Chanson à cordes (2023)

Commande du festival Aspects 2024

Instrumentation: viola and cello duo
Duration: c. 20’
First performance: 24 March 2024, by students of Conservatoire & Orchestre de Caen, France

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Chanson à Cordes is a collection of 8 duos based on traditional songs from the Normandy region of France as collected in the online resource base du patrimoine oral de Normandie (http://normandie.patrimoine-oral.org).  They cover the familiar topics of folk music: love, loss, nature and the supernatural.  They can be played individually or as a set, and are a response to an invitation from the Conservatoire de Caen to write string duos accessible to students at the conservatoire.

These duos extend the principles of my earlier collection Òran Fìdhle / Violin Song (2021-22), derived from traditional Gaelic song, which itself followed the model of Bartók’s 44 Duos for 2 Violins (1931).  To an even greater extent than Òran Fìdhle, with Chanson à Cordes I must acknowledge a distance from the source material, geographically and musically.  Although as a teenager I was an active performer of folk and related musics, this was in the Scottish / Celtic traditions, not those of France.  The commission from the Conservatoire de Caen offered me an ideal opportunity to immerse myself for a time in the folk music of a different, though related, culture.

Nevertheless, because it is not ‘my’ music, I want to make the distance clear: these are not arrangements or recreations such as a folk musician might legitimately make, but rather new pieces of ‘contemporary classical’ music written by way of the Normandy originals.  These duos are therefore resolutely not folk music, even though they come from folk music.  A double translation takes place: from vocal to instrumental music and from work-song to concert-piece.  My approach to respecting the integrity of the source is to harness the difference that these translations necessarily entail: freedoms (and expectations) in timbre and harmony and structure that aren’t necessarily available in the home tradition.  It is therefore important that my duos amplify their source rather than erase it, and so each piece has the URL of its audio in the base du patrimoine de Normandie archive printed alongside.  Although these are traditional songs, the starting point for my compositions are the specific performances by the specific people acknowledged on each page.

Photo by Gautier Salles on Unsplash

Òran Fìdhle (Violin Song) (2021-22)

Instrumentation: two violins (or two violas, or violin and cello)
Duration: c.18’

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Òran Fìdhle / Violin Song is a collection of 21 short duos based on the rich repertory of traditional Gaelic song accessible through the online resource Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o’ Riches (https://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk). Following the model of Bartók’s 44 Duos for 2 Violins (1931), they are presented roughly progressively and can be performed in in any order or combination.

I started writing these as fun things to play with my young daughter, on the one hand as ways to indulge her fondness for interesting timbres and ‘extended’ techniques, on the other as a way for her to encounter her Scottish heritage, albeit from something of a distance, geographically and musically. The distance is important: like the Bartók, these duos are resolutely not folk music, even though they come from folk music.

The songs from which these duos derive are mainly waulking songs: Gaelic verse traditionally sung as a way of passing the time while working cloth on the islands. It’s not my tradition: although Scottish I am not a Gaelic speaker, and while I played in a lot of ceilidh bands in my youth that was very much an instrumental, dance-based (and city-oriented) activity. It is, however, my heritage; and not just by dint of nationality but also by love of music and song and storytelling.

Because it is not ‘my’ music, I want to make the distance clear: these are not arrangements or recreations such as a folk musician might legitimately make, but rather new pieces of ‘contemporary classical’ music written by way of the Gaelic originals. A double translation takes place: from vocal to instrumental music and from work-song to concert-piece. My approach to respecting the integrity of the source is to harness the difference that these translations necessarily entail: freedoms (and expectations) in timbre and harmony and structure that aren’t necessarily available in the home tradition. It is therefore important that my duos amplify their source rather than erase it, and so each piece has the URL of its audio in the Tobar and Dualchais archive printed alongside. Although these are (with one exception) traditional songs, the starting point for my compositions are the specific performances by the specific people acknowledged on each page.

There is a basic principle of equality between the two parts, but in general the top part is a little more straightforward, and numbers 1-13 can all be played entirely in first position. Explanations of unusual techniques and notes on each piece can be found at the end of the score.

Thanks to Mary Ann Kennedy for help with the Gaelic and the English translations, and to Eleanor Suckling for trying out early versions of many of the duos.

Etude: 'Orrery' (2021)

Commissioned by Luxembourg Philharmonie for Tamara Stefanovich

Instrumentation: piano solo
Duration: c. 3’
First performance: Tamara Stefanovich (piano), at Luxembourg Philharmonie, 20 January 2021

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Etude: ‘Orrery’

Models of the movement of celestial bodies have long served as the basis for musical explorations, and vice-versa.  The Pythagorean tradition of the Harmony of the Spheres, in which planetary orbits, human emotions and the practice of music are all connected through sounding number is well-known, though I make no claim for the occult efficacy of this little etude! Rather, the orrery – a clockwork model of the solar system demonstrating the changing orbits of planets around the sun – is simply a useful way of visualising the musical situation: a series of more or less imperfect ‘clockwork’ mechanisms rotating harmonies around a central point. Each pitch-satellite has its own orbital period and the changing rhythmic patterns thus generated result in the emergence of hidden melodies; sometimes the mechanism catches and a particular pattern gets stuck in a loop.

The harmonies are all derived from a cipher of the dedicatee’s name: T(e)-A-M(i)-A(#)-R(e)-A(b) – this, along with the mention of ‘hidden melodies’ perhaps suggest occultism is not as far away as I might wish to maintain. . .

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Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

these bones, this flesh, this skin (2020)

Commissioned by Scottish Ensemble

Instrumentation: Solo violin (multi-tracked and processed) with dancer and film
Duration: 21 x 4.5’ films

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Developed in collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and Scottish Dance Theatre, these bones, this flesh, this skin is a digital work for solo violin and solo dancer by composer Martin Suckling, choreographer Joan Clevillé and cinematographer Genevieve Reeves. Through a bespoke online platform, the audience is invited to combine different audio and visual layers to decide how they want to experience the work in multiple iterations.

Born out of a unique period in our lives, the piece explores how heightened attention can reveal different experiences of time in our bodies and the environment around us. This layering of simplicity and complexity also manifests in the way that you are invited to make decisions. With every new iteration you can discover new perspectives, new nuances waiting for you in the spaces in between music, cinematography and dance, between the traces of our own memories and the aliveness of our attention.

View online: http://www.thesebonesthisfleshthisskin.com/

Image: still from film by Genevieve Reeves

Her Lullaby (2019)

Written for the Royal Academy of Music, in celebration of their 200th anniversary

Instrumentation: viola solo
Duration: c.14’
First performance: TBC

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Her Lullaby

For several years, every night I would sing to my young children, sometimes for hours. Folksongs, songs made up on the spot, verse after verse, anything that could maintain a calm continuity of circling sound. (So many folksong plots are not the stuff of good night tenderness, but I sang them anyway.)

And then the children didn’t need the songs any more. Which was in many ways a relief, but really I miss that calm timeless space of song gentling the night. The deep listening required of the solo performer in Her Lullaby – pitching the justly-tuned intervals, allowing the the harmonies to fuse in the body of the instrument, finding the right durations for each sound – alongside the strophe-by-strophe near-improvised extension of the melody recall for me those special times I spent with my children when they were very young, singing them across the border from wakefulness to sleep.

Photo by Gabriel on Unsplash

The Tuning (2019)

Commissioned by the Oxford Lieder Festival

Instrumentation: Mezzo-soprano and piano
Duration: c.20’
First performance: Marta Fontanals-Simmons (mezzo) and Chris Glynn (piano), at St. John the Evangelist, Oxford, 19 October 2019

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The Tuning – five Donaghy songs

The musicality of Michael Donaghy’s poetry is often remarked upon, and perhaps this is what drew me to his texts – a musicality that is more than just pervasive lyricism, one that extends to his precision of gesture and cadence and a delight in the union of formal elegance with expressive heft.  But I think what I love is the magic, and with it the making-strange, whether of poem-as-spell or of a seemingly quotidian observation. The magic holds me.

The five poems in this set are selected from across Donaghy’s output and are unrelated, though ‘Tears’ and ‘The River in Spate’ are placed next to each other in his third collection, Conjure. They are not intended to present a coherent narrative, nor are they a cycle – though the music offers cyclic elements, and a narrative could be constructed if desired. I chose them because I could hear them sung as I read them, and – with the exception of The Tuning, whose exposition-heavy text required a different approach – I set them as songs: simple, often strophic vocal lines and a piano part focusing on a single figuration, as in classic Lieder.

After an extended introduction, ‘The Present’ places cycling pairs of vocal phrases against ever-expanding piano descents. ‘The River in Spate’ and ‘Tears’ both offer types of musical near-suspended animation. In ‘The Tuning’ the piano takes the melodic lead, sinuous counterpoint enveloping the narrator’s arioso. ‘Two Spells for Sleeping’ practices a hypnotism of unceasing pulsation and not-quite-repeating loops.

image credit: Mikkel Frimer Rasmussen / Unsplash

Emily's Electrical Absence (2017)

Commissioned by Aurora Orchestra and Poet in the City supported by Bio Nano Consulting for the dissemination of PETMEM (piezoelectronic Transduction Memory Device), an EU Horizon 2020-funded project exploring low-voltage memory technologies

Instrumentation: String Quintet for 2 violins, viola and 2 cellos
Duration: 25'
First performance of mvt IV: 15 October 2017. Aurora Orchestra Soloists, Wellcome Collection, London.
First complete performance: 12 January 2018. Aurora Orchestra Soloists, King's Place, London.

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String Quintet, Emily's Electrical Absence

Among the many fascinating aspects of the PETMEM (Piezoeletric Transduction Memory device) project that frequently arose in conversations between Frances and myself were the strange otherworldly landscapes revealed under the scanning electron microscope, and the piezoresistive effect, where a material under sufficiently high pressure changes state from a resistor to a conductor of electricity.

There are many ways in which the idea of pressure can be translated into music – squeezing material into shorter and shorter timeframes, squashing the pitch space around a given note, increasing the density of activity – and all of these have a role to play throughout my quintet.  Scanning electron microscopy has its parallel in the microtonal landscapes of two of the quintet movements, and the technique of delving inside complex sounds to find hidden harmonic structures.  Memory is the other starting point: memories of other composers, memories of musical material within the quintet, memories of Frances’ poems and her inspiration, Emily Dickinson.

The first movement is a highly energetic dance with a bass line that is squeezed until it breaks off into a sequence of fortissimo hammered triads.  The second movement, following on from Frances’ paired lines in White Box, presents pairs of microtonal harmonies, all in harmonics, held in a floating stasis.  In the third movement, the quintet ‘speaks’ a Dickinson poem, After great pain…, their rhythm and contour taken from an audio analysis of my own voice reading the poem.

In the final movement, a viola melody is surrounded by a filigree tapestry of echoes and fragments and distorting mirrors across a series of compressions until all that remains of the available space is a single trill.  At this point of extreme pressure, the properties of the material suddenly change: bright, gleaming, sudden bursts of sound in a highly microtonal environment. 

All of this is haunted by the ghost of Schubert, above all the incomparable Adagio from his String Quintet in C major.  A memory of this music, perhaps my favourite piece by my favourite composer, increasingly asserts itself on the musical surface until the final passages become as if hypnotised by Schubert’s harmonies, crystallising around them like frost on a fallen leaf.

Visiones (after Goya) (2015)

Instrumentation: clarinet (or violin), cello, piano
Duration: 13'
First performance: 20 June 2015: Mark Simpson (clarinet), Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello), Tamara Stefanovich (piano); Aldeburgh Festival, Britten Studio, Snape.

Commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival

perusal score 

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Visiones (after Goya)

On page 10 of the Goya sketchbook generally known as the Witches and Old Women album, there is an image captioned by a single word: 'Visiones'. An elderly couple dance, apparently suspended midair in an awkward embrace: his attention seems elsewhere; she may be picking his pocket. The pen-strokes are few, and the ink and wash technique makes the image seem as though momentarily conjured out of smoke. But without a doubt they are dancing, this strange couple, ready to step off the page, so alive is the penmanship. Peeking out from behind a fold of the lady's skirt or the man's cloak is a grinning face, all sunken eyes and wrinkled skin, laughing at – what? The dancers, the viewer, the world?

As I drew together materials for this clarinet trio, Goya's vision haunted my dreams. It's not the piece but it drew the piece into its orbit: three odd characters, bound together in dance. There is a kind of beauty there, I think, and elegance, and poise, and some sweet melancholy. But also obsession and violence and no way out. As I shaped the piece, these ideas shaped my thinking.

There are three sections:

#1: Cello and clarinet circle each other in repeated microtonal lyrics, while the piano, completely separate, taps out ecstatic pirouettes in the extreme upper register.

#2: A fragment of the lyric figure becomes something approaching a lullaby; the three instruments combine to create a single expanding harmonic texture, which, increasingly mechanical, gets stuck in irregular loops. The process repeats. Then repeats again.

#3: A distorted memory of what has gone before. The piano is now the melodic lead; the cello a crazed, fragmentary virtuoso, unable to find a 'pure' tone; the clarinet restricted to a simple pattern of soft multiphonics. The spinning dance intrudes, then overwhelms.

Songs from a Bright September (2014)

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Nocturne (2013)

Commissioned by Aldeburgh Music for Faster than Sound

Instrumentation: violin and cello
Duration: 9'
First performance: 18 May 2013. Pekka Kuusisto (violin) and Peter Gregson (cello), Britten Studio, Snape Maltings, Snape.

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Nocturne

In this short piece of night-music, two materials alternate: a microtonally-inflected lullaby on the one hand and a shadow world of loops and dances on the other.  Throughout, violin and cello are fused together as a single instrument, the violin projecting an imagined resonance of the cello.  As each verse passes, this resonance becomes richer and more complex, until eventually the violin escapes into a kind of birdsong.  Despite their now contrasting songs, the two instruments remain bound together until the end, the cello repeating a simplified version of the lullaby melody, while the violin circles overhead.

Lieder ohne Worte (2010)

Commissioned by John Reid with generous support from the RVW Trust.

Instrumentation: Piano solo
Duration: 10'
First Performance: 19 September 2010. John Reid (with Nicholas Mulroy, tenor).

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Lieder ohne Worte

I. Der Dichter, als Prolog
II. Mein?!
III. ...mein Herz ist zu voll

These three short piano pieces are reflections on Schubert's cycle. In their way, they are songs too: the first, a recitation; the second, port-a-beul (dancing nonsense rhymes); the third a long lyrical aria.

Der Dichter, als Prolog borrows its title from the first of Müller's Die schöne Müllerin poems (which Schubert chose not to set). Like Müller's text, it presents an external speaker introducing the world of the song cycle, the forest, the brook, and distant horn calls.

The second piece continues directly from the triumphant Mein!, the over-exuberant repetition of key phrases from this song perhaps suggesting that the miller's cry, "die geliebte Mullerin ist mein! ist mein!" is more a delusional demand than a celebratory acknowledgement.

In Pause, the tenor sings “Ich kann nicht mehr singen, mein Herz ist zu voll” (I can sing no more, my heart is too full). The third piano solo, which follows immediately, takes this line as its basis: the idea of a heart filling with song to the point of overflowing.

Lieder ohne Worte are dedicated with great affection to John Reid, and their commission was generously supported by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust.

To See the Dark Between (2010)

Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Wigmore Hall

Instrumentation: piano, 2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos
Duration: 10'
First performance: 9 May 2010, Wigmore Hall, London: Aronowitz Ensemble

Three Venus Haiku (2009)

Commissioned by Oliver Coates.

Instrumentation: Cello and Piano
Duration: 5'
First Performance: 8 March 2009. Oliver Coates (cello) and Daniel Driver (piano) in the Wigmore Hall, London

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Let it be nameless
It is beyond the touch
of utterance and life

II.

She runs and runs.
In all the long years
never has she carried such sunshine

III.

Saftly, saftly lichts
the morning star. The black
abyss will nae oot it

(From Through the Letterbox: Haikus by George Bruce, Renaissance Press. Reprinted with permission.)

Three short pieces: a musical response to the poetry of George Bruce, the last surviving poet of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, who would have been 100 this year.

I. Piano and cello fused together as a single instrument, singing from a great distance.

II. Inside a beam of light.

III. A never-ending lullaby.