NEVER MISS AN OXFORD SALE (SIGN UP HERE) |





	Programme Notes H - M


	Search the catalogue

Programme Notes H - M

The History of Photgraphy in Sound
In stiller Nacht
Kritik der Urteilskraft
Liturgy of St Paul
Mars + Venus
Molly-House

The History of Photography in Sound

I am about eight years old, standing in the darkroom at my father's office in County Hall. A countdown is in progress. A piece of paper is floating in the pungent-smelling liquid of the developing-tray. As the seconds tick by, an image begins to form on the paper. If extracted too quickly from the liquid this image will not be fully and clearly visible, if left too long it will be spoiled – obliterated by a relentlessly creeping chemical twilight. These moments have an urgency and mystery that I cannot locate in the too speedy, too limited, and appallingly irrevocable click of the shutter across the lens.

Fifty or so years on, and I am looking at the vacant paper on my desk. The clocks tick, my hand moves, sounds appear. Eye to 'eidos'.

Photographs have generally been most valued, or perhaps de-valued, as documentation. They are treated as memoranda, relics, anecdotes, supposedly objective evidence, emblematic of singular arrested moments in time. In most photography, unlike painting or drawing, the view is disconcertingly blinkered, directly ahead. Everything is completely still. The camera and its lens (its eye) do not move. This fixed-perspective immobility is haunting and unnatural. In writing music, both my ears, and their accompanying brain and hand, have to remain mobile, alive. Acknowledging the fluidity, movement and characteristics of sound, discovering and exploring, getting the hands dirty and relishing it. Not putting 'already musical' sounds on a pedestal, and admiring them from a safe or discreet distance. Teaching my inner ear to newly recognise and listen.

The ear is not a camera, nor is my music-writing hand neutrally mechanical. My title uses the word ‘photography’, and its plethora of associations, to convey a certain kind of musical material: documentary – snipped out from different periods in the past, and different locations across the world – a collection of exterior facts. These refugee facts are then situated, more or less provocatively, in the eventual composition. They are exchanged for, disrupted, and transformed by composing (imagining, transcribing, analytically mis-reading) into other facts. The whole piece is outlining a type of musical composition using the analogue of an idealised 'photography' instead of painting, sculpting, writing novels or poems. Although I have lifted phrases from Roland Barthes for the opening two sections of the work, my feeling is that the emphasis he places on implied or covert 'narratives' is excessively literary. Many other writers interpret photographs this way. One can, as in a still rarer than 'normal' cinema, witness a more fluid and active camera and non-figurative photography. In the wildly cavorting camcorder of some of Chris Newman's videos, in the weaving and dripping trails of light across Maarten Vanvolsem's panoramic photographs, in the 'joiners' and collages of David Hockney. Teaching our eyes to look more closely.

'History' in the title conveys 'remembered or invented past and present'; or 'a chronological continuum'; or 'the appearance and stylistic attributes of previous and current eras'. 'Sound' is the raw magma of music, before what Baudrillard calls 'obscene formulae' intrude.

The musical 'documents' (= photographs) or materials used in this piece are:

(i) A 'motivo fondamentale' – the plainsong Te Deum laudamus, or the Lutheran version harmonised by J.S.Bach, Herr Gott, dich loben wir (BWV 328). This is, in effect, a pitch reservoir, a grundgestalt (alternate minor thirds and whole tones). It functions as the Aristotelian unifying factor, subsuming the following 'variations'…
(ii) A reference to Wagner's Gotterdämmerung 2.i. Hagen's question "Der ewige Macht, wer erbte sie?" - a rhythmic and harmonic leitmotif including rhetorical silence. Offset by…
(iii) A reference to Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette Scene d'amour, a melodic and textural idée fixe. And then, more localised…
(iv) Short quotations from, or allusions to, canonical musical personalities: most prominently Beethoven and Busoni, also Alkan, Mozart, Paganini, Grieg, and…
(v) Short quotations from, or allusions to, musical genres: fugal (diatonic/harmonically directional or functional) counterpoint, minuets, 18th and 19th century hymnody, ragtime, 'exotic' or 'primitive' folkmusics (African and Black American, Sicilian, Inuit, Norwegian hardanger-fiddle etc.), popular dance-band music of the 1930s and 1940s.

The piece, lasting around five and a half hours, is divided into eleven sections. The fifth and ninth are quite short in duration (between 10 and 15 minutes), the eighth is long (between 75 and 80 minutes) the others average half an hour. The composition was begun in 1995 and completed in 2001. Ian Pace gave the first complete (recital) performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London, on 28th January 2001. The eleventh section of the cycle (first performed by Nicolas Hodges with slide projections by Ken Scott and Steyning Camera Club) was commissioned by Steyning Music Society. The Academic Board of the Royal Academy of Music generously supported the writing of the later stages of the composition (the Bachsche Nachdichtungen suggested by Carlo Grante, sections 9, 2 and finally 1). The History… was designed to be performed, in whole or part, either as a solo piano 'recital' or as an 'installation' with video, slides and film.

1. Le démon de l'analogie (for Carlo Grante)

2. Le réveil de l'intraitable réalité (for Marc Couroux)
(1) Analogy – (Copy) – Homology. "No sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something."
(2) Reality – (Image) – Illusion. "We translate…as if the universalised image were producing a world that is without difference."

3. North American Spirituals (for Marilyn Nonken)
Billings – Ives – Cowell – Nancarrow. Confronting Afro-American spiritual responses to slavery: Nobody knows the trouble I see; By and by; Go down, Moses; Steal away. Appropriated by Michael Tippett in A Child of our Time to signify the voices of defiance and hope everywhere and at any period of history.

4. My parents' generation thought War meant something (for my mother, April 1922-October 2000)
Six verses, each introduced by increasingly brief fragments of the opening bars of Debussy's Berceuse Héroïque, drawing on vernacular sources between Arthur Sullivan (his hymn-tune Gertrude (Onward Christian Soldiers), also more pervasively Whatever you are from the operetta Utopia Limited) and the Soviet song (by Blanter) Sacred War.

5. Alkan – Paganini (for, and commissioned by, Nicolas Hodges)
Virtuosic pan-demonium (another set of analogues to No.1). Jean qui rit – Alkan re-composes Mozart, Paganini's Capriccio Op.1 No.12, copied by Schumann (Op.10 No.1).

6. Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets (for Ian Pace)
The central axis of the cycle and the first section to be completed and performed. The title recalls various albums of Japanese classical writing – wakashu – assembled between the tenth and nineteenth centuries. The poets appear in reverse chronological order: Gregory Woods (born in 1953), then Mutsuo Takahashi, Thom Gunn, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Harold Norse, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Kirkup, Jean Genet, Stephen Spender, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ralph Chubb, Jean Cocteau, Konstantinos Kavafis, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds (born in 1840).

7. Eadweard Muybridge – Edvard Munch (for James Clapperton)
Balances and contradicts No.5. Abstract structuralism (scientific rationality) – Metaphysical expressionism (emotive irrationality).

8. Kapitalistisch Realisme (met Sizilianische Männerakte en Bachsche Nachdichtungen) (for Colin Symes)
Three Bs. (i) Beethoven (grundgestalt thirds in Op.67, Op.18 No.5, Op.10 No.1). (ii) Bach (Allein Gott in der Hoh' sei Ehr' BWV 717, 716, 662, 667). (iii) Busoni (retrograde of the Pezzo serioso from Op.39 with an overlay of Sicilian folktunes collected by Meyerbeer). Counterpart to No.4.

9. Wachtend op de volgende uitbarsting van repressie en censuur (for Andrew Infanti)
Opening almost identical to No.1. Thereafter the first half is loosely modelled on the Sarabande from Busoni's Doktor Faust (linked to material from No.8). The second half is a disordered atomising (censoring) of the first.

10. Unsere Afrikareise (for Dr. Franz Eckert)
Title from Peter Kubelka's film. Meditating on occidentalised 'African' materials (also finally from No.3). Most obviously Victor Masse's operatic version of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, and Felicien David's Le Désert. Sectionalised montage including 'ritornelli' (as No.2 but mostly less hectic).

11. Etched bright with sunlight (for Dr. Mark Signy)
Title from Derek Jarman's unfilmed project Sod 'em. Reiterations of previous material, bringing chaos into order (Adorno's 'minima moralia'). Opening with Bach (BWV 328), then Wagner, North African folk music (related to No.10) and an excerpt from Kavafis (in No.6), Berlioz,… eventually 'disappearing' in 'mid-sentence'.

In Stiller Nacht

In Stiller Nacht was written at the request of the Bekova sisters - 'in the manner of Brahms'. On the one hand, this might seem a simple matter - write what composers today are told audiences really want: the music of the nineteenth century with new names stuck on it. But on the other, considering what Brahms' manner is, one is tackling the question of how he treats his musical material, how (and not what) he composes, the music's procedures - not simply (recognition, enumeration, parody of) its surface characteristics. Most easily, one can observe the how of Brahms by analysing those works where the raw material is not his - the variations on Handel, Paganini, Schumann, and St Anthony's Chorale, his piano transcriptions, his cycle of German folksong arrangements, or - more generally - his affectation of the exotic (be it self-consciously classical or more exuberantly Hungarian gypsy) manner.

But this has to be a piece of my music too, not just a critical commentary on someone else: I'm that arrogant. So it is a nocturne. It alludes explicitly to Brahms' arrangement of the folksong In stiller Nacht. It begins rather in the manner of Eastern European folkmusic. It has a neo-classical chorale at the end. It subsumes the performers' virtuosity, rather than making ostentatious use of it (sorry, no flashy cadenzas, Brahms despised them). Its use of Brahms' manner is in inverted commas. Eventually - no more nor less than you - I can only be (creatively) what I am.

Kritik der Urteilskraft

The title is that of Immanuel Kant’s ‘critique’ (of judgement) from 1790, in which he distinguishes between the following:

(i) that which is ‘pleasing’ based on desire resulting from titillation of the senses;
(ii) that which is simply (disinterestedly and aloofly) ‘beautiful’ and characterised by formal efficiency;
(iii) that which is ‘good’, or forming a guiding principle for human behaviour.

“From the very outset esthetics introduced an equilibrium into a one-sided rationalistic philosophy which viewed sense perception as nothing more than a means of arriving at intelligibility.” - Mark Delaere

Liturgy of St Paul

The Liturgy of St Paul takes its overall shape from the regular eucharistic service at St Paul's Church, West Street, Brighton. It contains both the 'ordinary' of the Mass (Kyrie-Gloria-Sanctus and Benedictus-Agnus Dei; in Latin) and the 'propers' (Introit, readings and post-communion motet; in Greek). The propers relate the Story of Saint Paul's conversion to Christianity and his martyrdom in its cause, rather than following the established church calendar. I have omitted those parts of the service which are communal (the hymns, the creed, prayers and blessings, communion itself).

The work draws on plainsong ('Damasci praepositus gentis Aretae regis' the Antiphon at 2nd Vespers for the Feast of St Paul's Conversion - 25th January), and the compositional techniques associated with it: cantus firmus, heterophonic elaboration, cyclic repetition, incantation (un-naturalistic, magical, intentionally mysterious and even 'impenetrable' types of declamation) and is designed as a continuous (unbroken) ritual 'act of devotion' lasting about thirty minutes, and - ideally - performed by candlelight, in a richly spacious acoustic. It was commissioned by the Hilliard Ensemble with funds provided by the Arts Council of England, and was composed between 1992 and 1995.

Mars + Venus

Mars and Venus. The coupling of opposites. Forces of love and war, femininity and masculinity, within each of us. This piece is not a commentary of Rubens' painting - I appropriated the title because of its emblematic quality, and I have copied what I think of as 'lack of rhetoric'. In the painting (given the 'heroine' subject matter), so the rather ordinary looking bloke (Mars the god and symbol of war) and his lady friend (Venus the goddess and symbol of love). So looking at ourselves, we are love and war, unexaggerated subject matter in an inconclusive and unpredictable scenario.

Molly-House

Molly-House was commissioned by C.O.M.A. as part of their 'open-score' project. It is an 'assemblage', having no particular order for its set of freely juxtaposed parts. Some of these parts are soloistic, and conventionally notated (nineteen 'arias' derived from four operas by Handel). Others are ensembles (trios and quartets) with various degrees of pitch specificity, or indeterminate 'solos'. Some (containing lists of numbers) are for electronic gadgets (hairdryers, mixers, drills, vacuum-cleaners, vibrators etc). The proposal is for a potential 'community' in which any smallish number of players (with differing levels of expertise) could creatively co-exist: a house with an unpredictable number of co-operative occupants. The first arias to be completed - on a winter's holiday in Norfolk - were dedicated to Molly Money (on her eightieth birthday), later ones were written for Andrew Potter, Ellie Blackshaw and Suzanne Aspden - Suzanne's expertise had provoked the Handelian content from the start, and eventually also suggested the title.

A molly-house was (18th century) a house of pleasure and fantasy, inverting (altering, substituting, transforming) the external world, and making (almost) anything possible. Mollies - then as now - thrived on being adaptable.

programme notes a - g | h - m | programme notes n - s | programme notes t - z