, all of that.

In some ways, it has been really isolating, and I have found it very, very difficult because I’ve always felt a little bit alone. Because if you really go down that road of, I’m just making this new thing, then you’re kind of a category of one, you’re just doing your thing by yourself. You’re not fully allied to any group.

The situation right now has really heightened that because it can feel very lonely being a British Iranian at the moment. Your British friends don’t really get it. They’re like, ‘Is your family okay?’ And I’ll say, well, they’re not dead, you know, but they’re not okay.

Of course, they’re not okay. They’re being bombed every day. And then with your Iranian friends, there’s a whole range of thoughts and beliefs, and people get very, very upset when you’re not on the same side as them.

So it can feel really lonely, and you’re just on your own a bit. Which I think has definitely been heightened lately.

TRJ: That sounds very difficult.

SL: Hmmm.

TRJ: Changing tack slightly. As a composer, you remind me a little bit of Liza Lim …

SL: … I love her! She’s amazing.

TRJ: … In that you’re the kind of composer who brings a lot to their work. In Liza’s music, because I’ve worked with it for so long, I can see how it’s not just, ‘Oh, this sound is doing this job, this musical action is doing this job’, but also how she turns that unit into a compositional arc. And I’m interested in what you are doing when you compose, and you have, as you said before, maybe a sound or melody or something that is representative of a particular idea – saying something about identity or about embodiment or whatever. How do you then make that into an actual compositional arc?

SL: It’s always a bit mysterious, isn’t it? Because I go into this weird trance and then I wake up and I’ve written something. I’m like, oh my god, how the hell did that happen? But when I have reflected on it, I’ve realised that I’m really zoomed out as a composer. When I think about the visual art that I really like, it’s often really big blocks.

I love Rothko. There was a big Rothko retrospective in Paris recently, which I went to and I spent like five hours in it. It was just amazing, and I don’t tire of his reuse of that general idea and just doing it so many times and getting so much more out of it. And I like a lot of Richard Serra: big hulking sculptural metal things.

And then when I have listened to some other people’s music, I remember thinking, wow, this is so intricate, there’s so much detail in one bar, one beat having all these different things in, and being like, my stuff is kind of slapdash in comparison to this! [laughs]

I don’t tend to zoom into the details of every intricate moment. It’s more like, what is the overall feeling? And I also think that relates to the way that I experience sound. There are things I’m really shit at and there are things that I’m better at. Like anyone. In terms of my ear, I’ve worked out that my sense of pitch is rubbish. If you played me a piece of music and asked me, what’s the harmonic progression, I’d be like: don’t know. And probably if you gave me a complex melody and asked me to write it out, I would do quite a bad job because the details of it would just evade me.

But one thing I noticed when I was teaching was that I could listen to a piece once, and very, very clearly understand the structure immediately, and also the big movements in texture. And not the actual harmonic progression, but the way the harmony moved as a whole, I could get it very quickly.

So I’ve always come at sound from this much more zoomed-out way. That is to say that for me, everything has to relate to the whole of it. And often it’ll be a colour or a texture or a visual thing or something, and if the piece is orange and that note is luminous blue, I’ll be like, why is that there? And even if it changes and it goes through different things, it all needs to fit into the whole.

TRJ: Are you planning a lot of that out in advance? Are you thinking, okay, this is my fifteen-minute orchestral piece, I’ve zoomed out, I know it’s going to be this shape. Or is that coming out of the kind of page-by-page doing of it? Or what?

SL: Normally it will be the former. There will normally be one thing that is the essence of the whole thing and everything comes from that – but that’s not to say that there’s a chord and everything comes from that chord in a very specific melodic or harmonic way. It’s more vague and abstract than that.

In a way, it relates to the santur, actually. You could play a complex melody on the santur for five minutes. And then if you just listen to the very end of the recording, you’ll hear the decay of everything that happened there, but it’s all gradually disappearing. Well, it’s almost like I have an idea, and it could be a feeling or a sense or a texture or a kind of physical thing, and everything comes from the decay of that.

TRJ: It’s like the after-image from when you look at a bright light and then you close your eyes. It’s not the attack of that initial idea, but it’s asking, what are the implications of that initial idea? That makes a space, a temporal site, that you can then poke around in and do something.

SL: Poking around is exactly what I do! When I think about that talk I did at eavesdropping [‘Notes on Failure’], that was all about this slightly practical approach to composing after being really ill and then having very little time and having to do things differently. And also looking back at my music very critically and thinking, well, each of my pieces did one good thing, and then there was a lot of shit around it.

So what I’m trying to do is pull out the one good thing and just do that each time. I’m sure many composers are good at that, but I don’t know if I have the compositional skill to do twenty good things in a piece and have them all come across. I think if I do one good thing and then just go down that rabbit hole, it always works out better.

TRJ: One of the things you talked about in that talk was the idea of picking out one thing from the last piece that you did, and then making that the next piece. I know that was the idea between the two versions of Undone. Is that something you’re still doing?

SL: I’ve done it where I can. Sometimes it’s not possible because of what you’ve been asked to do. But yeah, I’m still really interested in it, because it’s so easy to just write something and then move on and write something new. And then it all feels like this random collection of stuff and it doesn’t feel so connected. Also, if you’re not careful, I feel like I can get drawn into being a bit of a composer for hire. But then you also want to balance that with your own development. Like, what am I interested in? What am I trying to do? Reusing bits did really help that. It’s also a function of just not having a lot of time and feeling really pushed and, you know, still not having fully worked out my relationship to music in this new era where I have a long-term illness that could come back at any time.

I think it also comes very much from visual art. It’s a very visual art thing to basically do the same thing over and over again with tiny, tiny changes. I found a book that was advice for artists. It was really focused on visual art, and one of the things it said was something like, ‘everything you need to know about what you should do in your next piece of art is contained in your last piece of art’. That was kind of an interesting thing to take forward, I thought.

TRJ: I love going to professional art fairs, where everybody’s got their stall. And you go, oh, I see what you do and you’ve done it in landscape and portrait and in this colour – and although the art is not necessarily super high standard, I love seeing the gaps between the pieces because they’re in series and thinking, oh, that’s what it is. Obviously, the Rothko thing is a much bigger version of that.

Again, it’s about going on a journey as well, isn’t it? It’s about journeying through an idea, then it takes you somewhere you didn’t realise you were going towards.

The last thing I wanted to ask you about is the projects that you’re doing at the moment. I think you’re working as much these days as a performer as a composer. You’re doing this project with Juliet, Lament: A ritual of letting go, which has been going for more than a year now.

Where do you and your santur fit in with this, because I think of the music is Renaissance-influenced, isn’t it?

SL: Oh, it’s just the best project. I love it so much. It has just come into my life in this almost magical way, and it was exactly what I needed.

It’s Juliet’s idea. It’s a project that she has been working on for a while, I think. It was supposed to be her swan song. She was like, this is my final project, and then I’m leaving. And then it has meant that she’s not leaving. So it sort of reversed her plan, which I’m pleased about.

It came from this idea of lamentation rituals, which we’ve lost or used to have. We don’t really have them in the UK anymore, but they brought so much to our lives and they’re so important. But also this idea of letting go and finding ways to release and be free.

Juliet has written loads about it, which is really wonderful.1 She has written that, for her, part of this came from – and we’ve all discussed this at length – the fact that she’s only been singing for one year longer than she’s been singing professionally. So she says that she’s always had this kind of seriousness to her practice. And then the five of us in the group all started sharing our experiences of this striving for perfection, the endless pressure on yourself to absolutely be achieving everything all the time, to be perfect at everything. And I think that’s something that we’ve all struggled with, and maybe all musicians struggle with a little bit.

And connecting this idea of lamenting loss – people we’ve lost, relationships, things like that, but also just letting go of perfection. Initially I was on board just as a composer. And then, quite last minute, the person who was supposed to be in the ensemble got an injury, and Juliet reached out to me, because I’d recently done a performance at Another Sky [with cellist Colin Alexander].

TRJ: I saw that, yes.

SL: Yeah, and Juliet was there, and she invited me to a kind of development day. I think I they were just trying to see if it would be a good fit. And then it ended up working really well. There are five of us: Juliet and Christelle Monney, they’re both trained singers, and then the rest are Sarah Saviet, Eliza McCarthy [piano] and me. The three of us are not trained singers, which was kind of the point. Juliet wanted that sound. A lot of the stuff that we’re singing is Corsican folk music, which is not supposed to be sung by professionals. It’s supposed to be sung by people in the community.

But also the whole project is about letting go and about pushing your boundaries, doing stuff that you have not trained to do; it’s about embracing imperfection. Luckily, I was already doing that on my santur anyway, because it’s completely imperfect! [laughs]

TRJ: And it’s that loosening that you were talking about.

SL: Completely, the loosening. And what’s great about this loosening is that when you’re coming from a viewpoint of still being obsessed with perfection, it can feel like imperfection. It can feel like just doing things worse. But actually when you do it, what you realise is you leave space for new things to come through. And what comes through is this deep sense of community and togetherness. We perform for audiences, obviously, but the idea is that we’re kind of performing it for ourselves. We’re a group of women doing rituals together.

We’ve managed to tune the santur in such a way that it can fit in a few different pieces. We performed it in Aldeburgh first and then in Schwaz at Klangspuren, and then recently at MaerzMusik in Berlin. And every time it changes, every time we add new pieces, we take pieces out. Sarah had a baby in the meantime. Things are happening and changing. Actually in the Berlin version – because there are points in the thing where we do rituals – we included an Iranian ritual that I did that was really, really nice to do at that moment.

So yeah, it’s this amazing, amazing project, which is feeding into all the things that I’ve been exploring for a while, but has also really allowed me to work with this amazing group of people.

TRJ: And then you’ve got this new trio with electronics and tar [a type of long-necked lute].

SL: Yeah, there are three of us. Our connection is Trinity Laban, where I used to teach. The electronics guy is the head of composition, Dominic [Murcott], and the tar player is called Morad Kashef, who’s a current PhD student there.

It’s sort of the opposite way to make a band because we first had an album and then we had to make a band. Basically, Trinity had accidentally become this centre of Iranian music, probably because this student and teacher there, Amir Sadeghi-Konjani, is very connected in Iran. He just recommends that people come to Laban and suddenly you’ve got loads of people there.

And we talked about doing an album to represent all that different kind of stuff. Dominic found a label in the US [Other Minds] who were interested in releasing it. And then we were like, shit, we need to make a thing. So me, Dominic and Morad got together. Morad is an Azerbaijani tar player and singer. Iran’s very multi-ethnic; it has a big Azeri community. Dominic does modular synth and then I play santur. When you put it on paper, it sounds a bit like, wow, this is a very niche group. But we got together and we’ve played together; it’s very much in the early, early beginnings, but it’s already really exciting and amazing.

The only massive challenge has been the war. Morad’s wife and mother are still in Iran and he was like, I need to go back and be with them. So he was one of the few people trying to get into Iran during the war, and it was really stressful. We didn’t hear from him, and he was travelling across this land border with Turkey – which is, you know, land borders are always a bit intense places. But anyway, he got into Iran, and we did eventually hear from him that he’s okay for now. But yeah, we’re really worried about him and, you know, it has just gone completely quiet. So Dominic and I have been continuing to work together and just waiting for Morad to get back. But when he hopefully gets back and is okay I really want us to do some performances … I think it’s a time when we need to be doing stuff, and we need to be doing stuff with Iranian instruments that is its own contemporary thing and it isn’t only traditional, I think. I have this really strong need to perform this stuff right now.

TRJ: And that connects to what you were saying about the uniquely diasporic nature of what you do.

How does how do the Iranian instruments kind of fit with a modular synth? Because obviously that’s the challenge, right?

SL: Well, Dominic is an incredibly sympathetic and sort of thoughtful player, because I remember thinking this could be rubbish [laughs]. Oh God, this could be really shit!

But it’s actually working really well. We’re doing a lot of stuff with him live sampling the santur and then putting it through the synth and doing stuff with it. So they feel really connected. Because what I always want to avoid with Iranian instruments is this bifurcation of ‘Iranian instruments are old’ and ‘Western instruments are new’, which just isn’t true. And also just feels not interesting at all.

So yeah, when we’re finding ways to integrate, and finding ways to be understanding and sympathetic and really listen to each other, that’s the joy of it.

TRJ: Was there anything else that you wanted to say before we finish up?

SL: Well, there’s this whole other thing I’m feeling very frustrated about right now. I think sometimes it can seem like the Iranian thing is kind of cool and interesting and it gives this extra interesting flavour to my music. And that is true, I’m not denying that. But not everyone sees and knows about the massive dangers and downsides that come with it. That real danger and fear is something that is not always obvious to people, I would say.

TRJ: As someone who is, I think, about a million generations English, I don’t have a diaspora. I mean, my grandfather thought he was part Scottish and it turns out he was not even that … But it feels like very often, diasporic populations are more Jewish, Afro-Caribbean, whatever, than maybe the homeland population is. That’s a way of …

SL: … Keeping it alive.

TRJ: Exactly. But you’re saying that for Iranians, the opposite happens?

SL: Yeah, and also ... I mean, not to get too much on my high horse, but part of the reason that the situation in Iran is as it is, and has been that way for so long, is because of colonialism. It’s because of British and American intervention. It’s because they set up a company to steal the oil, and the moment the Iranians looked like they might be keeping a bit more of the profit, they destroyed any chance of a democratic future.

And that’s my culture as well. I’m sort of embroiled in that in that complicated way that we all are and have benefited from it. So I feel this intense frustration and anger that the two bits of me have made things such a mess.

After seeing them perform PIGSPIGSPIGS at the Wigmore Hall last weekend, I know I needn’t have worried. There are musical ‘numbers’ in PIGS – notably a long, piano-led song/instrumental wig-out that is essentially the act one climax – but much more of the sonic work takes place at the edges of music, somewhere between atmosphere, foley and mickey-mousing. If you act – if you just do something – you make vibrations in the air (sound) and articulate a point in time (rhythm). All actions, then, are but one step removed from music; or are like music; or even, occasionally, are music itself. And this was the aesthetic premise on which PIGS rested.

It was clear things would be OK early on, when Caitlin Rowley (as farmer’s son Noah) and Timothy Cape (as his girlfriend India) mimed long drags on a joint, accompanied by a banal inhale-exhale of mouth organs. That simple pairing of mime and music did so much work. It was, all at once, the visual and haptic translated into sound; a breath given harmonic shape (the harmonicas’ inherent plagal cadence); stage actions as musical rhythm; and a pretty decent joke. And when the harmonicas’ wheezing was incorporated into the song that followed, the lines between all these things were definitely erased. This, I realised, has always been BA’s genius: taking isolated musical or physical units and expanding them across every possible dimension.

PIGS also mined heavily that rich, anarchic seam that runs from Victorian music hall to Vic and Bob and beyond. Edward Henderson’s two-handed, two-jacketed conversation between the farmer and a shady real estate developer was an excellent piece of comedy business; and in Josh Spears’ send-up of an Anglican vicar, I caught whiffs of Rowan Atkinson and even Peter Cook. Like music, all actions are potentially comic, and the best moments of PIGS where when the action did a bit of both.

Which is not to say everything was perfect. I’m not sure the story resolved itself completely; and while the opening fifteen minutes were brilliantly energetic, the momentum sagged around the middle. One or two crucial lines got swallowed by the Wigmore’s acoustic (it really hasn’t seen anything like this before). I wasn’t that bothered though. All the above was enough for a good time.

Recording reviews

Apologies for the late delivery of this issue. I came back from London with a stinking head cold that put the brakes on me all last week. Nevertheless, I’ve found time to dig into Alex Paxton’s latest and have a bit of a mither about surfaces, sensuality and deeper meanings; to listen to a pair of wintry recordings by Laura Cannell; and take my third dive into Samuel Vriezen’s 94 Fantasias (part one here; part two here).

Before that, I want to add a quick word for a pair of live recordings by John Tilbury of late piano pieces by Feldman, released on true blanking: For Bunita Marcus, recorded at the I&E Festival, Dublin, in 2007; and Palais de Mari, recorded at Tectonics, Reykjavik, in 2012. Feldman fans won’t want to miss these. And although the latter recording is marred slightly by an audience phone going off in the last few minutes (SWITCH OFF YOUR DAMN PHONES), these are brilliantly hovering, shimmering performances by one of Feldman’s greatest interpreters.

Alex Paxton: Candyfolk Space Drum (Jonah Records)

I think Candyfolk Space Drum was the first piece of Alex Paxton’s I heard, at its London Sinfonietta premiere in 2022. That was a remarkable concert that also featured two works by that other great composer-trombonist, George Lewis. I remember being quite taken aback: half an hour of Paxton’s technicolour bamboozlery is a lot to absorb when it’s your first time. He was soloing too, there was a school choir (the brilliantly excited kids of Belham Primary School), a jazz drummer, all sorts. Lewis, in the audience, approved: his laudatory speech for Paxton’s winning of the Hindemith Prize in 2023 credited Paxton with creating ‘a new, creolized identity for classical music’. It definitely tapped into Paxton’s experience as a primary school music teacher, and everyone seemed to have an absolute blast.

This album – Paxton’s fifth in as many years – pairs CfSD with Blue Chew Cheerio Earpiece, played by Riot Ensemble, the orchestral Pullback Hat Biome Dunk (featuring improvised vocals by Jennifer Walshe) and Carpig for electronic keyboards, played by Zubin Kanga. Undoubtedly, he has hit on a rich and fluent way of doing things. Equally, there is nothing else that sounds like his music. Those are obviously good things, and they have brought Paxton to the forefront position he now occupies in British and European music. Where I start to worry, though, is that while nobody else writes music like Paxton, all of Paxton’s music sounds like Paxton’s music.

I know this because, since that 2022 premiere, I’ve written about it several times – in notes, blurbs and reviews – and I’m starting to run out of vocabulary. I had to invent ‘bamboozlery’, above, just to balance out the over-used ‘technicolour’. But then, I wonder, is that really the problem I think it is? Paxton is hardly the first composer to hit on a pleasing and original way of doing things and to stick with it. Indeed, this is what most of the best do.

So what about it that bothers me? If I’m honest, I’ve started to find it all a bit one-note. Paxton told me once that his aim when composing was to invest every moment with as much sensuality as possible. And while this is a laudibly populist goal, it does foreclose a number of expressive possibilities. In addition, pushing everything up to the surface in this way – making surface itself almost an ethical position – does rather drive one to think (and, yes, to write) only about that surface. And along the way, you run out of words.

What I want more of is not only darkness, banality and barrenness but also a sense of form or purpose with which to grapple. There’s a little of that in the short Pullback Hat Biome Dunk, Walshe’s improvised vocal describing with tragicomic delight the down-the-hatch-and-back-up-again life story of an unwise pina colada (‘You think it’s going to taste like an exotic holiday, but it’s not … Just hold my hair back …’). It’s all over in a flash, is never quite what it seems, and ends in a chirping, chattering halo of regret.

And, to be fair, the emphasis on grooves in Blue Chew Cheerio Earpiece gives that piece greater stability than your typical Paxton; I like too its tendency to fragment rather than saturate the sonic space. There’s a great moment in part five, ‘YOUR MOM Still Laughing’, when everything drops out to leave some faint synths and a bit of vinyl static that is genuinely surprising and suggests that Paxton is mindful of overdoing his schtick. When this material gets developed, via a weird recorder/sax chorale thing, we get a sense of what the underbelly of Paxton’s music might sound like – and I really like it. The default remains the hyperactive, luminous colours stuff, but I could get into this different dimension.

Laura Cannell: The Medieval Drone Society and The Medieval Drone Society II (Brawl Records)

I had listened a few times to the two volumes of Laura Cannell’s The Medieval Drone Society, struggling to find a foothold, before it occurred to me that perhaps I was listening at the wrong time. Cannell recorded these two modest discs in the depths of January, ‘sleepless at the turn of the year’ and seemingly in search of respite and perhaps hope. This morning, a squall of rain had passed briefly over, but now the sun was out, the late daffodils were still nodding and the birds were once more singing in force. To make it make sense, I had to bring her music back with me into a memory of winter.

Both discs of TMDS are made up of multitracked solo improvisations, played variously on cello, recorder and violin and based on short fragments of medieval music – thirteenth-century monophony on volume one, the music of Machaut specifically on volume two. We cannot know what Machaut et al. were thinking when they wrote, but Cannell finds in their pages something chill, something dark, like an unheated corner of the house. And yet despite the ‘drone’ in her CDs’ titles, these sixteen pieces (none of them more than five and a half minutes long) are not steady state blocks, clenched and shivering against the cold, but patches of just enough light and warmth to see one through. What fragments there are of her medieval sources are well disguised, but what they impress is a sense of trajectory, a language of insistence and faith.

And they are proved right. The seasons move on, and with them, the ever-prolific Cannell. AURORAE, her newest record, arrived just a fortnight ago. Clothed in red and blue swirls, like a retinal after-image, and dwelling on the thicker sounds of organs and synths, it orients her once more towards the sun.

Samuel Vriezen: 94 Fantasias for 31 voices (tracks 33–48)

Jumping in again, I switched to headphone listening for most of these. In part out of consideration for the rest of my family against this music’s enduring oddness, in part for the sake of a change. I’d recommend it. The opportunity for a slightly lower volume, without compromising on any detail, takes a bit of the edge off the sound. And listening from inside the music, rather than in front of it, really heightens the spatiality of all that polyphony.

I think this set (as I mentioned last time around, I’m deliberately not re-listening to earlier chunks of the series just yet) contains one of my favourites: the unassumingly titled No. 32 – Molto adagio, a twenty-minute realisation (according to Vriezen it is the second longest of all ninety-four) whose slower pace creates a more pointillistic effect, in which melodic lines fragment and recongeal as a starry tableau before giving way to a long comet’s tail of a coda.

Elsewhere, the woozy No. 121 – The Heavens are Drunk with Delight in Life is quite fun; funnier still is No. 51 – Vulgar Djinns, which begins with a similar melodic shape but adds to it raspberries, burps and farts (depending on register). In time, these also congeal, into a kind of wailing incantation.

If we want to talk more generally, that idea of congealing is important, I think: the nature of the project – dense polyphonic experiments whose voices are all set off in tempo and pitch against one another – will tend towards massification, as up to all of those thirty-one voices are heard at once from different angles. But so too are the ascent and descent either side of that point: it’s notable how many of these pieces have codas that sound (and often behaves) so utterly different from their intros. A function of the canon melody being different at its end to its start, for sure, but it’s also an emergent function that gives rise to expressive form: no matter what happens in the middle, no matter how raucous and overwhelming things might get, there’s something sad about these long farewells. The opening moments of No. 9 – Yodel Melt do exactly what their title suggests: an arpeggiated kind of Alpine call that disintegrates into a low ooze as it falls. The middle section resolves almost into a slow chorale, with a weird Mahlerian adagio energy, while the conclusion creeps in on you and away before you know.

I also enjoyed the bassier tones of No. 123 – The Cries of Mokum (Mokum the Yiddish word for Amsterdam; the ‘cries’ therefore those of the city’s erstwhile street vendors), the Vangelis-like melodic hesitancy of No. 34 – Tentacles (I don’t know why Bladerunner should only have come to mind now), and the on-off contrasts of No. 97 – An Emergence, whose distorted tones and on-off contours at the outset made me think of the no-input mixer music of Toshimura Nakumura or Sachiko M, although the rest of the music far outstrips this initial impression. Like Yodel Melt, it too ends up in quite an interesting harmonic space, and again it ends with bare, blasted coda of long isolated tones.

Words elsewhere

I have two more reviews out this month – a long one for Nutida musik (Norway) on GBSR and Taylor MacLennan’s definitive recording of the Feldman trios (watch out for an English reprint of this in a future issue of PL), and my Gramophone debut, reviewing a portrait CD of the Belgian composer Annalies Van Parys, Tuning Time … And then lots of programme notes. For the Salzburg Festival: Grisey and Verunelli, and Huber and Morales; for Aldeburgh: Henze’s Voices, Sean Shibe, Aldeburgh Young Musicians and Luise Drewett, and Aimard playing Kurtág and Schubert; for the Philharmonia: Gabriela Ortiz’s Music of Today concert; for the LSO: notes for all eight pieces from this year’s Panufnik young composers workshop; and for the BBC PO: a short note on Julia Wolfe’s Big Beautiful Dark and Scary.

Historically, cystic fibrosis has been defined by abnormalities in sweat, digestion and respiration. Later in life, other issues present themselves, including male infertility, diabetes and osteoporosis. (Tick, tick, tick and tick.) As what was once euphemistically described as a childhood condition (because no one who had it made it to adulthood) has become managed into a long-term chronic illness, new symptoms, new complications are always being found. But it is these first three that raise postnatal red flags, even today. Sweat is salty. Food is not absorbed properly. Lungs fill with phlegm. Babies do not thrive.

The term ‘cystic fibrosis’ was first used in the mid-1930s, when it appeared in a student thesis supervised by the great Swiss paediatrician Guido Fanconi in 1934, and then in an article of his own in 1936, in which he described for the first time a connection between bronchiectasis (damage caused to the airways through thick mucus and repeated infections) and fibromatosis (soft tissue tumours) of the pancreas – a tell-tale pairing of symptoms we now know to indicate CF. Two years later, the American pathologist Dorothy Andersen detailed for the first time CF’s particular symptoms and firmly established ‘cystic fibrosis’ as a medical term and a distinct disease.

Andersen was a remarkable woman. Orphaned at nineteen (her father died when she was thirteen; she nursed her mother for six years until her death), she supported herself through university, graduating from John Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1926. She went on to a surgical internship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY and further studies at the University of Rochester, yet despite her clear accomplishments she was denied a surgical residency at Strong on the grounds of her gender. Undeterred (a DIY roofer and carpenter, heavy smoker and weekend canoeist, Andersen was the sort of woman who would not be deterred by anything), she won herself a position in the Department of Pathology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Here she taught between 1929 and 1935, earning her doctorate in medical sciences along the way. In 1935, she took up a role as an assistant pathologist at Babies Hospital in Manhattan (now the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian). Interested particularly in heart defects, she began to collect the hearts of infants who had died from cardiac problems. By the 1940s, her acquired knowledge was so great that pioneering open-heart surgeons would routinely seek her advice.

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On 11 April, Bastard Assignments (Timothy Cape, Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley and Josh Spear) will be making their Wigmore Hall debut with a performance of their new music theatre piece, PIGSPIGSPIGS. It’s quite a journey from where they started out, with a ‘World Tour of London’ – four guerrilla gigs around South London on a damp Friday in November – and graduating the following year to ultra-intimate concerts hosted in people’s front rooms. PIGSPIGSPIGS is a seventy-five-minute collaborative work that signals a possibly new phase in the group’s development – something more narrative, more realistic, more theatrical. Some of the story of how we got here from there is described below, as well as the group’s thoughts on collaboration, how it works for them and the peculiarities of being a new music band.

I met Ed, Caitlin and Josh (Tim was unavailable) in the cafe of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, a plastic-shrouded, Teletubby-like building that curves alongside Deptford Creek in southeast London (I took the photo on my short walk from Deptford station). They had just finished teaching duties for the day, taking part in CoLab, an annual, two-week ‘festival of creativity and innovation’ hosted by Trinity Laban that is structured around the creation, development and rehearsal of student-led projects, in collaboration with international artists.

This was a four-way, in-person conversation, so I’ve kept closer to the tape than usual in my transcript, in the spirit of trying to reflect everyone’s voice within it, as well as its overall flow.

Interview with Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley and Josh Spear of Bastard Assignments

Lockdown Jams

TRJ: We’ll talk about PIGSPIGSPIGS in a bit, but I wanted to wind the clock back a little, if that’s okay.

Josh Spear: Uh-oh.

TRJ: Because I remain fascinated by the Lockdown Jams. I know they were rough and very experimental, but I was watching them again today, and they’re like tiny time capsules of that horrible time; the mood of it all is in there, somehow.

What was going through your minds when you were making those? Particularly those very early ones when it’s just playing around – with feedback on the phone or whatever.

JS: Well, it was something to do, and we got this money to do it.

Edward Henderson: But we were doing stuff before that. Straight away, we were doing stuff.

Caitlin Rowley: Yeah, before they even announced the lockdown.

TRJ: I think the first are from very early on in March.

JS: I’d never used Zoom before.

EH: The early ones were for Google Hangouts.

I think when I get anxious, I want to do stuff. [laughs] So I think it was an anxious time, and I also felt like we were quite well placed to explore it. Or, it felt like something that we could do – to try to work out how to make a Google Hangouts piece, a Zoom piece for something, and that was the start of it.

CR: For me, it tapped into a much earlier thing. Which was, I think, about

2000, 2002. I was up in Brisbane. Vincent Plush ran a festival up there, and he invited William Duckworth over. And William Duckworth was working with these networked performances where you could go online and he’d network this whole instrument that was online.

You could play the instrument. And my cousin and I brought our laptops and sat in the audience as part of the laptop part of it that was then fed into the mixing desk, and they mixed some of it in, and every now and then you heard your own bit in there – considerably after you’d actually done it.

And so I was fascinated about it from that point of view. But I didn’t really have the contacts, the tech, to be able to do network stuff at that point. So when this possibility came, I was like, ‘Ooh, okay, this is really interesting to me. This is really something I’m very, very into.’

TRJ: Because there’s a real sense with those pieces that – like everybody else – you were just learning the tech on the fly and thinking, ‘Well, if we do this, then that’s going to happen, and then that becomes an interesting possibility’. Then, of course, it became slightly more formalised as you went on and you started getting commissions.

EH: Yeah, exactly.

TRJ: But in a weird way, it’s the early stuff that I like, it’s still ...

EH: … Very raw.

JS: To me, it was a desire. You could see it with everybody else doing those quizzes on Zoom, things like that; it was just a desire to remain connected.

EH: Yeah, to be together. Because we had just spent a lot of time together up to that point. And in the year running up to that. And I think it really made sense for us to do it. To continue to be together somehow.

TRJ: That’s what I mean: they made sense. I tuned out of music for about three or four weeks at the beginning of the lockdown, and these were the first things I came back to, in which I was interested in how people were going to manage the situation.

As I say, I like them so much because they were about the material, about the format, at a time when most people were just playing a violin in front of a camera.

EH: Yeah, that was not interesting to us. Actually, we realised really quickly that it was not possible to make music in a satisfying way on Zoom.

TRJ: Were you all doing it at the same time? So that’s a recording of the live feed?

JS: Yeah, but there were also different ways within the different approaches. When we started commissioning people, there were different approaches to that. Pre-recorded and things like that.

EH: Definitely the early ones, they’re just a screen record of the call itself.

CR: We had a whole theory, which I half remember, that Josh and I wrote an article about, about live pieces and ...

JS: ... What ‘liveness’ is. How ‘liveness’ can be redefined through this, when the performers are not actually co-present. Is it still live? I think we said it was still live.

CR: Yeah, very much so. And then what is a piece that’s designed for this kind of ‘live’ but not co-present?

After 2020

TRJ: You talked to Robert Barry about the aftermath of this time for his article in The Wire a few months ago. It was a challenging time for the group ...

EH: I think it was a challenging time for the whole sector. I’ve spoken to people since, and I think everyone felt like it was just them. When, in fact, it was everyone – but it felt personal, somehow. We tried to get some stuff going in 2022, and it just didn’t happen.

JS: What were we trying to do? Were we trying to make the gigs happen then?

EH: No, we were trying to ... That was the end of 2021.

CR: I remember that we’d been trying to make something new for the tour, and we couldn’t get any money.

EH: Yeah, we tried to make something new; IKLECTIK [a creative organisation in South London, housed at that time in Lambeth] was the plan. We put something in for that. We did a project with Ensemble Garage [in Cologne], which was fine, but we felt a bit limited by it. It seemed to me like it was not working, was not very satisfying. And I remember I had a coffee with Josh. This was, I don’t know, autumn 2022, and I was like, I can’t think of a way through it.

TRJ: You said that other people were saying this as well, so it wasn’t just you, it was more structural?

EH: That was more after the fact. People were saying to me, ‘I really felt it was over for us’, or ‘We were really struggling with no commissions’ – different kinds of composers and artists.

TRJ: Were you reading that as just a money thing, or was it that people didn’t know how to do live music anymore?

JS: Well, for me, I know I feel like last year was when my infrastructure, my life and all the things I was doing recovered from COVID. Do you know what I mean?

TRJ: Yes, I do.

JS: All the upset and the backlog, and then everything’s having to ... Because the institutions have to get back up again, and then it’s a year or two before everyone else is back up, and all the organisations are back up.

TRJ: I think it’s a psychological thing as well. You get used to doing some things in this way for two years. There are lots of reports of audiences in live concerts just simply not knowing how to behave anymore.

JS: Yeah, they forgot about it.

EH: They don’t come back. There’s a gap of continuity, obviously, or a gap of training. There’s a period where the new lot has not been trained into the whatever it is.

I think it was institutional, but it was also a problem with the group, somehow, in that in the period of COVID, I was the only person left in London by 2022. And obviously, the model that we had before was that we organised our own concerts in London. And I was like, I don’t think I want to do it, if it’s just going to be me going around and sorting out these spaces.

I think we were maybe getting to the point, as well, that it was not of interest. It’s a lot of work.

JS: Was it 2019, the last one?

EH: Yes. So that came to an end, I think. And then there was a question of, ‘What’s the next thing?’ And so we pitched a few things that seemed quite modest in 2022 that didn’t go anywhere. And then we had some quite well-timed feedback – or some feedback was filtered through Josh from Matthew Shlomowitz: ‘Simplify the offer. People know you for the expanded field stuff.’ And I thought, okay, let’s give it a go. One more chance.

TRJ: And then how did you respond?

JS: Well, the offer was that we curate a mixed bill of performances. And that’s not a very sexy offer for a festival.

EH: It’s too confusing.

JS: The festival would curate. Why are we curating?

EH: And it was also straining because everyone had their personal practices that were somehow trying to come under the umbrella of the group. And really, people wanted to do their own thing in their own way. Fine. But that’s not very group-like. So the group had to be something else.

So, okay: the group is the group. Everyone does solo stuff by themselves; you can do whatever you want. And then the group is the group, we make stuff as builders of the group. And then we can do bigger things and sell a bigger piece.

JS: It’s easier to sell that idea.

EH: Then I was sending emails saying, ‘This is how we’re going to work; it’s going to be fully collaborative composition and we want to do big things’.

TRJ: Because before you’d do an Edward Henderson piece, you’d do a Caitlin Rowley piece … you’d do that between you.

JS: Exactly. Each person is their own country with a whole technical system. Their whole rehearsal slot. And it’s quite inefficient.

CR: And then when you get venues that say you’ve got two hours to get in, we can’t do it.

TRJ: So you’d hit this wall in 2022 ...

JS [archly]: I would say we evolved. [laughs]

EH: I would say it was a wall.

JS: Well, we tried to do the same thing, I think.

EH: Yeah, we tried to do the same thing as we were doing before the pandemic and it was not working.

TRJ: So what were the conversations that led you to do a big music theatre piece?

CR: I think it was very clear that we needed to co-compose. I mean, we’ve been edging towards that. Lockdown Jams was really our first experience of that. So that was very significant because everything was by Bastard Assignments, even though maybe mentally that was Josh’s piece, that was Ed’s piece. Everything was by us, so we all had sort of a toe in it.

But also, when you apply to the arts council, they always ask, ‘How is this expanding your practice? How is this making it more?’, and so forth. So let’s just go big: that’s clearly what they want. Something bigger, rather than we used to do this, now we want to do this ... No, we’re going to go really big.

TRJ: HOUSE is really big isn’t it?

CR: Yeah, HOUSE is massive! Eight hours.

TRJ: Was that the first thing you did this way?

CR: No, PIGS was the first.

JS: They came out almost at the same time.

EH: Same period of work. And quite similar pieces, in a way. Cross-pollinated.

CR: We were even sort of interleaving them. We’d have a rehearsal, but some days we’d be on PIGS and some days we’d be on HOUSE.

EH: Maybe this is a false memory, but I remember us having a kind of doomy conversation on Zoom in 2022 as a group. And then you [Josh] said, ‘Well, Matthew thinks it should be like this’, and I remember thinking it was immediately clear to me how we were going to move forwards. And I remember being like, ‘No, it’s this, it’s this, it’s this’, and Tim [Cape] was like, ‘Hang on, I don’t get it’.

CR: We eventually convinced him.

EH: Quite quickly after that, we started talking to [the] Borealis [festival in Bergen], and [Borealis artistic director] Peter Meanwell pulled the starting gun on PIGS.

JS: Well, we had been nipping at his toes – we’d always been telling him what we were up to. And I think that when the story changed of what we wanted to be, then he could suddenly get on board with that. So is that what you think happened?

EH: It was the right time moment for him, it was enticing enough. I mean, we’re not really an ensemble, there’s no model.

TRJ: Exactly. It’s more like a band.

EH: But we were trying to fit into an ensemble. But we’re we not really that. And even in the early conversations with Wigmore, they were like, ‘Well, you could do a whole day of concerts’. And I was like, ‘What rep? What pieces?’

CR: You’d have to drag everything out of the armoury.

EH: I don’t really want to do five-year-old pieces. It doesn’t make sense for us.

JS: All different setups.

EH: Exactly. So it was all breaking down. And then because we couldn’t quite frame it for ourselves ... I also think letting go of it, supporting our individual practices as well, was a big psychological thing. It was, okay, fine, I’m going to do my own thing and that’s separate to this. That took a degree of confidence.

Then we said to Peter, we’re going to make a big thing. It’s music theatre piece, and it’s going to be about a family. And I think that was it. That was enough.

JS: And then, of course, all the other places go, ‘Ooh, that’s interesting ...’

EH: Yeah, there’s a bit of interest.

TRJ: It’s a clearer thing.

EH: And I think Wigmore didn’t know what we did, really. They were like, ‘Oh, if you’re an ensemble, then maybe you could do a day of ensemble stuff’. And I don’t think we can do that. So then that was another year… [laughs]

Then when we spoke to them again, it was, ‘Well, we’ve just been commissioned to make this piece by Borealis. We’ll do that for you.’ And they were like, ‘Are you sure?’ And yes, it’s going to be this piece. And so we had to make it.

Making new work

TRJ: Caitlin, you said that you hadn’t really done work as as co-composers before. But how was it setting aside that part of yourself and then giving yourself up to something that really was collaborative?

CR: We really started in the way we had been working in 2019, because we’d had this collaborative practice for a long time. It’s just that other people fed into your piece and you had final say over it.

[The new work] was really about breaking down those boundaries a bit and letting go a bit more of that control, having a bit more back and forth. But it took quite a long time to work out, really, how to make that happen. We had a residency in Ghent ...

EH: Yes, September 2023.

CR: … So we had about two years, maybe a bit more, working on this piece. And what we did there – yes, it was sort of the bones of what we have now, but it was very much in the transition.

JS: I would even say summer of 2023, we met at Trinity.

EH: And CoLab, February ’23, we met for CoLab. We did quite a lot of work around our teaching.

JS: Yeah, we did. I was obsessed with using this whiteboard: What can we do? What do we like? What do we hate when we see other people’s stuff? I thought it was quite important to have these conversations. You actually had to define the group a little bit.

EH: It was a huge imaginative amount of work because you had to imagine the group and imagine the piece. Imagine what we could do. And then at the same time, imagine ourselves into these contexts that we’ve not been in before.

It took a really, really long time and a lot of work that we’re still discovering, really, putting ourselves in these contexts, because there doesn’t seem to be ...

I mean, for example, we’re thinking about bigger pieces, so people have done bigger pieces, like Jenny Walshe or Pina Bausch, or in the music theatre or dance theatre kind of world. But somehow we found the fragmentary or episodic nature of those pieces a bit unsatisfying. What’s the way for us to deal with that? What if we had a story that pulled it through? And this, in the context of experimental music – maybe not for Josh, but I think for the rest of us – is a big taboo.

JS: It is taboo.

TRJ: One of the things that I really liked about your pre-2020 stuff was that it was narrative but without being narrative, dramatic without being dramatic. It was like music theatre in which the music bit was in bigger letters. All the theatre came out of the manipulation of instruments and things. Whereas for PIGS, the theatre was the bigger element. Presumably that’s by design, as you’re saying, a way of holding it together.

EH: I’ve been saying to people – playwrights, friends of ours – that it was the only thing we could have done. That’s what it felt like, for me, anyway. I think Josh is slightly different, but for me, I wasn’t desperate to tell a narrative story.

It was, okay, we’re going to make a seventy-five-minute piece. What was the only thing to me that made sense? Why are we doing it for seventy-five minutes? How are we going to bring the audience through this material without it being exhausting?

JS: Or boring.

EH: Or that it’s not just five fifteen-minute pieces bolted together. And then I could sort of see it over the mountain. If it worked for us – because there was no guarantee that it would work, or there continues to be no guarantee that it works for us – then it could give us the momentum to do all of the usual stuff that we do, all of the music, all of the drama and, you know, movement, all the weirdness, all the experimental sounds, or whatever, and it would be held together by a story that was legible.

JS: A logical chain of events that you hang your stuff off.

EH: And in a way, easier to perform. My experience of performing the piece is that you’re kind of working quite hard in the first half, and then the second half is ‘whew’, because you’ve set everything up.

TRJ: And the story kind of gives you the beats.

JS: Yeah, it gives you dynamics and intensity and energy in a way.

EH: But it took us also a long time to get our head around doing that. And it will be interesting to see how it goes down in London ...

TRJ: What’s the response that you’ve had?

EH: The Norwegians loved it.

JS: The Bergen audience found it hilarious. The Oslo people were a bit ...

EH: They liked it. I think that was a good audience.

JS: They might have been a bit tired.

EH: No, that was a good audience. I think that when they start laughing, and they feel like they’re being naughty for laughing, then that makes them laugh more – I think that is the perfect response.

JS: And then I have almost no memory of SPOR [festival in Aarhus] at all.

EH: It was fine, I think. We were a long way away [from the audience] in SPOR.

CR: Yeah, you can never tell when it’s a huge stage. It’s so big.

JS: It was a big room. But they weren’t laughing there like the Bergen people.

CR: Yeah, but they never do.

EH: I suppose, trying to take what we do and somehow sell it to the bigger venues and also to more of a general audience was also sort of baked into the pie. I think it also makes sense of, ‘It’s about a family, and the dad turns into a pig’. And people go, Oh, okay. All right, of course. I’ll buy a ticket to that! [laughs]

TRJ: And how did you write the story? Was that collaborative in the same way that the music is?

JS: Quite collaborative, but I think I was the one gunning for the story the most.

CR: It started out sort of being vaguely based on some of Josh’s family history.

TRJ: Did your Dad turn into a pig?

JS: No, no, not yet.

CR: Sort of vaguely ...

JS: But we did also have a day where we made Hamlet in half an hour.

CR: We did a very good Hamlet set in a Kent apple orchard.

EH: Just to see if we could do it. If we could do a story.

JS: And so we took something and with all the just the story books, was like, right, just do it, like, write it in about half an hour. It doesn’t matter. And we’ll just see if we can do it.

And I enjoyed that. We found a lot of stuff. It was like a camp Hamlet in a car, racing along and there’s a saxophone growling, doing a car on the stage. Yeah, we could do this stuff. This is music theatre, isn’t it?

Then we spent a long time writing this script. We reluctantly came to the idea of writing the script in Ghent, I think. I think we just need a story that happens.

EH: Again, it was the only thing that we could have done. We really tried other things, like generating text and ...

JS: And the family was the thing. So, we reached my family; my mum’s dad’s family is quite interesting because my mum’s dad accidentally killed his own dad by punching him – it was quite a rotten relationship … You [Edward] were about to have a baby, so that’s in there.

And then that lot are from Dorset, so that’s sort of the Dorset part. But we like this rural folk world.

EH: And if we can have it in England, then we can have a lot of fun with our own imagined version of England and English culture, and the songs, the music and the whatever. And suddenly, we can just do whatever we want in this space.

TRJ: There were weird bits of kind of Englishness in your earlier work as well that just sort of creep up in odd ways.

Did you start with the script and then do the music?

JS: We started with the residency.

CR: Yeah, we made music in the residency that I don’t think any of that survived ...

JS: It was not right, essentially.

CR: … Oh, except Tim’s song.

EH: That’s the one bit. We made some music. And then we made a scene and ...

JS: Just had lots of material, really.

EH: And then I think we got to a point where we were like, ‘We need to write a whole script and get to the end of the story’.

JS: So sometimes we arrive somewhere and think, okay, this needs to be composed now. That’s fair to say, isn’t it?

EH: Yeah, we can’t just busk through this. We were improvising, so let’s just decide what this is. And so you compose it.

And then once we had that, it started to make a bit more sense of the music. I think this is also what Josh was pushing the whole time. Once we know what we’re going to do, then it makes sense: this song has to happen here, music has to happen here, the underscore, it can be this.

JS: You can have a weird bit here, but what are you making weird?

EH: Exactly. Just stuff was not that useful as musical material.

JS: Or it would take years to land on something.

EH: So we all wrote online. We were just on a Google doc; we wrote this script

JS: Did we have a go at it ourselves, or did we get Kim [Pearce, director] in then?

CR: Kim came in to help us because we needed some help and she tightened everything up.

EH: Well, more than that.

JS: Yeah, then she started blocking it. Now she’s going to be our director.

EH: Yeah, we press-ganged her into directing.

JS: Well, I think she just made herself in dispensable.

CR: Yeah, she really did amazing things.

JS: We couldn’t have done it without her.

CR: She very quickly made the whole thing feel more Bastardy than it had when it was just us.

JS: Because she saw what we could do, just quicker and better.

TRJ: She can see: we need to push this harder.

JS: We wouldn’t argue with her! It’s amazing, you can collectively work this thing and then like weird details about how old someone is or little details about the characters – you also have completely different ideas about, even though you’ve worked on this thing together. Like what’s what is the ending? What actually happens at the end?

TRJ: I imagine that before it’s all properly staged, you have a picture in your head – say, if we all read the same book, we’d all have an image of what the characters actually look like, but they’d all be different.

EH: Also, if you’re performing in it, I find it really hard to imagine what it looks like. If you’re trying to remember your bit and then think what it looks like, how it makes sense, it’s so hard.

JS: The idea of us coming in and out to look at it? It’s impossible.

TRJ: That wasn’t something that you were thinking about, though, when you were doing your own pieces before this?

CR: Well, you could do, actually ... They were all so self-contained, and you’d have one person who was really mostly in charge. So you do some stepping out, and then you just film it. And the film is short so you can just look back at it. There was a lot of that back and forth, but once you get to a bigger scale, if you start doing that, you’re going to spend weeks ...

EH: And that kills the flow. You have to start, fiddle about the thing, watch it, which takes however along, talk about it, then you’re out of it. The film is not really how it is.

TRJ: I remember you were doing this when I came to see you rehearsing FEED.

EH: It’s not a very good way to work. I mean, it’s all right if it’s just you guys.

JS: I’m anti-it now, and any stuff like that.

CR: I feel it still has a place, but it’s not essential to developing the work.

JS: It might be for a private rehearsal.

EH: And then you’ve started making a film as well.

JS: You make stuff for the camera. Can’t trust that, I think.

In defence of story

EH [to me]: What do you think of the narrative idea, then? You think we’ve jumped the shark? [laughter]

TRJ: No, I wouldn’t say that …

EH: Do you think we’re enemies of experimental music?

TRJ: I think what I found surprising was the realism. That seems ... Not that realism is a problem, but it does feel like a really big departure. I’m still intrigued by that. I understand that if you make something big, you need some way to structure it, and you’re either going to do a Feldman-y thing, or you’re going to stick a story on it. And then one thing leads to another, and you’ve got people in costumes, characters and so on. But it does feel different.

JS: I think big for me also means big idea. Big emotional stakes, big subject. Because sometimes something can be long and it’s empty of any particular ...

TRJ: I think the thing that I would be wary of, if this was me doing this with three other people, you don’t want it to be like a revue, where like, okay, now we’ll do this, we’re going to put in Caitlin’s bit in here, and we’re going to put in Josh’s bit in here. Presumably you were coming up against that?

JS: There is vertical block work. But then there’s also stuff that works horizontally as well throughout the piece. The twigstrument1 is really only in twice, but it feels like it’s sort of continuous because it joins up again.

TRJ: … And the twigs are always on the stage.

CR: Yeah, you’ve got Tim collecting the twigs that become the twigstrument.

JS: Exactly. So that runs through the whole way. There’s lots of that.

EH: You’re saying that the story helps avoids the sort of, ‘Now it’s Caitlin’s turn’?

TRJ: Well, I think, to some extent there’s always a little bit of that. Knowing your work reasonably well, when you’re at the piano, and you’re playing those nice chord sequences, this is definitely Ed’s bit. And when Tim’s doing his crazy vocal stuff, you can see where it comes from. So there’s a tension in there.

I suppose the question is, is that tension productive? Is that something you want to kind of foster, or is it a transitional thing that you’re eventually going to smooth out?

JS: It’s quite productive because it’s a unique combination of things. That’s how I’m thinking about it.

EH: But there’s a kind of lumpiness to PIGS – I don’t know exactly what I mean by lumpy – it’s so intentional, it’s so bloody-minded.

TRJ: … It doesn’t have a Disney-esque slickness.

EH: Yes. But also in terms of the material. We really have attacked head on something that is very difficult for us. And I think that’s in the piece.

Whereas HOUSE, for example, which we obviously made at a similar time, I think you would be much harder pressed to be like, ‘Oh, that’s an Ed bit.’ I think the lumps have been blended out a bit more in that. I think we’d got to a point where we were much more playful with the material, and we were much more relaxed somehow in the making of it.

JS: And time as well.

EH: Yeah, there was a lot more time. The format suited us, I think.

TRJ: Is HOUSE plot-driven?

EH: No, not at all. Apart from the frame, the set of the house.

CR: It’s more of a vague scenario: Doing house stuff.

JS: Doing very little but being in states and giving them … enough.

EH: Allowing people to project their own hopes and dreams somehow. People find it very, very emotional, much more emotional than we’d thought. It was shocking to us. It’s songs and thoughts and interior states. It’s stuff to do with the toilet and the bath, you know, these little choreographies in the kitchen area, then it’s all in the bed together. And this allowed people to really find a lot of their own feelings in it.

JS: Because we’re always in the same scene together. We all move as a clump. So you’re looking into relationships of the past, of the room that relate to that, I suppose.

EH: We had all this work that we’d done: it’s time, we’re moving through time periods, there are ghosts, there are different relationships, different generations all living in the same house. It’s Caitlin’s house, it’s Gravesend. It’s these different decades, blah, blah, blah. All of that. We didn’t put in.

CR: Yeah, but it’s all in the background. It’s in here.

JS: It’s too conceptual and too difficult to do sometimes.

EH: But the material that we ended up with was really just messing around, writing pretty songs, doing funny choreographies that would make us laugh ...

CR: … Whatever the objects were we had in the house.

JS: Yeah, a lot of responding to the set.

TRJ: Not to keep banging the drum, but it feels like there’s a bit of Lockdown Jams in that, in terms of just looking at what is lying around?

CR: Definitely.

EH: I think it is a COVID piece.

TRJ: Post-COVID.

EH: Post-COVID, yeah. Trapped. Why are they trapped? Post-apocalyptic, slightly.

CR: Stuck in a bunker.

EH: Why are we all here? How long have they been here? Why are they doing this? [laughs]

JS: How long are we gonna be here!

CR: It’s all right, it’s an installation. You can leave at any time.

The new music ensemble as band

TRJ: Both HOUSE and PIGSPIGSPIGS are pieces that are connected with family and domesticity. Presumably you’ve got thoughts beyond that?

JS [circumspectly]: We’ve … got a new piece to make.

CR: The very beginnings of a new thing.

JS: Have we got a sexy hook for that?

EH: The hook as it stands is that it’s a reimagining of Les biches by Poulenc, but as The Bitches.

CR: And without any Poulenc.

EH: No Poulenc. It’s a party. It’s bright young things at a party and then a monster arrives.

TRJ: So there’s still a thematic connection.

EH: Do you think so? Oh, about the monster.

TRJ: Yeah, there’s a monster.

EH: Disaster.

TRJ: There’s a close-knit group …

EH: … that is under attack. Okay, I hadn’t really thought of that. But yeah, this sort of horror, nightmarish quality, I think, is appealing.

That’s very early. We want to work with a couple more people to make it more of a chorus.

JS: Maybe about six or eight.

EH: We’ve got some eyes on some people. We need to get some commission on some money together. But we’re working on it. It’s very early.

JS: How long would that be? Seventy-five?

EH: It’s something that could be standalone, but could also be a festival piece.

And I think that what we’re talking about now, in the funding proposal but also with the director – Kim again – is somehow finding a way to combine what we’ve learned in both HOUSE and PIGS.

TRJ: Are there things that you didn’t like in how those came out?

JS: Presumably. They would sort of fall away ...

TRJ: You don’t have your whiteboard with ‘Don’t do that again’?

JS: [laughs] Not yet, not exactly.

EH: Maybe there was no other way to do it, but making HOUSE, when we were in the room together, we just started. We did a warm up, and then we just started to work without really saying anything. We just started to produce material: ‘Oh, we’re doing this square dancing thing, and then we’re doing this climb over furniture thing, and then we’re doing this thing that’s sort of a Benny Hill, sex romp thing … and it’s like, where the fuck did this come from?

JS: And where’s it going to go?

EH: And that, to me, was very exciting. I think I had some chords and Tim had an idea, and then we had a Lennon and McCartney moment: it’s like floating the boat down the stream.

JS: But it’s quite a brave leap. It’s different. It is not being a composer. It’s live composing, it’s improvising, and it’s just making, devising ...

EH: Getting to that point and allowing it. There’s bits of that, I think, in PIGS, but a lot of PIGS is really worked out.

JS: Exactly, because everything has to serve that particular moment of the story; that’s what theatre has to do. We don’t necessarily have to do that. That’s where we’re freed up. That’s why I like HOUSE, you know.

EH: The thing is, if you have an audience sitting down for however long, I think you’ve got to give them something in terms of …

JS: … you’ve got to frame what you’re doing. Frame how to understand this. Even just at the beginning.

TRJ: … Give some sense of expectation.

EH: Exactly. Where are we? Who are these people?

When we’re running the CoLab – this is the fourth year we’ve done a ‘Musiktheater with Bastard Assignments’-type thing – the students come up with a little choreography, and I’m asking, ‘Who are you? What is the relationship between you? Oh, okay, you’re the mum.’ Suddenly it’s interesting. Just the action is not that interesting, but if you have this kind of relation or dynamic … it’s certainly more interesting to me, anyway.

JS: Or you have a frame or an expectation, followed by this activity, and then, okay, compare these two things.

TRJ: This brings me to the other thing that I want to dig into, which is that as a new music band, you’re quite rare. There are collaborative ensembles, but as a group that actually makes and performs each other’s stuff, it’s much more like a rock setup. At some point, the group as a thematic idea is in there as well, isn’t it?

Even when you aren’t in costume, when you’re doing something more abstract, you can still look at it and think, ‘Josh is the x in this one, Tim is the x in this one’. Are you conscious of that when you’re making work? Are you deliberately drawing it out or is it natural?

CR: It sort of comes naturally.

EH: I spend quite a lot of time trying to think, especially in this phase of developing a new work, what is special about us? What is the interesting thing about us and how we are on stage, as performers? It’s really hard for me to know the answer to that.

JS: But also, very, very few times has anyone actually told me: ‘You’re very x, y, z on stage, because no one really tells you, or they don’t think about it. But we got it quite hard working with Jenny Walshe in Darmstadt. She was: ‘You’re this kind of person on the stage’.

TRJ: Maybe it’s not that you’re this kind of person, but you bring a particular energy…

JS: You’re a presence.

EH: I think where I’ve ended up with it – rather than try to work it out, which is very difficult to do – you just trust it. And you’ve done it for that many years, you’ve done that much time together, that you’re just like, well, it’ll be the flavour it is.

We did this gig in Copenhagen, and the composer was like, ‘You’re very relaxed’, and Josh was like, ‘We do this all the time’ [laughs]. ‘This is not a big deal!’

JS: We weren’t stressed out.

EH: It feels better to be with them. It feels better to be backstage ready to go on and think okay, it’s gonna be okay.

JS: Yeah, it will just be okay because it’s us. That’s always how I feel.

TRJ: Those roles also evolve, don’t they? I’m going to make an absurd comparison, but the way you’re talking reminds me of the Peter Jackson Beatles film. Because in 1963, the Beatles are Johnpaulgeorgeringo. But by 1968, ’69, John is John, Paul is Paul, George is George, and Ringo is Ringo. The group dynamic becomes much more exaggerated, but it also becomes much more part of what makes the whole as well. Those relationships become key to the sound.

EH: Obviously it’s a really fertile thing to talk about, because you come from a family, and everyone has a pair of parents or whatever. And we were getting to the age – I was getting to the age – where I was having my own family and my own child, and thinking about that. But also, we are from slightly different generations, although we look sort of similar … and also four is a sort of family unit.

And it keeps coming up in the work, even in FEED, like Dad driving and Tim is the dog.

CR: For years, we’ve talked about a group as a family.

EH: But funnily, in HOUSE, we don’t do anything that really leans into the family. But somehow, I think people can see a lot of ...

JS: The obvious interpretation, but we don’t ...

EH: But it’s also weirder than that, because it could be relationships or brothers, or ...

CR: We don’t have family roles in that one so much, but we’re very much people who know each other very, very well ...

TRJ: You don’t need the role in order to build the relationship, though, do you? It’s the relationship that is actually more interesting – the dynamic between two, three, four people is more interesting than, say, being husband and a wife.

JS: Yes, in some way. I was thinking that the group, this combination of four, creates a dynamic: the separate elements that come together create the compound. Not necessarily this personnel side of the group. [others laugh]

TRJ: Presumably, there are moments where you have to kind of step back a bit and say, we need to rebalance this, because, let’s say Tim is taking too much control of it? We’re not quite happy with the family dynamic.

JS: The thing is that it will never be 25, 25, 25, 25.

EH: I think every day, no one is happy with that. [laughter] It’s very unstable. It never feels like, ‘Oh yes, this is it for the next 25 years’. Sometimes it does, you get a little feeling of it. But often you’re like, I can’t do this again!

I think the reason why we are continuing and have continued up until now is that we’ve all worked really, really hard to try to re-find what’s going on within it and re-find each other and re-find ourselves again and again and again and again on a kind of constant basis.

The feeling that, ‘Oh, yeah, this is it now. We know what we’re doing’, I think would be the killer thing.

JS: I would agree, yeah.

TRJ: What keeps bringing you back, Josh?

[laughter]

I’m going to ask you all the same question!

EH: It would be funny if you only asked Josh! You can all do other things, you’ve got other strings to your bow.

JS: Well, I do do all these other things, and some of it is great, wonderful, and often the ones I really enjoy are with people I’ve worked with again and again and again.

So I enjoy those ones. Then you do stuff with people for the first time, and you think, I don’t really have the energy to start a new thing, and a whole new stream of activities with other people, because it’s a pain in the bloody arse.

It’s very hard work at the first phase, being totally unstable and you have arguments and conflict. And you think, I’m getting too old for this bullshit. So it’s quite nice to return.

EH: You just want to have arguments and bullshit with the people you know! [laughter]

JS: So that keeps me safer in this group. And I think we’re working at quite a high level, really. I think it can go very far if we want to – it keeps going. Every few months, the thing we were aiming towards just becomes the new baseline. It’s very exciting in that regard, and bigger opportunities keep coming. Or bigger interest, bigger possibilities. So the sky’s the limit, really.

[To Edward] And I think you said something like, well, aiming too small will be the death as well. If you don’t keep going higher and bigger.

EH: It can take, somehow, any amount of ambition.

JS: It seems to always land where we want it, really.

EH: That we’re doing the Wigmore show is amazing to me. It’s crazy that we’re doing that. What the hell are we doing?

TRJ: Is that going to be with a set?

EH: No, no, no.

EH: Minimal set. Very like Oslo.

CR: We designed it to be a touring production with Wigmore in mind and the very small space on the stage.

JS: I don’t think anything’s ever been on that stage like it.

TRJ [to Caitlyn]: What keeps bringing you back?

CR: I think for me, I’m a massive introvert and I find people difficult, so it’s great having, like Josh said, a safe group. I think the work that I tend to do on my own is often very small. I think you [Josh] said once in an Instagram post that basically everything I did was like minute fiddling or epic shred, and there was no in-between. And I feel that the stuff I do on my own is often minute fiddling. So this is the epic shred.

TRJ: This is the place you can let that out a bit?

CR: Yeah, a little bit. They push me to be bigger, which is really good, and they’ve been very valuable over the years. It’s so useful having people who are just like, ‘No, you can do more.’

JS [putting on a teaching voice]: We encourage you to fulfil your potential.

CR: That’s it exactly, yes! It’s really good because my natural tendency is to sit in my room and be on my own, and it’s not good for me as an artist to do that. And then we have these huge weeks when it’s, ‘Oh, God, we’ve got to do this again, we’ve got to trek into London and we’re going to do this and that and the other’. And you get there and it’s amazing. And why did I doubt? Ever? You idiot. [laughs]

TRJ: Was there anything else you guys wanted to say?

EH: You didn’t ask me why!

TRJ: Didn’t I? Okay, go on. What brings you back?

EH: Well, I think there’s a combination. You can put something on the table, and then it’s whipped off the table and taken off into a new direction, it’s spun into something that you’ve never thought of. That is amazing. And I also quite like to have an idea, and then someone say, ‘No, I don’t get it. No, I don’t want to do it.’ I think if everyone’s just saying yes, yes, yes, all the time – you know, if I’m the boss of an ensemble or a situation – that’s not that interesting to me.

JS: You need some bite back.

EH: I need some bite back or some assistance.

CR: You need some rejection in your life.

TRJ: You do. You need someone to come back and say, no, do it again, but better.

JS: You need a critical response, rather than, ‘What fingering do you want?’ We have more – I’m taking your question now – compositional critical thought.

EH: And then once you’re used to it … It’s nice to work with other people, but it’s also strange. You say, ‘I’ve got this idea’, and they’re like, ‘Okay, I’ll just do your idea’. No, no, no! No: you could reject my idea and have a better idea!

CR: You’ve got to bounce things back and forth.

EH: … And then you realise that it’s a very luxurious, amazing way to work.

TRJ: It’s one of the things with the new music economy being so fragile. And everybody knows it’s fragile. If you’re going in to work with an ensemble, the mood is, if we just keep quiet, we’ll make this happen.

Whereas in a group like this, as Josh was saying, you can actually be quite brutally critical to one another because the four of you know that it’s going to hold up.

CR: Yeah, there’s a lot of trust there to be able to be that.

TRJ: And you can say, you know what, that doesn’t work; I’ll come back and I’ll do something different. Whereas in the rest of the new music world, people don’t want to rock the boat too much.

JS: Being a composer, you’ve already had to have imagined the ending and got to the double bar line before you’ve got the musicians. I find that process boring, almost impossible. [laughs]

EH: And we also have more time together. We have been able to explore things, to try things. I want to be surprised; I don’t want everyone to just do the idea that I had in my bedroom. That’s very uninteresting to me. It’s more like, ‘Can we use this as a starting point to run away with?’

Tomorrow I will be publishing a big interview with Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley and Josh Spear of Bastard Assignments, ahead of their appearance in PIGSPIGSPIGS at the Wigmore Hall on 11 April. As a teaser, I wanted to share one of the outcomes of my last interview with the group.

Back in 2019, BA invited me to watch them in rehearsals in advance of their residency at Aldeburgh Festival that year. After watching them work together on each others’ pieces for an hour or two – Henderson’s Flower, Spear’s FEED, Rowley’s Quiet Songs and Timothy Cape’s SUGAR CAGE – we retired to the pub, where I talked to them for another or so while the staff there set up the evening’s disco. What follows is the programme note I wrote for Aldeburgh that year; it’s obviously quite playful and experimental, but it seemed necessary to do it this way to convey something of BA’s unique approach and artistic make-up.

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JOSH: We can be quite rude with each other, or very direct.

EDWARD: But I think it comes from the fact that we’ve worked on it so much, and for so long, that it becomes …

JOSH: A shorthand …

EDWARD: … a shorthand. Politeness takes up too much time.

It’s not this immediate expression.

CAITLIN: That basis of trust and friendship that we’ve built up allows us to bypass that without people’s feelings getting hurt.

JOSH: … it takes a long time.

CAITLIN: We’re just like, ‘cut that!’

Before. An East London rehearsal studio. Pine floor, natural light, a large whiteboard. On the floor are: coats, bags, instrument cases, camera tripod, guitar amplifiers, cables, large steel cooking pot (inside: drumsticks, glass bottle), laptop, cardboard box with packing materials, takeaway coffee cups, sandwich bags, five sparkly hula hoops.

On chairs sit CAITLIN ROWLEY, JOSH SPEAR and EDWARD HENDERSON. They are holding credit cards between their teeth and twanging them with their fingers. TIMOTHY CAPE, standing, is directing them. The piece they are rehearsing is ostensibly ‘his’, but all four offer comments and suggestions. It feels like the work is still being tested out, as though in a laboratory.

Formed by Edward Henderson and Timothy Cape, Bastard Assignments have since 2013 been at the forefront of London’s DIY new music scene, putting on concerts in derelict or off-grid spaces – a bombed chapel, a tunnel under the Thames, police cells, friends’ front rooms. From 2016, they began to work more and more collaboratively, composing pieces as a group as well as performing them. As well as concert music, their work draws on traditions of performance art, music theatre, video art, and comedy, leading one critic to describe them as ‘Fluxus for the Facebook generation’.

Later: a pub around the corner.

EDWARD: Me and Josh did Jennifer Walshe and David Helbich’s composer–performer workshop at Darmstadt in 2016, and from that process we got some ideas about a much more feedback-intensive compositional process that we could bring back to work with Bastard Assignments.

JOSH: David and Jenny would give us quite hard feedback, daily [laughs], whilst we were doing that course, and that was enormously useful. But horrible.

EDWARD: I remember thinking that we’re not using each other as a compositional resource.

JOSH: Yet.

EDWARD: And that we’re missing out. We could be opening up pieces to different ideas, different ways of doing things. And that would make everything better. So rather than bringing the finished piece and saying ‘this is how you would perform it’, it was ‘here’s the idea, and let’s talk about whether it works or not’.

TIMOTHY: It was very refreshing not to come with decisions made. This works, this doesn’t work, throw that bit out – basically making it in the rehearsal room.

CAITLIN: To some extent we’ve worked together so much now that we know the kinds of things each of us is going to like about a piece or dislike about a piece, and where something has come from.

[I]t seems new music as an institution is finally acknowledging that a body isn’t a piano. An oboist playing forte against a violin playing piano is not the same as a male performer singing loudly over a female performer, or a white female performer talking loudly over a performer of colour. Different people, with their different bodies, mean vastly different things, are read in vastly different ways. In the last year or two in particular, as movements such as Black Lives Matter gained traction, as discussions around non-binary gender and trans rights pushed to the fore, as elite composers discussed their BDSM lifestyle openly, it seemed that perhaps it might be possible for new music to dive into people. To dive into something as complicated, messy, vibrant, problematic, terrifying, hilarious, infuriating and joyous as everyday life. Our everyday life here in the Anthropocene – our precarious, darkly euphoric existence on this rapidly warming planet.

– Jennifer Walshe, ‘Editorial,’ MusikTexte 149, 2016

EDWARD: I’m very put off by anything that is too ‘fancy’.

JOSH: [laughing] Too artful!

EDWARD: Anything whose claim on the music is too large. We’ve got a slight distaste towards more commercial-type aesthetics or theatre combined with …

JOSH: I quite like a bit of commercial theatre.

ALL: [laughter]

JOSH: But not really for its earnestness.

EDWARD: So I think that something we have is a directness. A can is a can, with us, or Bowie is Bowie.

Exemplificative Art: Art as illustration or example or embodiment of idea, especially abstract conception or principle (Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’, Christian Morgenstern, Gertrude Stein’s ‘geographical’ and ‘calligraphic’ styles, Marcel Duchamp, concept art, modular music and poetry – Steve Reich, Philip Glass, etc. – structural cinema, poems reflecting Chomskian linguistics, Dick Higgins’s happenings and graphic cycles).

– Dick Higgins: ‘Five Traditions of Art History, an Essay’, poster, 1976

JOSH: Being in that new music context, rather than being in cabaret or that sort of stuff, we’ve got quite a long lead with what we can do, we can be really quite weird, weirder than a lot of …

EDWARD: Theatre stuff.

JOSH: Yeah, more mainstream theatre stuff.

DAVID BOWIE: Let’s dance!

On the whiteboard, in the rehearsal room, written in green: Popcorn, Car I, Execution 1, American Werewolf, Dog, Foley, Execution 2, Silent Night, Muybridge, Car 2, Tim Dead, Werewolves Abstract, Silent Night. ‘Are these words yours?’ I ask, pointing to the board. ‘Yes.’

CAITLIN: Risk is a huge thing in what we do, and we all embrace risk. And I think there’s still a lot of thinking that risk is something to be avoided.

TIMOTHY: It’s total belief in notation. I think that’s the trap.

JOSH: I stop telling them what to do – it just makes more questions. Just let them do it. They’ll do it better than if I nest every tuplet and cross every ‘t’.

EDWARD: Not doing things is as important as doing things.

This was, it soon transpired, barely the beginning of Ti’s story, however. Within a couple of years, they had already moved away from the demonstrative, declarative style of their early student works towards something less assertive, more contingent, exemplified by the pair of pieces Mirror Stratum and, especially, Glass Stratum. I remember catching these via, probably, a Facebook post of Ti’s when they were first written, and thinking, ‘Huh, that’s unexpected, but it also makes a kind of sense’.

Guided by a number of different influences – among them the ceramic artist Nishida Jun and, especially, the choreographer William Forsythe – McCormack pursued this path further and further, moving increasingly towards large-scale forms that tested both the physical and psychological mettle of his players (but which were equally prone to sudden and cataclysmic disruptions, like the limescale geologies that inspired his large ensemble work KARST). At Harvard, where they earned their PhD and which became their base after leaving Huddersfield, they took dance lessons (alongside their composition studies) with Jill Johnson, a long-time Forsythe dancer and collaborator; one of Ti’s most important pieces from around this time, you actually are evaporating, takes its title from a text by Forsythe.

Through the 2010s, McCormack’s music became increasingly engaged with the bodies of its performers, and the bodies of its instruments. We talk much more about this in the interview below, but significant landmarks on this journey include the hour-long quartet your body is a volume, for the JACK Quartet, and the truly epic WORLDEATER for trombonists Weston Olencki and Matt Barbier, which I have described elsewhere as ‘an immense organism composed of breath and lips and brass tubing’. 2021’s piano solo mine but for its sublimation, honoured on these pages at the end of last year, is also part of this story, a highwire act of piano resonance and delicacy of touch.

The interview below concentrates on Ti’s recent viola solo, … stretched across its axes – another vast span, at forty-five minutes – for the Italian string player Marco Fusi. Like many of Ti’s solo pieces, stretched arose out of a process of collaboration between composer and performer, so it made sense to bring Marco in on the conversation too. Ti spoke to me from his home in San Diego, Marco from his just outside Milan.

Readers in London will want to know that Marco will be playing this piece, alongside Yu Kuwabara’s Toward the Brink of Water Or the Verge of Dusk for viola d’amore, at City St George’s University on Tuesday 24th, at 7pm. Details and tickets for that concert can be found here.

TRJ: … stretched across its axes is a collaboration of sorts between the two of you …

TMcC: We’ve been talking about it for years; there’s been over a decade of buildup towards it. We always knew that it was in the future. So every time we were in the same place at the same time, we would check in on our interests and string research things and ideas for sounds – and then get dumplings!

And then, I don’t remember exactly why … It wasn’t the normal constantly deferred project; it was understood between us that there’s no rush, and when it wants to happen, we’ll just know, there will be something in the air – and that’s exactly what it was. I don’t remember exactly what the initiating thing was, but I remember it just felt mutually like now is the time.

So then there was a bit of a different charge in the air when we would see each other. There was a moment … we were at EMPAC [the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, New York] at the same time. I was working with [violinist] Winnie Huang and [trombonist] Juna Winston on a recording thing, and Marco was there as well. And we had a much more, I don’t know, like pointed workshop. I think after a decade of this thing stewing in our brains, a lot of the material, or at least a lot of the fundamental technical ideas, were experimented with and set. And then after that, it was fairly clear what the piece was.

MF: Most of what Ti has said resonates with me and my memories – meeting, talking about this. What is very acute in my memory is how much we have grown from the first meeting to when we actually were on stage bowing together, because I remember talking about this for the first time when Ti was still at Harvard – and then afterwards having dumplings!

TMcC: And it was my first or second year at Harvard.

MF: Yeah, it could have been more like fifteen than ten years. And the thing growing organically and us being in touch. And then I proposed to play with some colleagues this piece for violin, Paetzold contrabass recorder and cardboard [The Chain of the Spine], and we performed it somewhere remote in Sweden …

TMcC: … the Kalv Festival ...

MF: … so there was a constant connection and rekindling of thoughts.

And then when we met at EMPAC, I also felt that was the moment when things came together. And they came together in a way that was, on the one hand, very reassuringly, successfully traditional in the sense that Ti and I played, or rather embodied, our roles. I was the performer touching the instrument, exploring and trying to find sounds, and Ti was there trying to capture these ideas, to structure them, to think how the little grains of sand that I was producing could be melted into glass.

At the same time, the beauty of these sorts of collaborations, in which, I would say, boundaries or rather rules and competencies are clear, is that you can really see when the two ways of thinking click together.

I remember moments where some sun was sparkling out of the instrument, when we were both like, ‘Oh my god, yes, this is it, we’re going to use this’. There is a specific moment around thirty minutes into the piece where a sound is generated by over-pressure of the bow, but also fingering up the string. That technique produces both a low grunt, like a hammering, like a growling sound, but also a high frequency, a high resonance and a high partial that is produced by the contact point of the bow on that specific point of the string. And I remember when we discovered that sound … we just needed to identify two or three sounds, and then a few months later, Ti came back with a quotation from Stravinsky, played with that specific technique. So it was quite interesting to see how that little sparkle exploded in the piece.

TRJ: Is that Stravinsky quotation in the piece?

TMcC: Yeah. This isn’t crucial for the piece, and it’s not compositionally located in a meaningful way. It’s just a little inside thing that leaked its way in. It’s a kind of bastardisation of a quotation. It’s not the exact quotation, but it’s this E-flat clarinet moment in the Rite. The morphology of that figure gave me a morphology for the figure of this moment that Marco was talking about. But it’s not the exact pitches, it’s the shape and contour.

The same could be said for Kurtág. There’s a recurring figure in the piece that is sort of a motive, so to speak, that is a sort of resonance or radiation of Kurtág’s Stele that leaked its way in.

In the piece, I don’t think there’s anything about these quotations that a listener would apprehend. They’re not really references. They’re just radiations off of these things that have been with me for a long time and that I think about and love. They just appeared in this piece – and again, they are not so much quotations. Rather, the morphology and the affect of these sources congealed something and made something clear for me within this piece. They’re cool and cute, but they’re not the foundation of the piece at all.

TRJ: To turn perhaps to one of those foundations, I know, Ti, that you work with, or think about bodies, and particularly bodies of specific performers. For as long as I’ve known your music – which is nearly twenty years – that’s always been part of the way you work. Presumably there’s some of that in the way that you’ve been thinking about Marco as the performer of this piece. Can you tell me where you are in that journey?

TMcC: Every piece that I write – especially a solo piece, but not just those – is sluicing two things together and is a confluence of these two things. One of which is: I have relationships with instruments, whether I play them or not. The first time that you write for an instrument, you learn a lot about not only the instrument but also your relationship with it. And what about a certain instrument exposes or clarifies or allows to emerge something within my own work. So every piece is a continuing sort of research/poetic project.

This is just to say that there is this string world that I’ve been mining for a long time. And of course, the deeper you excavate into a certain place, the more you realise is there. This piece really furthers the poetic, formal spaces that my work with strings for the past ten years has proposed.

But then also – and this is more to your question – a big part of that equation is the person that I’m writing for and what they allow: the knowledge and insight into their instrument, and the relationship they have with their instrument that they grant me access to. With Marco especially, he is a performer and a musician and a person who is very acutely sensitive not only to their instrument … You know, Marco is so analytic about his relationship with the instrument. We would be working and we would make a sound, and immediately, of course, I need to know: what are the physical conditions of this sound? And Marco is just immediately able to switch into this self-analysis, like, ‘Okay, what I did was this and it was this pressure, and if I move my finger in this way, it does …’. Which is exactly how my brain works.

When I want to use a sound, there’s a blockage between me and the possibility of using it, no matter how much I’m interested in it, if I don’t know exactly what is going on in the creation of that sound. I tend to try to analyse the production of that sound and determine what parameters – bow speed, bow position, finger pressure, bow pressure, all that stuff – what of that needs to remain constant? If you modulate one of those parameters, does one of those parameters break the sound, make it into something else when modulated? Or is the sound resilient through modulations of a certain physical parameter. In which case, I know that that’s the parameter that I can use to shape and create morphology with a certain sound.

That’s how my brain works, but on a sort of ‘removed composer’ side. And I got the sense that that’s how Marco’s brain and body work with the instrument as well – very analytical but also very poetic. I felt like we were able to bring each other through these spaces. From the analytical ‘Okay, just how is this technique? What is this sound? How is it being made?’ into this more poetic or formal space, ‘Well, what does this mean? How can we arrive at this place? What does it then allow for places for us to extend or or go? How can this sound be transformed into that?’ Which has immediate bearings on what the piece is: where it goes, how it moves through itself.

And so I just felt like we understood each other in that capacity. And knowing through working with Marco that he has such an immediate retreat into this critical-analytical relationship with his instrument … But also haptic; whenever these moments would arise in collaboration, it was never like, we put down the instrument, we talk about it; he was always thinking through his body in contact with the instrument. So I knew that with this piece, I could write really, really nuanced.

I mean, I guess I probably would anyway! [laughs] My music is pretty nuanced, I guess, but I knew I could really go there with this piece. There are a lot of passages in this piece where, yes, it’s a delicate balance to maintain the sound just right for this amount of time, but the degree of nuance that I could write and could trust Marco would attend to was really heightened.

We were just talking about this particular technique that revealed itself through us following a chain of sonic and physical situations that we were working on together. That’s one example. It’s a specific sound that is located only in this tiny little hidden corner, but once you access it, you can get on its frequency and vibrate with it and maintain it. But then there are passages that aren’t that sort of thing. It’s just the difference between, like, triple molto tasto and double-and-a-half molto tasto has some sort of vibrational, resonant shift in a sound.

There are minutes upon minutes of this piece, massive swaths, where really all he’s playing are open strings. But there’s still such a morphology and such an expressivity and an internal shifting to those, based on these really minute, really nuanced little shifts in bow pressure, bow placement … string tension is a really big thing in this piece.

Anyway, I felt with Marco that he was in a constant haptic feedback loop with his own instrument and always able to check in where he is and where he needs to go and how he can further sink the sound into a certain place.

MF: I was smiling while Ti was talking, because I think that most of my supposed ability to communicate about techniques and instrumental performing approaches really comes out of teaching: teaching the violin and explaining to students where you put your bow when you play a Mozart concerto, or other repertoire.

Obviously that is a bit more extreme, and the palette of those techniques becomes more refined in recent repertoire. One of the composers from whom I have learned the most in this specific area is Nono. And the way his desire for this mobility, this unstable sound and this exploration – especially in the last pieces – becomes so essential and so open, and so empowering of the performer without asking them to be improvising or doing anything different from what’s written.

So when Ti and I started working together, I felt this specific skill was very appreciated – the ability to express, communicate, reflect and show; or rather suggest direction for explorations in what they could do next after. Saying this technique is developed this way, it works in this register, I think, but maybe with a different string it can work differently, with more speed, or … And therefore, for me it was very beautiful, rewarding and exciting to see what happened after these little seeds were offered to Ti and the piece became what it has become.

Talking of bodies: although I’m familiar with this music, I’m not familiar with the physical experience of most of their music. I haven’t performed their string quartets. I’ve only performed the violin piece [The Chain of the Spine]. So I may be wrong in what I’m about to say, but my understanding of this specific piece is that there is another body that is being explored and has been exposed, almost, and caressed – that has been included in the dialogue in a meaningful way, and that is the instrument.

The instrument is celebrated in its own uniqueness, in its own ability to express and transform and translate itself into some other sonic world. And this transformation does not happen via an abstract reduction to an electronic device or an abstract insertion of pitches on the instrument – play this note, this note, this note … It really is made through altering the body of the instrument and the physicality of the string tension, and further enacting digital pressure upon those: touching specific points of the strings, pressing the strings down with the bow, finding the point where the instrument is not free to vibrate, is not suffocating, but is somewhere in between, where it is expressing sounds that become the new norm of the instrument, is accepting a new instrument, the body of the instrument in this new form.

And for a performer, who has been trained for ten, twenty years, on a specific instrument – and of all instruments, the string family is the one that has been more anally defined in micromillimetres, and performing technique is something that we’ve had drilled into our head since we were a child; like, this is how the fourth string should sound, watch Paganini – if you look at the fourth string of this piece, that fourth string is a different animal. It’s a different entity, it’s a different instrument. Its voice is wonderful. It’s fascinating, and it moves and moulds and offers. When we are talking about bodies and creatures and entities in this piece, the instrument is central.

TRJ: The idea of the instrument as a body and the performer as a body, and both of them in this entwined, touching relationship, and activating something in each other in the process of doing that – that’s a very erotic image on one level. I’m curious, Ti, how far you push that metaphor, the metaphor of the instrument as a body?

TMcC: I mean, I don’t really think of it as a metaphor. It’s quite literally the situation. Instruments are very, very complex objects, organisms; they’re not inert things. They have zones of … I don’t know. I mean, they’re constructed like our bodies: there are soft places and structurally firm places, and it’s all entwined together to make a thing that produces its sound. That is a super broad thing, but our bodies also contain multitudes.

So yeah, it’s not metaphorical, for me. What I’m writing for, in this case, a viola – not just a violist, but also a viola – it has an internal construction, a physiology, that I need to learn and that I’m in direct communication with.

Going back to what I said earlier: hearing a sound in somebody else’s music or, you know, hearing Marco improvise and produce a sound – it could be the coolest fucking sound I’ve ever heard in my life, but if I don’t know exactly how it’s being made, I have no interest in it.

It’s not even like, ‘Oh, I can’t write for it’. I literally don’t really care about it until I know how the instrument produces it, or what the situation is between the performer and the instrument in producing it. That’s when it becomes alive and a real thing for me, once I understand how the thing makes it.

It’s not just a technical, ‘Oh, now I know how to write for …’; it gives me information about the instrument’s body and how the instrument is constructed in how a certain sound is placed within my knowledge of that instrument’s body and its expressive potentials. It’s in communication with all the other things that I know that that instrument can do because of this, this, this and this …

Again, I don’t see this as a metaphor: it’s quite literally the situation, this reciprocal touching and unlocking or exposing or whatever that the performer has upon the instrument or that the instrument has upon the performer. There’s an agency that instruments have just as obviously as performers have over each other. You know, instruments are constructed to fit upon our bodies in a certain way, and there are specific places that we physically touch and thus connect to an instrument. And in those moments, the instrument includes us in it, and vice versa.

That objective fact is really generative for me, but there’s also a poetry of that. There’s a choreography of that connection, of those sites of touch and mutual expansion and exposure. And that’s really the locus of my work. It has been for a really long time, but that has meant different things, or it has become different things over the years. And with every piece, and especially a solo piece, I think my goal, at least initially, is to figure out what those locations are for the piece.

The piece has an agency as well. We think, or maybe people think, that a composition is a thing that is being created. You know: it’s ephemeral and it’s invisible and it doesn’t exist until you create it, and at the double bar line, it’s there. But for me, that’s not the case at all. We’re talking about the agency and the presence and the reciprocity of the performer and the instrument. Those are objects that presuppose the piece, but also the piece – even though it’s not a thing in the world yet – also presupposes the situation in a way. It also has an agency in its emergence.

There is an aspect of discovery and not quite knowing what something is until, you know, Marco and I have done x amount of time working together, workshopping ideas and techniques and stuff. But there is also a sort of traction that the piece exerts, before it is created. It’s difficult to articulate, but there is a thing that I have a sense that the piece might be, and it’s reciprocal with all of the work that we’ve done, in a more ephemeral but paradigmatic way that the body of the performer and the body of the instrument are reciprocal – they touch each other and in finding the nodes of touch there’s an unlocking, a discovery in in finding the right ones.

So even as the piece is emerging, before it’s a thing, those nodes, those places of reciprocal touch – the piece is part of that as well, of finding that triple node where a sound between, you know, the instrument and a person, but then also the formal and poetic requirements or requests of the piece … those three things locked together. And that’s why some pieces are different than other pieces, despite the fact that there is an ongoing interest in research in certain techniques and sound worlds of string instruments that I carried into this piece. But this piece is so different from any other pieces of mine that also start from within that same current of research.

A piece for me is largely navigating and trying to sense amongst all of the work that Marco and I have done on sounds and techniques, and thinking about these various bodies and the places in which they intersect. But a large part of the piece, especially the early process, is very slow because I’m also trying to sense when and in what concrescence of these things does it then feel like it’s sinking into the piece. It’s like walking through the woods at night, not being able to see anything but knowing that there’s a swamp or a sinkhole and wanting to sink down into that. That’s the substance of the piece, and we’re carrying all this potential material and potential experience through it. But once it unlocks a place that you feel like you can sink into, that’s the zone of the piece.

TRJ: I want to come on to the role of duration and length in this piece and how that how that interacts not only with the physical aspects of playing it but also this idea of becoming that you were referring to, Ti.

But before that, I want to ask: the way you’ve described the process so far is that you and Marco were working together, and you were finding sounds like this grumbling thing with the high harmonics, going ‘Yeah, that’s got to go in, that’s a landmark in this piece’. When you go back to your desk, with a whole load of these landmarks, how do you turn them into a continuous piece of music? Is it a matter of finding the transitions between those landmarks, or creating a drama out of them?

TMcC: I mean, again, it’s a sort of negotiation: you know things, but you don’t know things. I think one of the most difficult aspects of composing is having all this knowledge, having all of this history, having all of this loaded material. Marco and I generated all sorts of things … and it’s not even – at least the way that we work – ‘Okay, we have this technique and we have that technique’, it’s like, we understand the properties of this reciprocal physical haptic situation that’s going on with the instrument. We understand the specific zone or zones that we’re exploring. And we’ve mapped it out, or we’ve learnt it to a degree that we know that within the zone there’s that place and this place, and if you push in this way, it becomes that thing, etc, etc.

So there’s this knowledge. And then within that knowledge, there’s a network of understandings of potential material and how they can be related to each other, either formally or physically – by which I mean, I know that this sound can transform into that sound, by way of this physical operation, and I can use that.

The zone of composition is informed by all of that, but it also has its own agency. And I think one of the most difficult things about being a composer, or rather about composing, is that you have to both hold and contain and be mindful of all of this material and all of this information and knowledge that you have generated, but then you also – or I also – have to be at every step very attentive, attuned and open to the piece itself. By which I mean – especially as you write it – there’s a point at which the piece that you’re writing, even though it’s this emergent thing that doesn’t exist yet, it does sort of know something about itself that I don’t.

There is always a point or points where the piece itself starts to talk back to me. And it’s very difficult to … you have to be flexible and open and vulnerable enough with oneself, I guess, to actually hear the piece when it’s talking back to you. And then I also have to be flexible enough with my process: I might have a plan for the piece, but it starts talking back, and in order to be responsive and open to those moments, I also have to be flexible enough with myself to let go of plans that I had or places that I felt that the piece might go. And that happened a lot with this piece, much earlier in it than I had also anticipated.

The piece is sort of a diary of its own making. In this piece, but also in a lot of recent work of mine, the beginnings feel, in a metaphoric way, but also – again, this is all very real to me! – they begin in a place where the piece itself is waking up. It’s an organism that’s just coming into being and very, very slowly learning about itself, learning that it has extremities, that it has arms and legs and appendages that can move. And once it realises that it has those and they can move, then there’s this learning that we hear happening in the piece of not just that it can move, but how it can move.

And in this piece, we hear that. The beginning is at once very diffuse and very indistinct, but at the same time, it’s … I mean, it’s the most difficult passage of the piece, I think Marco has said multiple times. [laughs] It’s also very specific, despite it feeling weirdly diffuse. But then – and this is getting to this idea of the piece talking to you – I was, again, very surprised – this was not the plan – but it actually reaches a clear statement of itself much earlier than I thought initially would make sense; you know, this idea of the piece waking up and learning of itself. It’s not that deep into the piece before we get an interval and a very harmonic kind of solid statement of a thing.

Going back to your initial question about duration: yes, duration is really, really important. I think of it more as scale. There’s a scale of time, I guess, of proportion, that’s really crucial to hit with this music because, yes, there are pivot moments. Those pivots can have a duration in and of themselves – or sometimes they’re actually on a dime. But if they’re not anticipated, once they happen, they need to feel inevitable – it’s not being able to anticipate a place, but once we’re there, it feels inevitable that we were going there. And in order to achieve that, it’s actually not just about those moments and the specific shift or balance of those moments, it’s actually about everything that came before and how long we are with what, what the rate of movement is and for how long.

So I think a lot about how much time – and the proportions therein – that certain materials need to emerge and learn about themselves and understand themselves. But then also sometimes, once they’ve established themselves, once the piece has learnt a certain thing about itself, to then sit with it and be with it. It’s not just a state of constant unravelling of emergence, it’s also important to have places that are sustained and maintained with that knowledge.

And so there’s a constant balance of proportion and flow and energy. I think a lot about too little material occupying too much space, and then the inverse. But it’s never just a formal game. I always hope, if not in the moment, then at least eventually or in retrospect, that spending that much time with a certain thing prepares our ears for this other thing.

MF: I think that the way Ti and I worked on the piece was particularly significant in that direction, in the sense that once the piece was completed, we didn’t have an awful lot of time together. The very first meeting we had [about the finished piece] was on Zoom. And I remember we only scheduled 45 minutes, which was the duration of the piece!

And in my own way, that was probably unexpected and borderline rude, I assume, I forced them to speak about the piece for a good part of those forty-five minutes. That is, telling me not just what is this technique or that, because I was familiar with the writing and with the technique, but what’s the story? What is the direction? What is the meaning in the general structure of what’s happening here? And what is the body of the piece doing, why is this point so static and why suddenly is it flashing to me?

So there is another wonderful moment in the piece where a sort of tentacular creator flashes towards you and tries to get closer, and this sort of gesture stays with me. I wait for that moment for a good thirty-five minutes at least. Or at least I know that that’s about to happen.

And this idea, this structure in time, is to an extent what drives the performance. It is a transposition of … you know, when you learn how to play an instrument, you are always taught to read the next note, not the one you’re playing. On an incredibly different scale, this is the same situation. To be at my best, I would want to know before the performance that I’m entering this line, and I want to know where I’m going, where my trajectory is going within a certain amount of time. And with that in mind, I know where I can slow down even more when I can … not necessarily play with time, but play with the listener’s expectation in their time and keep them static for an insane amount of time, with the promise, or at least with my own word, that something is about to happen. And that sort of calm and static acceptance of time passing and remaining in the same situation is what forces people in the audience, and myself, into understanding even more when things change and these pivotal moments when these firecrackers explode.

Again, as a performer, that is a strategy that you use often. You slow down, you play the crochet in the last second – but on such an enormous scale, such a wide breath of time, it is something that becomes almost a promise more than something that is perceived. Because when you are forty minutes into the piece, the fifth minute still counts, but in a way that you don’t remember anymore. You’re living through the situation, you’re getting close to the end, you’re exiting.

And if I can rebound on something that was mentioned briefly before: the idea of sensuality and physical contact with the instrument. That is a metaphor that is very relevant for Romantic music, for a lot of music that has this sort of a flame, this burning passion that is ingrained into itself. I always make jokes about playing more than one instrument and not being, you know, a monogamous person, or other jokes about, yes, but I’m doing it on stage for way too much time ... [laughs]

So there are things that reveal the limits of the metaphor, but what I think remains interesting is that in most situations, or in the best situation, I hope for, you know, deep, physical, emotional and sensual connection. There is with another body – whether that is human or not human – an aspect of wonderful and deep knowledge of each other. That is what remains, and that is what allows you to go on stage with your instrument partner and to be able to perform that, to play the piece in a way that becomes believable because you both know how to act in that situation.

You both know it’s not the same when you’re in the practice room or in the bedroom, but it is very much something that you know so well how it goes with them, that you can show it to somebody else. You know, when you can drive them and tell them: you see, I’m doing this, I’m doing this gesture. Now I’m touching it here. And this is not a casual point. This is exactly what’s happening in this piece. But I think it’s not only sensual, it’s a deep and embodied knowledge of each other.

TMcC: If I can just add a few things that I was thinking about off of what Marco said, just to bring it down to earth – because I’m talking like, ‘Oh, composition is this cosmic thing …’.

It should be said that this is a forty-five minute piece, and Marco’s body – fingers, chin, arm, with the bow being an extension of his arm – is in contact with the instrument that entire time. That has repercussions. I don’t think that there’s any moment where you’re allowed to just, ‘Okay, off that, and now the next situation or the next place that I need to be …’

TRJ: It’s a continuous situation.

TMcC: … It’s a continuous situation. And if the bow needs to be at a certain place, at a certain pressure on a certain string, and the left hand needs to also be at these various very specific places, it’s not just a resetting there. It’s a haptic … from one very specific situation into another, but through, in that transition, through many others, that are being made in communion with the instrument, constantly in touch with the instrument. Which also means constantly making sound, so all of these interstitial physical sensuous, intimate ... I mean, it’s very, very intimate, and it’s also very, very vulnerable because every touch, every quality of touch that Marco has upon the instrument, is then heard. There’s a vulnerability to that, and that’s happening for the entire forty-five minutes.

One more down-to-earth thing off of what Marco said. Just going back to the idea of time and duration: Marco was talking about how long some of these trajectories are, which is important. I mean, there are passages in the piece in which a single phrase, from start to finish, could be five to ten minutes. I mean, it’s a contoured, nuanced thing, so there are smaller places and shapes and trajectories and morphologies within that, but it’s a line that needs to be kept taut, that entire time.

When a phrase goes to that level of time – and again, Marco is in physical contact with the instrument that whole time and needing to transform very slowly from one state or situation to another throughout that, and it’s taking place at that level – it induces a very, very different sense of time and sense of form and trajectory, not only in the listener but also in Marco as the performer. Knowing that, ‘Okay, I’m pushing through this place and eventually this is going to connect to that place’. And for the listener, it may take some time for the piece to sort of induce this sense of time, but it does eventually shift our relationship to time and our relationship to flow of event, rate of event. It changes one’s listening, and I think you sort of forget about time. But at the same time, your attention is really with every moment of the piece. So it’s a sort of double expansion.

The physicality that we’ve been talking about, this sensuous reciprocity, the instrument in the body being one thing, but also mutually exerting a knowledge upon each other and the sensuousness of that – that is directly connected to time and scale and proportion and duration. They’re not different things to me.

The sense of time is accessed through this particular state of physicality; but also, it is that time, that expression or that sensation of time, that informs the rate and proportion of gestures and phrases and physicality. So again, it’s a reciprocal thing. It’s not just like, I want my pieces to be long and slow and so I’m going to write drones that last for a long time. It’s much more of an intimate entanglement between the two things, just like the instrument and the body, and the piece and the instrument and the piece in the body – just as they exert a mutual contingency upon one another, I also see that between the quality of sound and the physicality that goes into that, and this temporal sensation.

TRJ: I wanted to ask just one more question. Marco, we’ve all talked about this idea of two bodies corresponding and engaging with one another, and that being a process of discovery. And that’s the fun thing, that’s why you like to take time over these things, so that you can discover things.

But I’m wondering, when you’re actually on stage, playing this music – not so much when you were making the piece together, but when you are actually doing it on stage, and you’re working within what sound like very, very small margins of possibility – is that sense of discovery still possible?

MF: [pauses] So as a good PR, I would say, yes, of course it is. And as a more honest person – I don’t think PR people are honest – as a more honest person or musician, I think, yes: to an extent. The extent being both the contingency of the performance and the degree of freedom that I feel I grant myself or that the situation grants me.

For instance, in a very silly way, if you premiere the piece in an important festival, I hope that things work out as best as possible, but I’m also very mindful of not ruining anything. So there is a degree of familiarity with the piece, a familiarity with the scene. In a recording situation, I would feel more comfortable exploring more because it’s not live.

In terms of physical interaction with the piece and with my body and with the scene and with the audience, there is a degree of tiredness that happens throughout the piece, because the concentration and the tensions that need to be exerted are very high, the attention to details, and attention not only to details that have to do with sonic production but also to do with your own incarnated experience, your embodied experience meaning.

I know how my body and most bodies work when playing an instrument, and I am aware of a sort of crystallisation that starts to happen where things move less and less and your knees lock and your elbow and your pelvic floor moves in a certain way, your breath becomes shorter, your neck becomes stiffer. And I am aware that this will happen in the course of forty-five minutes. And when I am almost there, and I’m almost solidified on stage in this sort of tension that I can’t breathe out anymore, that’s when things become more difficult. But significantly, that’s also when this piece changes and unlocks completely. Techniques change dramatically at a certain point, which is to my own physicality, specifically when I’m about to crack.

So, I think the discovery has to do with my own well-being on stage, my own confidence on stage, and the degree to which I think I can afford and risk on stage, as well as my own actual physical state. How I’ve got off the plane before. How in tune the instrument is.

That’s a problem we recently had – a discovery, let’s put it this way, that we had when we premiered the piece in San Diego, given the room and the tension and everything else. The tension of the strings changed throughout the piece, and therefore I had to actually act when I was supposed to play open strings to correct the tuning, to finger things so that I could actually obtain the pitches that Ti has written.

Anyway, long story short: every performance is a process of control and allowing freedom, and this happens in different situations, at different moments in time.

The virtuosity here is very much an ‘underwater’ virtuosity. When you have to preserve your breath for as long as possible. You are in apnoea, and then with that you need to be able to do wonderful dances and movements and sounds, but preserving your oxygen until the very last molecule.

TRJ: It’s like the discovery that you get from running for a long time, but not in a completely solipsistic way. That discovery then becomes how you’re making the sound that we hear.

MF: Yes. Also, in terms of solipsism and performing for oneself versus performing for others: there is a bit of both. Because you want to assume that the audience is following you, and you do all your best to have the audience following you.

However, if somebody isn’t connected because they’re not on the same wavelength, it’s definitely not a Paganini piece where you can, you know, do a couple of left-end pizzicato and people get excited. That’s where you are, you are stuck with this sound. So either you come to me or I am playing for myself.

And it also depends how people perceive time. Everybody has a different perception of time in the moment of the day or in the moment of life. For me, right now, it’s very interesting how I’m very conscious of time when I’m not performing. When I’m teaching, when I am talking to people, I know exactly for how long I have been doing this specific thing. However, when I play, I honestly can’t tell if I’ve been playing for fifteen or for forty-five minutes. I don’t know.

So the idea of drawing the arc is an intellectual way of knowing that it’s going to be long. But this is also what makes me feel when I’m delivering this second, I know where I’m going; but this second is as important as the next second, which feels the same. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that. It’s a presentness in time that means the trajectory is being built one step after the other, each trying to have the same quality and presentness.

TMcC: I want to add something to that. First of all, there is a pretty crucial left-hand pizzicato in this piece. One: so that’s the Paganini reference, I guess! [laughs]

But what Marco was just talking about – my way of thinking about it … As I said earlier, this idea of the instrument and the performer being this mutually connected, entangled organism, that’s been with me for a long time. That’s been the locus of where I begin my music for a long time. But as I said earlier, as you excavate a certain plot of land, you just discover more and more.

So even though this place has been with me or this starting point has been with me for a long time, obviously the music that has resulted from it has really changed. And along with that changing of the music has been a shift in what physicality means or what type of physicality is being called upon. This is just to say that back when you did your 10 for ‘10 profile on me, physicality was really important in my work at that point, but the type of physicality was a very demonstrative and extroverted physicality. It was the physicality of atoms crashing and energy is put out.

My work has shifted over a long period of time, but we’re now at this place where the type of physicality that’s being called upon between a performer and their instrument is a very hidden and retreated physicality. It’s not necessarily so evident to a view, but to one’s ears, you could really hear it. And for a performer, it’s inescapable.

And so the music that I’m writing now, the type of physicality that a performer needs to access – or what they need to do with their body – they really need to be centred the whole time, very centred and sunken into and attuned to every movement that they’re making every. Not just movement, but the force of every finger, of every bowstroke, etc. And that requires a centredness of oneself that doesn’t necessarily display itself in the same way to an audience, but I think there’s a charge in the air. It’s very … tense isn’t the right word, but intense, a palpable quality of physical attention and physical intelligence that Marco is having to maintain because there’s really no other choice. Maintain, embody, be mindful of, etc. There’s a soft energy from that that is really, really palpable in the hall as well.

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If Barrett’s nacht und träume sits at the crossing of two lines that project out from Beckett and Schubert, at another sits the American composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987). It is often said that Feldman was Beckett’s closest equivalent in the field of music. An experimental innovator – he is credited with the creation of the graphic score, in which the traditional five-line stave marked with dots for pitches and beams for rhythms is replaced with a more open-ended series of visual suggestions – Feldman changed tack in his later years to fill large, slow spans of time with the obsessive restitching of small details. In these works, which can last up to several hours, nothing ever quite repeats; but nothing ever quite stays the same, either. Feldman called his method ‘crippled symmetry’, a name he gave to a 1983 trio for flutes, mallet percussion and piano/celeste. It refers to a kind of looping, self-sustaining circularity that Pozzo, Winnie and Krapp would all have recognised.

Barrett and Beckett never met, but Feldman and Beckett did. In September 1976, Beckett was at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin, supervising rehearsals of his Footfalls and That Time. Feldman was also in town and took the opportunity to introduce himself, although this wasn’t the dignified meeting of two great artistic minds one might have hoped for. At least not at first: Feldman was brought onto the stage where Beckett was rehearsing but, already short-sighted and further dazzled by having come straight from outside into the dark theatre, he managed only to shake Beckett’s thumb before tripping on a curtain and falling to the floor. Feldman tells this story against himself, and I suspect he enjoyed a pratfall as much as the playwright.

They went out for lunch, although Beckett had only a beer. Feldman had received a commission to write a work for Rome Opera. Would Beckett consider providing a libretto? ‘Mr Feldman, I don’t like opera’, was Beckett’s reply. ‘I don’t blame you!’ responds Feldman. ‘I don’t like my words being set to music’, insisted Beckett. ‘I’m in complete agreement’, replied Feldman. Evidently confused, Beckett looks at him again. ‘But what do you want?’ ‘I have no idea!’ laughs Feldman.

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It’s not often you can say of a concert that the encore was the best bit – and what had gone before was exceptional. Ólafsson had begun the evening at a muted upright piano, sat to the right of his wife, Halla Oddný Magnúsdóttir, in the same configuration as that adopted by György and Martá Kurtág in their legendary Játékok recitals (the last of which, Service told us – and which I hadn’t realised – had taken place on this same stage in December 2013, as part of the Southbank’s year-long The Rest Is Noise festival). The pair played ‘Twittering’, one of a handful of four-hand pieces in the first volume of Játékok, and ‘Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit’, one of Kurtág’s favourite Bach arrangements. Magnúsdóttir then took a seat in the front row and Ólafsson switched to the Steinway at the centre of the stage for a run of more Játékok, plus pieces of additional significance to him and Kurtág: an arrangement made by him for Kurtág of the Air on a G String (which utilised Kurtág’s own practice of registral displacement to clarify the lines), and an arrangement given to him by Kurtág of the Adagio movement from Haydn’s String Quartet in G major, op. 76, no. 1, apparently a favourite of Martá’s and the only thing guaranteed to make her smile in her final days. Homages by Kurtág to Bach, Schumann to Bach, Kurtág to Schumann and Mark Simpson to Kurtág marked this less as a concert than a ceremony of gifts. And after a delightfully translucent Webern Passacaglia (more early modernist than late Romantic, as it is often styled), a precious realisation of the … quasi una fantasia …, Op. 27, no. 1, instrumental groups around and among us.

Allusions to Kurtág’s life and loves, and to the relationship enjoyed between him and Ólafsson over the last decade, abounded. And so with his encores, Ólafsson played two pieces that he had played to Kurtág at their first meeting: a folksong from Iceland and another from Hungary, the latter arranged by Bartók. Now at rest, the musicians on stage – with Service and Schwarz taking a seat among them – watched and listened with us. Those around the auditorium stood where they were, as though held in thrall by virtuoso street performer. These were the gifts Ólafsson had offered to Kurtág: a song from his own country, and an interpretation of one from Kurtág’s. In a circle around him, we sat rapt, as if at that first meeting ourselves.

This week I have had the huge pleasure of interviewing the soprano and curator Juliet Fraser. To anyone involved in new music, Juliet needs no introduction – an extraordinary singer, a true champion of composers, a storied collaborator. But she is also a mover behind the scenes, one of those admirable people who see a thing that needs to be done and gets on and does it. The record label all that dust that she founded in 2018 with Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong is an unfailing source of gorgeous boutique recordings – ranging from Nono and Babbitt to Catherine Lamb and Aaron Einbond. And later this month sees the return of the annual eavesdropping festival that she founded and now runs with producer Linda Jankowska, as well as small team of additional producers and designers. (She also writes a Substack, Notes on flying.)

eavesdropping is, in my experience at least, unique. Its almost exclusive (but not rigid) emphasis on female, non-binary and transgender artists is part of that, but actually not the most significant part. What is even more meaningful, I think, is how every other aspect of the festival flows out from that initial axiom: its structure, its emphasis on informality and experiment (without losing sight of rigour or critique), its openness of ears, minds and arms. When I reviewed the 2024 festival for The Wire, I wrote that ‘Many festivals claim to be accessible or welcoming to all; few practice that ambition quite so assiduously.’ Like much of Juliet’s practice, eavesdropping is a shining example of that old writers’ maxim: ‘show, don’t tell’.

eavesdropping this year runs from 19–22 March, at Cafe Oto and the Vortex in Dalston. Full details can be seen here. Juliet also produces a podcast series of conversations with the festival’s artists, which can be accessed on Soundcloud here, or wherever you get your podcasts. It is a brilliant and always insightful listen.

My conversation with Juliet took place over Zoom earlier this week, and has been edited in all the usual ways.

Interview with Juliet Fraser

TRJ: I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to start by stealing a question that you use on all your podcasts, which is: how do you describe yourself as an artist?

Juliet Fraser: I suppose it’s a bit context-dependent. Either I’m a singer, or I’m a soprano, or occasionally I’m a vocalist. And sometimes I’m a curator ... I guess I’m a singer. If I’m talking to a taxi driver, then I’m a singer, I’m definitely not a soprano.

TRJ: What’s the difference?

JF: Well, I feel like ‘soprano’ is a really classical identifier. And it tends to lead people immediately towards opera, interestingly. Whereas a vocalist is – that’s probably the term that I use the least – but that’s definitely less classical. And singer, of course, is the broadest thing. So it normally invites a follow-up question.

TRJ: ‘Are you like Taylor Swift?’

JF: Exactly. And I say yes, just like Taylor.

TRJ: When people ask me what I write about, I say, well, you might have heard of Philip Glass; everything beyond that is my area … and then they often lose interest.

JF: That’s really interesting. How did you alight on Philip Glass as a reference?

TRJ: Because he’s well known. He feels like someone people might have heard of. They might know the film scores.

JF: Normally it goes: ‘I’m a singer.’ ‘What sort of singer?’ ‘I’m a classical singer.’ ‘Oh, so you do opera?’ ‘No, actually, I do everything except for opera.’ ‘Oh, right, so what is that then?’

And then I quite often end up saying, ‘Do you know the Turner Prize for visual arts? Well, it’s a bit like that, but with music.’ I’m doing the edgy experimental, weird side of music.

TRJ: It’s so weird that there isn’t a common reference point for people – we always have to come at it sideways via something else.

JF: But maybe that’s the nature of experimentalism, that’s it’s a bit tricky to categorise.

TRJ: I wanted to really to talk to you about the curation side of your work. When you did start curating, in addition to performing?

JF: 2017. I suppose it depends a bit what you mean by curation, because every time you design a programme for a concert that is curation. But I think what we’re talking about today is me curating other artists, and that began with eavesdropping in 2017.

TRJ: What was the initial impulse?

JF: The initial impulse was really a space. I’d moved to East London about five years before, and I knew that I couldn’t practise in this flat where I’m sitting today. So I was looking around at spaces in East London that I might be able to hire to do my practice in. And I had been working in this wooden chapel in Bethnal Green, which was not open to the public because it had a leaking roof, but that wasn’t a problem for me.

And at some point – I think I must have been showing it to somebody else – I just thought, there should be more happening in here than just me doing my practice. So it was really the space that made me think, what would it be like to present an event here? And then what would that event look like? What would I want to do? I could do anything, so what would I want to do?

TRJ: As it has developed, eavesdropping has gained quite a strong identity, and maybe a kind of philosophy behind it. We can get into what that is, but when did it start to emerge?

JF: I think it’s been there right from the beginning. I don’t really think that it has changed, in fact. I remember standing in the space and thinking, who do I want to present here? What sort of event is worth the enormous effort? I was thinking about this recently, but I think I just had this idea: What would it be if I made it a platform for female musicians?

There was a lot of talk about Keychange1 in the years before that, and I guess I had maybe been a little bit sceptical about the 50/50 idea [of gender parity in concert programming] – this is not a new conversation for us to be having, but some of the issues that arise with the idea of 50/50 programming. And I think once I’d had this idea – what would it be if I made a platform for women – I then thought, well, why not? Let’s just see what the implications of that are.

And I since I wanted it to be a platform for women making experimental music at the edges of various genres, I felt particularly aware that sometimes it was even harder for women working in that way. I feel like we’re expected to stay in the mainstream – you know, this idea of lanes. So it just felt at that moment that it might be a worthwhile experiment. And that’s always how I’ve seen it, really: an experiment with an idea. I’ve held to that, but I’ve also never felt that I have to hold to that in perpetuity – there may come a time when I want to loosen that or change the emphasis a bit. And it’s important that I feel free to do that.

TRJ: The format is quite unusual, isn’t it? Because it tends to be two sets each evening, each one a solo performer or maybe a duo; but it’s not ensembles coming in. One of the things I find really interesting about eavesdropping is how much – not just who’s on stage but also the things around the festival, the ethos, the audience – all seem to stem from this idea of it being a platform for female, non-binary and transgender musicians. And it just feeling like a very different space as a consequence. Is the solo performer focus a part of that?

JF: Yeah, I think so. That’s partly practical: it’s to do with budgets. But even more than budgets, it was to do with the size of the space in which eavesdropping began, which had an audience capacity of maybe forty-five. And it was a very beautifully resonant space; I’d tried singing in there with, say, five voices, and it was just too loud!

I also thought, there are many people for whom that act of stepping up there alone is quite a significant part of their artistic development. And that turned out to be true; it turned out that there was a need for that. Over the years, we have had a few artists who one might consider very experienced in terms of group improvisation or ensemble performance, but creating a set of solo material is really nudging them into new territory.

TRJ: Lots of the artists come to eavesdropping with works in progress or something they’re trying. It feels like that openness is part of its identity.

JF: It is, and I think that comes from me being a performing artist myself. I decided very quickly that I didn’t want to be announcing repertoire, I didn’t want a performance to be locked into a programme – like one tends to be so many months in advance – because if it were a space to share new things, often you want the flexibility to go, ‘Okay, I thought that was going to be a good idea, but it doesn’t quite work, I’ve needed to tweak it’. Whether that’s because you decided you wanted to learn such and such a piano sonata and actually it turns out that you hate it! [laughs] I don’t want somebody to be obliged to follow through on something.

It’s what I describe as artist-led programming. It’s always me talking to the artist … It always begins with a conversation: ‘Hi, what are you working on? What’s your current kind of direction of travel? What’s interesting you at the moment?’ And then seeing if there’s some kind of overlap there with what I want to programme.

And then that conversation continues after they’ve been officially invited to be part of the festival. I’ll be talking to them about what they’re working on. They might be saying, I’m thinking about this or maybe that, and I’m saying, ‘Okay, I think maybe this one and not that one’ or whatever, depending on the other artists that evening – or partly on just what I want to hear.

So it is very much a conversation, but I try to let them make the final decision.

TRJ: Do you tend to know more or less what they’re going to do on the night, or are there occasions when it surprises you?

JF: Definitely occasions when it does surprise me. And that’s great, as far as I’m concerned. And often I’m programming people that I’ve never heard live, so there’s a significant proportion of the performance that I will not have heard live, and I love that. I love turning up to the festival and going, ‘Oh, I get to hear this at last!’

TRJ: How do you find people to programme?

JF: Lots of listening. Lots of rabbit holes. I think a lot of encountering names – if not the people themselves – when I’m wandering around the place doing festivals. I always look at the rest of a festival billing and come away with a little shortlist of people who I then want to go and research. Some recommendations. All sorts of sorts of ways, really.

TRJ: Do you sometimes see someone in a group concert and think, well, I wonder what she would do on her own?

JF: Occasionally. And there are some people who I really keep a beady eye on for several years. There was somebody that I encountered in 2017, just before we launched – we were a series then, it was a series of four events before we moved to the festival model – and I just kept a watchful eye on their practice as it developed. And then finally I invited them to perform in the 2025 festival. So that was quite a long incubation period, but that’s representative. Not of everybody, but there are quite often one or two people like that.

TRJ: Is not just – it’s the start of the year, who do I book?

JF: Not at all. And sometimes it’s just about the stars aligning, whether they happen to be in Europe or whether I happen to remember them at that particular moment.

TRJ: When you’ve got four shows and eight performers, eight sets, are you also thinking about how they’re going to pair up on the night, and how the shape of the thing overall is going to be?

JF: Definitely the shape of the thing overall. I always see it as a jigsaw puzzle, and there are lots of different sorts of … I’m trying to think of a better word than diversity because that tends to mean quite a narrow thing, but I’m looking for as much breadth as possible. Across the programme.

It’s pretty easy for me to programme the contemporary classical people because that’s my world. So it may be that I’ve got two or three of those locked in quite early on, and then there’s this very complicated process of filling the rest of the slots and making sure that there’s enough difference across the eight artists. But I no longer really programme thinking about the pairing because that nearly always tends to be more practical, about availability. Sometimes there are people that I think would really work, and when the dates align then that’s super, but often I don’t have any control over that. So I’m increasingly relaxed about it.

TRJ: It’s more to do with the overall balance.

JF: Yeah, it is. And sometimes the balance across the years. I remember one year there was one sort of experimental folk artist and I thought, well, maybe next year I don’t need to tick that box so I can lean into a different sort of experimental area.

TRJ: And then, the forum has emerged alongside the performances, but that’s relatively recent, I think?

JF: It’s been there from the beginning. It was called a symposium in the first year, and we’ve always wrestled with the language of it because, well, we were a series and a symposium – they both begin with S, isn’t that tidy? But ‘symposium’ felt like it might have been too academic and putting some people off. So then at some point we switched to a festival and a forum.

But we had a two-day symposium in the very first year. So that’s been part of the festival – or part of the activity, let’s say – right from the beginning.

TRJ: And how do you see the two things mutually interacting with one another?

JF: I guess I’ve always seen it as a meeting point between the visiting artists and the, let’s call them local artists. I was just aware that a lot of artists really are wrestling with questions. They’re not just people who get up to perform music, they are people who are thinking about some of the gnarly questions behind what it is to make music. So I thought it would be nice to create a space to actually do that work of asking questions together.

TRJ: And the theme of this year is risk-taking – ‘Cultivating courage’. I don’t know whether you would use this sort of language yourself, but there is a feminist underpinning to a lot of what eavesdropping does. Obviously from the programming choices, but also in the themes of the forums. How do you see those in terms of the wider underpinnings of the project?

JF: Firstly, to address the feminist thing, that has absolutely been there from the beginning. There were specific bits of feminist literature that were really shaping my thinking at the time when I decided to found eavesdropping. Where I’ve been less consistent, let’s say, is in the degree to which I want that word, ‘feminism’, to be at the front of how we describe the activity. Generally, I feel that I want the activity to speak for itself and the feminist thinking behind it just to be a sort of quiet underpinning.

TRJ: Yes.

JF: And then in terms of the themes, I feel like I’m doing that thing of sucking a finger and putting it in the air to feel where the breeze is coming from! [laughs] I’m trying to capture something a bit zeitgeisty, some of what feel like the pressing questions of the time. When it comes to pinning down the theme, it will often be that I’ve got two or three topics that I’m ruminating on, and I’m keeping an eye out to see what other festivals are doing. Generally sidestepping, for example, AI [as a theme], because that’s happening everywhere. It’s been on the shortlist for two or three seasons, but I just can’t bring myself to be another festival doing AI.

So it’s a little bit arbitrary, but I’m trying to read something that is in the air.

TRJ: Are you trying to line that theme up with the performers that you’ve got?

JF: Not really. There’s a bit of a wall, I would say, between the headline artist and the topic of the forum. But sometimes somebody clambers over the wall – which is happening this year because I’ve invited Zosha [Warpeha] to speak as part of the forum. So it’s quite flexible, but I don’t try to reflect the topic of the forum in the material of the festival evening.

TRJ: You mentioned that one of the early impulses was a response to the Keychange thing from whenever that was – ten years ago?

JF: I think it was 2012, even.

TRJ: A possibly depressing question, but do you think the conditions have changed since then? If you were to start something now, would you go in with a different set of questions, or not?

JF: I suppose there are two different questions in there. I think things have changed a little bit. People, artists, tell me both that it’s still very difficult and that things are a little better. I think it depends very much on what scene you’re in, actually. There are still scenes that are more or less misogynistic, I would say. Of course, there’s a great deal more awareness and talk about it, but whether that actually translates into a difference in terms of access is, well … just very variable, I would say.

And would I do it differently now? Yeah, I might do. But partly just because I’ve done it this way before, if you know what I mean. So I think that if I was starting a new festival, I probably would do it differently – but that’s mainly just to make it as fun as possible for me. I might not announce any particular strand to the programming and just let myself be a bit more playful.

That’s not to say that it’s hard work to do eavesdropping the way that I do. It really isn’t. There are just so many artists out there, and I’m nowhere near the bottom of my lists!

TRJ: It’s always remarkable to me when I see the programmes that there are always plenty of people who I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of this person’. I like to think I’m reasonably in touch ... So that’s always good!

Speaking more broadly – not necessarily if you were to do something new – but are there things that you would still like to do with eavesdropping? Not necessarily particular artists, but more structural or conceptual things that you’d like to do with it?

JF: I’m never short of ideas. It’s really just money that makes the whole thing difficult.

TRJ: And what if money were no object?

JF: If money were no object ... I probably wouldn’t try to make much of a bigger festival. I like the model that we have. I guess I would feel that I had the capacity sometimes to move beyond the solo artists, or rather to support the particular individual artists that I was approaching. If they said to me, yes, I want to do that, but there’s this duo that I’ve just started … to be able to support slightly bigger groups on stage would also be really, really nice.

And then I would definitely do much more in terms of supporting touring. So bringing people to the festival and then facilitating them, having follow-on events or prior events in other places around the UK. That for sure is what I’d be doing. And maybe similarly with the forum – we’re experimenting with a one-day follow-on forum at Southampton University in May this year for the first time. Because I really like the intimacy of the scale of what we do currently, it makes a lot of sense to me to replicate things, but for similarly quite small audiences in other places.

TRJ: You already put performances up on YouTube. Would you be interested in releasing recordings of live sets?

JF: I mean, having run a record label, I know how much work that is – so probably not! [laughs] I’d be up for recording things at as high a quality as possible and then just giving them for free to the artists. That would be more my thing, for them to release it in the way that they want to release it.

I would definitely lean further into artist development. So creative retreats or residencies or whatever you want to call them – which we’ve done a couple of times, but that feels like a strand that could be so intrinsically linked to the festival performances of new work. I think there’s a real dearth of residency opportunities here in the UK. I’ve just come back from France, where I’ve had two residencies. Not in my name, but with other people, and there’s such a better infrastructure for R&D over there.

So that would be another thing. And one of my fantasies for next year is to work towards some sort of published compendium of the various talks and papers and whatnot that we’ve had over the years. That would very much be a whittled-down selection, but I think it would be really nice to have a physical documentation of the thought side of the festival.

TRJ: Yes, because that can be a bit more ephemeral in a weird way.

I was listening to your podcast with Nathalie Forget, in which this question of residencies came up. And I agree that there isn’t very much in the UK at all, whereas in France, Germany, Italy, it’s quite a healthy way of nurturing the system.

JF: Yeah, it’s really difficult to create new work here. Or at least I find it is. Obviously the improvisers have a totally different setup, but for people who are either commissioning or creating original devised work, having that time to experiment without the pressure of a performance at the end of it is really difficult to find here.

TRJ: Do you feel that gives you, through eavesdropping, a sense of mission?

JF: I feel so much sense of mission, Tim. Every year, I think this is what needs to happen. This is the hole, these are the gaps in the provision; it’s really clear what could be done. But I have found it almost impossible to get the long-term financial stability that makes that possible.

TRJ: I can appreciate that. I think there’s also a tendency in the UK, among

funding bodies and so on, to look at things and say, Well, there’s eavesdropping already, so we don’t need another one of those. We’ve got Huddersfield, we don’t really need any other big new music festivals.

JF: Yeah.

TRJ: And that puts a lot of weight on one thing. It doesn’t really allow for a culture to grow, it just becomes isolated things that tick that particular box.

JF: I think that’s right. I had a very interesting conversation with a lot of other programmers recently. I think sometimes we feel like we’re pitted against one another and it makes partnership quite difficult. We’re either pitted against one another because you have to be doing something distinctive and unique and all the rest of it. Or literally we feel like we’re competing for the same pots of money.

But there’s a real … I speak generally because there are isolated instances of people confronting this … but there’s a general sense that the dots on the landscape across the UK aren’t very joined up, and it’s quite difficult for small organisations to develop significant partnerships that would make so much sense in terms of economies of scale or shared resources, or actually supporting artists to tour new work.

TRJ: I know that on the European festival circuit there is a bit more of this connection – are you involved in any of that?

JF: A little bit, informally. I would say that there’s a handful of festival directors on the continent that I talk to about things that are going on. That hasn’t really translated into anything concrete yet, but one of the challenges is that because I focus on solo artists, a lot of the – I guess it’s by chance – but a lot of the festival directors I consider friends tend to be programming much bigger stuff than that.

There are definitely possibilities to be explored there. But again, it comes back to the same thing about having some kind of long-term financial stability. That is actually what underpins long-term creative possibility, because it’s very difficult to have conversations two seasons in advance if you don’t even know if you’re going to have the funding for next year. It makes long-term planning almost impossible. Really. And that’s a real challenge to developing strategic partnerships.

TRJ: I’m only seeing any of this as it plays out on the stage, as it were, but I feel one of the strengths of eavesdropping is its light-footedness. You don’t come to it thinking, this is a big festival piece that has taken five years put together. So that is a strength, and a thing to be celebrated. But as you say, behind the scenes, it is presumably quite frustrating to think, well, we can’t really schedule anything beyond that.

JF: This is exactly the kind of salty contradiction that characterises eavesdropping because, we – when I say we, I guess I’m talking about me and the board of trustees – we’ve really come to cherish the sort of fleet-of-footness that you’re talking about, and to want to protect that. So we’re chasing this Holy Grail of some sort of stability that allows creative long-term planning, but a stability that doesn’t lock us into something that feels inflexible, or prevents us from adapting to what I perceive to be the pressing needs of the time.

TRJ: Let me turn in a more positive direction ...

JF: I was thinking the same! I didn’t want to sound like I’m whingeing!

TRJ: What have been some of your best experiences with eavesdropping? What does it look like and sound like when it’s at its best?

JF: Surprising, and in the best way. I’m always looking for a little touch of surprise. For me – because I am also an audience member – and for the audience. I want that sense of the unexpected. I’ve got this image of people’s ears being gently tweaked in a direction that they weren’t quite expecting. So that can be from an individual performer, or it can be from the contrast or indeed resonance that can arise between the two performers in an evening.

It’s really all about listening. That’s why I do it. I do it because I want to hear stuff. Because I want to be in that sort of space where there is very focused and generous listening going on. And then it’s about community … Sometimes I’m not really sure what that means, but I know that we’ve had it when I get unsolicited feedback from artists that is articulating that there was a special vibe going on.

Yeah, I think it’s actually artist feedback that is the most precious to me. Every season, people are reinforcing this need for a platform where they are given the freedom to try things. And the need for a platform where they’re being supported rather than kind of demanded of.

TRJ: There’s a very nurturing quality ...

JF: That’s the idea. I don’t always get it right, of course; at the end of the day, we’re all people. But that is certainly the idea. And again, that just comes from what I want as a performing artist. Maybe that is a bit of the special ingredient: that it has been curated by somebody who spends most of their time up on stage, doing that.

TRJ: It’s something that you feel as an audience member in the room, too: that you are also being nurtured, and doing some of the nurturing as well.

JF: Oh, that’s amazing. I never really know if that comes across. Not that I’m aiming to communicate that, but you never really know how this thing that stews inside you, how it’s actually going to be.

TRJ: It does feel unique. The other thing that I’ve noticed is that at Café Oto, you more or less know who is going to be in the audience. But actually, when I last went, two years ago, the audience was quite different from a normal new music, Oto audience. How much do you know about that? Where have these people come from?

JF [laughs]: I don’t really know! I think what I’ve learned is that the audience is always different. It’s different from night to night within the festival, and it’s different from year to year across the festivals.

We definitely brought something of an audience from our original Bethnal Green home to Oto. So that was already changing the Oto demographic a little bit. And then there are people that haven’t been to Oto before, but they’re coming for one artist on the billing or, you know … So it’s always a bit mysterious and always a bit in flux, which I’m totally happy with.

TRJ: You still seem to get the numbers.

JF: So far we have! [laughs]

TRJ: One last question then, and it’s an obvious one: but what can we expect this year? And what are you especially excited about?

JF: I think always expect a little bit of the unexpected. That’s certainly my attitude. I always want people to come with curious ears rather than fixed ideas about what they’re going to hear.

There are so many artists. I’m always excited about all eight of them, but I’m particularly excited to hear Zosha live. I’ve been wearing out their previous album and they’ve got a new one which has just dropped. I’m really excited about that – and the Hardanger d’amore. I mean, what could possibly be better? That’s a sound world that I just want to live in for weeks and weeks!

I don’t really want to single out individuals from just eight. But similarly, Audrey [Chen] I’ve never heard perform – and this is a vocalist I have been listening to for years. Whenever I’m giving a seminar or working with composers or vocalists, I nearly always put a track by Audrey.

That’s so exciting to me to finally hear her perform live. One of the things that I love is that even if you know an artist’s recorded work quite well, you never really know how they’re going to be in performance; they’re two completely different media. The energy that you finally get to witness when you see somebody performing live in a room – it’s never what I imagine it to be. That’s another element of surprise that I’m always looking forward to.

I’ve lived my life alongside music, but before these two events, Schubert had not had much impact on me.

I grew up with music echoing through the house. My dad is a pianist – an amateur, but a very good one. He worked as a chemist for a large pharmaceutical company, but every evening he would practise on the Hoffman baby grand that dominated our living room (before my parents had a room built specially for it). I remember Chopin, Debussy and Dad’s beloved Beethoven; the music of these composers lies deep within my consciousness. There must have been Schubert too – the Impromptus, maybe bits from the sonatas. But if there was, it has faded from memory.

I was an oboist, rather than a pianist. My own repertory was dominated by music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Lully, Bach, Vivaldi – along with a handful of mid-twentieth-century works by the likes of Poulenc (the quizzical, lushly upholstered Oboe Sonata) and Britten (the six endlessly inventive Metamorphoses after Ovid) that I adored for their comparative strangeness. Outside the orchestra and a few very early chamber pieces for wind ensembles (barely more than sketches), Schubert never wrote for oboe. He crossed my music stand just once, in the form of a song, ‘Auf dem Strom’, which I played as part of my A-level music assessment. It needed to be something for more than two musicians, and this was a great fit: a song, yes, but one that unusually included a part for a French horn as well as voice and piano. A classmate, a horn player herself, suggested it, and I took the voice part on my oboe. Dad accompanied, and we rehearsed together around the Hoffmann.

My only other contact was in a music history class. A-levels again. The syllabus was built around an anthology of Western music – a remarkable book that set out (with some success) to cover all the main plotlines in Western classical music from the Renaissance up to the late twentieth century in the form of short score extracts. Among them was the Quartettsatz, the first movement of a string quartet Schubert began in 1820 but never finished. He managed a few dozen bars of the second, Andante movement then either became distracted or disillusioned – no one is sure which – and gave up. It would be another four years before he tried to write for string quartet again, but that attempt brought forth Death and the Maiden.

Our teacher was somewhat scornful of what he called Schubert’s habit of note spinning, which could be found, he argued, all over the eight-minute Quartettsatz. Dressing his criticism up, he introduced my classmates and me to the term Fortspinnung – actually the perfectly respectable business of developing a musical motif, although my teacher interpreted it negatively as a lazy filling in of time. As students tend to do when introduced to an apparently easily graspable concept, we looked for examples of it in everything we studied thereafter – crying “Fortspinnung!” in hopeful enquiry every time – although apparently nothing else quite fit the bill.

As it happens, I liked the Quartettsatz. I loved its thrilling opening: the four tremolo strings piling on, one after the other, building swiftly into a tornado of noise; the equally thrilling collapse into sugar-sweet melody that follows. It had – again – a strangeness that set it apart. Even in this brief extract, it obviously sought to stake out the widest possible expressive territory without conceding anything to formal niceties.

But already my head was turned to more contemporary music, and it would be almost three decades before I thought seriously about Schubert again. That same teacher was an organist and had introduced a friend and me to the music of Olivier Messiaen, the supreme organ composer of the twentieth century. One morning before class, he had brought in the score to ‘Dieu parmi nous’, the extraordinary firework display with which Messiaen concludes his first great cycle for organ, La nativité du Seigneur (1935). I had never seen so many notes on one page. How could it be possible for one man to work out and write down such thick chords? And so many of them? Each one was shimmeringly perfect; their totality an intoxicating blaze of colour, reminiscent of the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where Messiaen had been organist for sixty-one years. My teacher sat at one end of the schoolroom piano to play the two hands, while Dan and I went to the other end to hammer out the pedal part. I played very badly, my universe expanding faster than my fingers could keep up. Eventually, planets and solar systems would cool and cohere. For now, I had to make do with flicking forward to the last thirty or so pages of my Anthology to gaze at the twentieth-century scores presented there, trying to imagine how they sounded.

But beyond that, I wanted to say a little more about Kurtág here. Because more than Feldman, even, whose centenary was celebrated last month, Kurtág’s music set me on the path I am on now. Not, I would say, necessarily because I like Kurtág’s music more. There are some pieces that are incredibly special to me – the Játékok recording he made with Martá for ECM; …quasi una fantasia…; Grabstein für Stephan; STELE; Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova – but there are equally plenty that I have never got my head around. And there are long periods of time when I don’t think about Kurtág’s music at all, which is not true of Feldman’s, which is never very far from me.

But Kurtág has represented a more consequential fork in my road. I think my first encounter must have been the ‘score’ – really just a bar of music – to the first of the twelve microludes for piano, from Book 2 of Játékok, although I have no idea now where I would have seen this. Really no more than a gesture, it captivated me with its size; I doubt I’d seen any music on this tiny a scale before. A middle C, followed by a three-note cluster spanning the notes on either side. Ludicrously simple, but somehow also sufficient.

And also crazy: look at the hairpins! A crescendo underneath a held note? Physically impossible on a piano, which knows only how to fade, not grow a sound. Yet it is practically the music’s only expressive marking, and with so little else going on, it has to do a lot of work. Once again, everything in this music is in the decay – only this time, that decay is doing the inverse of what the music wants to be. The performer must work against the objective physical properties of the sound, but with its subjective insistence. How they do this is up to them: they can’t play the crescendo literally, of course, but they do have resources with the pedal, with the touch and timing of the cluster, and with physical movement (if in front of a live audience). But the point – and this pertains to almost all of the Játékok’s hundreds of miniatures – is that there is much more to the music than simply the notes on the page. (There are dozens with impossible dynamic markings like this.) As Kurtág writes in his preface to the collection, ‘On no account should the written image be taken seriously, but the written image must be taken extremely seriously as regards the musical process, the quality of sound and silence. We should trust the picture of the printed notes and let it exert its influence upon us.’

Anyway, my mind was captured, even if my ears had not yet heard a note. I got hold of the ECM/Keller Quartet recording of the string quartet music. This included Ligatura – Message to Frances-Marie (The answered unanswered question), whose transcendent, surreal coda (three rising celesta chords that appear magically from nowhere) cemented my interest. And on a university orchestra visit to Budapest a year or two later, I bought up as many Kurtág recordings as I could find (including the Adrienne Csengery Kafka-Fragments) and spent a large part of the coach journey home sniggering childishly at the seemingly bizarre translations of János Pilinszky and Attila József in the liner notes (‘A trouser leg falling in darkness’).

By now I was pretty hooked, and when it came to choosing a topic for my master’s dissertation, it could only be the Játékok. And a few years after that, although Kurtág himself was not the subject of my PhD, my focus on Hungarian and Polish music of the 1960s and 70s was largely down to him, and that Budapest trip. And so here I am. Boldog születésnapot, Gyuri!

CD reviews

As promised two weeks ago, I’m catching up on a few more CDs this issue. After this, however, you can expect a great run of interviews: in the next couple of weeks I’ll be speaking to Timothy McCormack and Marco Fusi about long-duration music, performing bodies and Tim’s 45-minute viola solo, …stretched across its axes, which Marco will be playing at City University on 24 March; Juliet Fraser about programming, curation and her eavesdropping festival, which takes place this year on 19–22 March at Cafe Oto; and Bastard Assignments about their new music theatre piece PIGSPIGSPIGS, which will be staged at Wigmore Hall on 11 April. I’m looking forward to sharing all those with you.

The first two releases discussed below are already out; the Branciforte/Dumoulin will be released on greyfade as a ‘multi-disc object’ and digital download on 17 April. Readers in London might also be interested to note that the two musicians will be appearing (alongside Scanner) at Rich Mix on 20 March.

Richard Barrett: close-up (Sargasso)

Arriving at the end of last year, close-up is the inaugural release in Sargasso’s projected Richard Barrett edition of recordings. Barrett has been prolific in recent years, so while he is already fairly well represented on disc, a dedicated avenue to keep up with his output is a welcome development. close-up was composed between 2013 and 2016 for Serbia’s Ensemble Studio 6, and like many of Barrett’s works it is a cycle of interlocking smaller compositions that can be performed separately or together. (For those who are interested, the full score can be viewed via Barrett’s website here.)

Since 2013, Barrett and Milana Zarić, harpist and artistic director of Ensemble Studio 6 have maintained a close artistic (and personal) relationship: Barrett has written several works for Zarić (including the harp and electronics duo tendril with which close-up begins); they perform together; and they co-run the digital label Strange Strings. The seeds for close-up were sown during Barrett’s first visit to Belgrade, when Studio 6 gave a performance of his collective improvisation work codex I (originally composed in 2001), and a plan emerged to incorporate this and a new work in the codex series, codex XII, into a larger work-cycle.

close-up follows other works in Barrett’s output of the 2010s – notably the hour-long life-form for cello and electronics, which I reviewed back in 2017 for Music and Literature (and which provided the inciting moment of my whole Schubert project) – in focusing on natural forms, structures of life, organically derived processes and relationships. I choose those words carefully: inspired by the natural world though close-up is, I mustn’t give the impression that Barrett’s music evokes, Messiaen-like, the sounds of nature itself. There is no birdsong here, no rustling of the wind, no washing of the tides.

Like Liza Lim, a composer with whom he shares (via the ELISION Ensemble) an extensive creative history, Barrett takes an analytical approach to nature. Straightforward imitation is of little value. (If you want to hear a lyrebird, you’re better off going to the zoo.) What is of value is how the processes of nature can inform musical practice; and, as musical practice in turn inform social practice. Barrett composes musical ecologies: landscapes of niches and needs, symbioses and cohabitation. To make a crude, but hopefully instructive analogy, this is one way in which his cycles of work operate: extracted from the cycle, a given piece can serve on its own, like a specimen; but returned to its ecological context it becomes more than this, a node within a network, whose presence impacts upon and is nourished by its setting.

Forests appear to be particular stimulating environments for Barrett. One of my favourite sections of life-form, and an image I return to over and over, is its third movement, arboreal, whose electronic track models the way in which rainforest species organise their calls so that they each operate in different parts of the sound frequency spectrum. As the cello cuts a path through this dense environment, the electronics adjust in real time to make ‘space’ for it within the overall sound. The electronics/rainforest comprise therefore a kind of global steady state; but one that also flexes and reorganises in response to an external stimulus, just as any natural environment will. The point of view established is therefore a complex one: one listens from the point of view of the cello, pursuing (almost indifferently) its heroic melodic path; but one also listens from the point of view of the forest, making way, adjusting, accommodating. This perspective changes how we hear the cello, which changes again how we hear the electronics … and so on. Life is not competition, but endlessly reconfiguring cooperation.

close-up takes us back to the woods. It emerges, says the composer, ‘from the multisensory image of passing through a forest, or some other richly biodiverse environment, and viewing it from many perspectives, from the smallest details to the whole; now an almost microscopic insect making its way across a translucent leaf, now an ancient tree whose summit is almost out of sight, all of this forming an unfathomably complex dynamic unity’. Part of what this means – in almost all Barrett’s music, not just here – is the creation of sonic environments or states, in which one can stay for a while, looking, exploring and getting lost. By no means is Barrett’s music minimal; but it shares with minimal music a spatial interest. But whereas we might say that the succession of rooms in, say, Music for 18 Musicians are architectural, empty, inviting the listener to fill them, the spaces in Barrett’s music are made out of the things that fill them, out of which one might infer a surrounding geometry. You see the trees first, and then infer from them a forest.

Four movements of the cycle point explicitly to different natural phenomena: tendril, pauk (‘spider’), nachtfalter (‘moths’) and šuma (‘forest’). The last of these is a further composite work, comprised of six solos (instar, calyx, cyme, spore, tegmen and epiphyte) for recorder, trumpet, harp, accordion, cello and electronics. While none is strictly representative, one can imagine the jagged, spiky movements of spiders in pauk’s staccato accordion and muted trumpet; the dusty, nocturnal fluttering of moths in nachtfalter’s trio of harp, cello and alto recorder; and of course the diversity of forest flora and fauna going about their business in šuma’s interwoven solos. tendril, though, seems most poetically evocative, the glissando sweeps of the harp – counterpointed by Barrett’s electronics – strongly suggesting the curling, probing growth of vines across the forest floor, perhaps even reaching into new spaces to root and found an entirely new arboreal system.

Between these, the two semi-improvised movements codex Ia and codex XIIa1 are more abstract in their relation to forest, but perhaps do most of the forest-performing, as it were. Where the named (and more full notated) movements point to specific phenomena, viewed in close up, the two codex movements introduce a global perspective: the ethical economy of interdependent life-forms, negotiating and co-habiting. If one wishes to continue the organic metaphors, the two codex movements represent kinds of less cultivated (but no less coherent) forms of organisation.

As ever with Barrett, there is a lot – almost too much – to get one’s teeth into. I find often that listening to his music is a three-stage process: there is a seductive surface, novel, interesting and exciting. Then there is the (over-)abundance of theoretical and metaphorical underpinnings, some of which I have touched on here; this phase is usually the most challenging and the most disorientating. But then, with a bit of persistence, one pushes past that and arrives at a new clarity. The theory doesn’t go away, but somehow the music takes over and makes the same point more clearly and more acutely. This stage really is worth the effort, but I won’t pretend it comes easily, or on a first listen. As I write this, with close-up I am mostly somewhere between stages one and two; I look forward to living with it longer and discovering those deeper depths that I know are in there.

1984: The Forward Process (Dropa Disc)

1984 (the Orwellian inference is deliberate) is Belgian guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe’s new trio with turntablist Mariam Rezaei and saxophonist Sakina Abdou. Readers from the old place will remember me raving about Van Cauwenberghe’s recording of Anthony Braxton septets a few years ago.

For this album, which features a mix of compositions by Van Cauwenberghe and the group, the trio take inspiration from a line in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic sci-fi novel, The Dispossessed. (Their track titles come from places, ideas and characters in the book, too.) On the desert planet of Annares, a composer introduces himself to the young physicist Shevek, whose life work is a new theorisation of space and time. ‘I’m writing a piece of chamber music’, says the composer.

Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony.

This image makes me think immediately of the ‘mobile’ (vs ‘tree’) conception of music I wrote about in PurLis 1:

For tree, think Ligeti, or Grisey: music that defines its terrain progressively over time, discovering and developing as it goes. For mobile, think Feldman or Reich: music that defines its terrain at once, making discoveries by progressively altering or rotating.

But this would be a mistake. The music 1984 make is nothing like that; or nothing like I would expect that to sound. It is considerably more fluid, much more surprising.

There is mobile-ness in it, of course, and an absence of melodic causality, at least overtly. But one does not have the sense of receiving everything at once; one always has the sense that there is more to be revealed – to players as much as to listeners. And so the music has a momentum: in the stepping out and joining in of parts, in the (?accidental) arrival of communal gestures. It contains a past – with turntables, how could it not? – and a future – in the exhalation of breath to pass across reed and out through a saxophone’s bell, how could it not? In between, Van Cauwenberghe’s guitar: instantaneous, present. What lingers in the memory is the movement of individuals, around and through each other; a creation and negotiation of time and space.

Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin: ITERAE (greyfade)

Prolific producer Joseph Branciforte founded the greyfade label in 2019 on the premise of ‘a music release as a complete conceptual universe, integrating sound, compositional architecture, visual design, and text into a single object worthy of sustained engagement’. Wearied (but persistently compelled) by the convenience and intangibility of streaming, this is a view I have a lot of respect for, even if I am not necessarily disciplined enough to fully participate in it in my professional or leisure time.

Such a philosophy is intended to resist the aesthetically deadening (and financially crippling) effects of virtualisation on the business of making and selling records of experimental music, but Branciforte is no Luddite. Greyfade’s aesthetic, encapusulated in the gorgeously crisp designs of its record sleeves, holds in tension both digital and analogue realms. Just look at this:

That tension spills over into the recordings themselves; in 2024, greyfade released Branciforte’s transcriptions of Kenneth Kirschner’s digitally composed July 7, 2017, played by cellist Christopher Gross. The release took the form of a hardback book (with QR codes inside to access the music), thus neatly straddling that same digital-analogue divide.

For ITERAE, Branciforte has worked with Belgian keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin for a series of improvised duos on a pair of Fender Rhodes pianos. If that makes you think of Herbie Hancock – The Wire’s Philip Watson had the same thought – you would be wide of the mark. Hooking their Rhodes up to an array of live processors and effects (as well as Branciforte’s custom live editing system), the pair produce a delicate, post-glitch music of the spaces between crackles and static; and the crackles and static between tones.

This is a really rich and compelling record. The glitch thing does carry noughties echoes of Fennesz, Pan Sonic, etc; but there is a distinctly human undercurrent here, a burbling, almost pastoral tenderness to some of the sounds. Branciforte and Dumoulin do not indulge in that fetishisation of technology that sometimes afflicts glitch music, but engage with their machines and circuits openly and playfully (note the occasional jazzy flourishes, when they let Rhodes be Rhodes). At the same time, there’s a darkly ambient quality that reminds me of klein’s sleep with a cane from last year, or even Space Afrika’s Honest Labour, two albums that really do capture the mood of the times. A lot of thoughts going on here; that Branciforte and Dumoulin allow them in, while keeping their music on a tight thematic leash (their album’s spirit of understatement is one of its strengths), is all to the good. Don’t miss this.

Words elsewhere

In addition to the interview mentioned above, in celebration of Kurtág’s centenary tomorrow, I’ve written some programme notes for this superb-looking concert with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Víkingur Ólafsson, featuring works by and around the Hungarian master …I’ve also put together chunky programme essay for the Aspen Music Festival and School, on recent American music … further programme notes for the LCO’s performance of scores by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson … and a short essay for Norient responding to this conversation with the Moroccan composer Ahmed Essyad.