Download Booklet

SAM HAYDEN FREE DOWNLOAD from our online store Sam Hayden Die Abkehr 11’07 Ensemble Musikfabrik • Stefan Asbury conductor Helen Bledsoe fl ute/piccolo/alto fl ute · Peter Veale oboe/cor anglais Richard Haynes contrabass clarinet · Rike Huy trumpet/piccolo trumpet Bruce Collings trombone · Benjamin Kobler piano · Dirk Rothbrust percussion Hannah Weirich violin · Axel Porath viola · Dirk Wietheger cello Håkon Thelin double bass Enter code: HAYDEN247 nmcrec.co.uk/recording/dieabkehr Die Abkehr (Turning Away) is the most recent drive or melodic elegance of a particular part one composition presented here. As Hayden explains, moment, to the dialogic interplay between different ‘[t]he more poetic meanings of the title hint at a instruments the next and the more complex and critical commentary on the increasingly nostalgic diffuse surface of the totality at another time. What and inward-looking culture of the UK’. Abkehr also remains tantalisingly out of reach is an appreciation means ‘renunciation’, and to what extent that title of the whole and its constituent parts at the same time. is expressed more specifi cally in the piece, over and Again like earlier works, Die Abkehr is highly above being embodied by a musical language that episodic: there are three movements, each seems out of step with what the composer sees as consisting of a number of short individual sections the dominant trends in the UK and that is largely each exploring a particularly type of material. If shared with the rest of his oeuvre is hard to say. As anything, however, Hayden appears to have grown the composer also states, the composition ‘is the bolder in his use of the general pause: time and latest of a cycle of pieces that combine ideas related again, the music recedes into silence, before to “spectral” traditions with algorithmic approaches starting afresh. This may be partly a property of this to composition, where aspects of the pitch and particular performance: the score contains many rhythmical materials are computer-generated using fermatas, measured and unmeasured ones, with SUBSTRATUM IRCAM’s OpenMusic.’ Considering this approach, precious little indication of how to perform them: the level of continuity with Hayden’s previous only those at the end of the second movement and work may come as a surprise. The subtle dialectic the very end are a whole bar long and the latter is between individual line and collective totality given the further indication lunga pausa. But the that is characteristic of most of Hayden’s mature similarity to Transience, which too falls silent time compositions, is, if anything, more developed here. and again, suggests that this is no coincidental As listeners, we may be drawn to the rhythmic aspect. Heile Björn © 2019 2 SAM HAYDEN SUBSTRATUM 1 Relative Autonomy 13’50 Ensemble Musikfabrik • Stefan Asbury conductor Helen Bledsoe fl ute/piccolo/alto fl ute · Peter Veale oboe/cor anglais · Michele Marelli e-fl at/b-fl at clarinets Richard Haynes contrabass/bass clarinets · Elise Jacoberger contrabassoon/bassoon · Rike Huy trumpet/piccolo trumpet Rune Brodahl horn · Bruce Collings bass trombone · Melvyn Poore tuba · Jürgen Kruse piano · Dirk Rothbrust percussion Hannah Weirich violin 1 · Diamanda Dramm violin 2 · Axel Porath viola · Dirk Wietheger cello · Håkon Thelin double bass Transience 2 I 5’12 3 II 4’28 4 III 4’12 5 IV 4’28 6 V 3’46 7 VI 3’55 8 VII 5’29 Quatour Diotima Yun-Peng Zhao violin 1 · Constance Ronzatti violin 2 · Franck Chevalier viola · Pierre Morlet cello 9 Substratum 24’49 BBC Symphony Orchestra • David Robertson conductor Total timing 70’27 Please see p. 12 for information on how to download the free bonus track Die Abkehr. photo © Charles Linehan 3 Gestural Music Hayden would have looked to Harvey’s quartets employed that sets the work apart, even in a ‘pure’, lyrical playing seems to obscure both the for inspiration. twenty-fi rst-century context. What is perhaps instrument and its player: they become pitch. The centrepiece of this album is formed by a most characteristic of Hayden’s approach By contrast, it is the often forced, strained or substantial string quartet in seven movements Harvey’s string quartets are renowned for in this work and many others is that pitch is suppressed quality of many of the sounds in and of about half an hour in length. To anyone reinventing the ensemble, using his experience never abandoned in favour of noise, but it is, Hayden’s work that allows us to perceive the who knows Sam Hayden and his music, the with electronic music to imagine entire new depending on the occasion and one’s own instruments and the players: horse hair on seemingly traditional genre may come as sound worlds for the instruments. As the perception, enriched, sharpened or in danger of string, the wood of the instrument vibrating, a surprise from a composer who is deeply quotation above indicated, Hayden could be being submerged by it. There are very few ‘pure’ practised hands clenching the bow, the tension committed to the promise of innovation said to pick up where Harvey left off: there is sounds; most are, variously, scrapy, scratchy, of the player’s body released in a downstroke, inherent in the modernist project. Yet, not hardly a note in the entire quartet that is bowed grainy and hoarse or tender, soft and whistling. the minute adjustments of the fi nger on the least due to the commissioning of new work ‘ordinario’. Techniques such as ‘col legno’ The composition revolves around this tension string to produce the softest of harmonics … by leading ensembles, the string quartet has (playing with the wood of the bow creating a between pure pitch on the one hand and pure What both violent and tender gestures have gained a tradition in new music that rivals scraping, grainy sound), ‘sul ponticello’ (playing noise on the other as well as the exploitation of in common is that they evoke an embodied near the bridge, resulting in a faint, whispery its classical and romantic legacy. One may the whole spectrum in between those poles. response. This music does not only engage sound) and ‘sul tasto’ (bowing on the fi nger still detect a suspicion of genre traditions in our ears and minds, but our bodies too: it is board, producing a soft, fl ute-like sound) are the The result is a particularly bodily conception the choice of a specifi c title,Transience for visceral, sensuous. norm rather than the exception, and a host of of musical material. In a celebrated essay, String Quartet, over a genre title, although the others are used, often in combination. Perhaps the French poststructural literary theorist and This physicality is also apparent in the gestural instrumentation is mentioned. As the composer the most characteristic in the quartet are philosopher Roland Barthes wrote about the nature of the musical language ; ‘gesture’ here explains in a commentary, the ‘“transient” [is] glissandi (gliding on the strings) and harmonics ‘grain of the voice’, which he defi ned as ‘the has to be understood both literally, in the sense the short lived noisy part of the beginning of a (soft, ‘whistling’ overtones when strings are body in the voice as it sings’. This notion is of the movements performed by the musicians, sound associated with its attack, before a clear not fully depressed) as well as microtones. The more complicated than is often assumed, but and metaphorically, in the sense of clear frequency has come into being, a phenomenon conventional idea of a lyrical string sound can what Barthes is drawing attention to is how expressive musical shapes. As the composer that was important to the conception of only be glimpsed at rare moments. lyrical singing in a ‘pure’ voice (the example states, ‘[t]he piece oscillates constantly the material’. Another important clue is the he gives is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) seems between dense, energetic, hyper-virtuosic dedication ‘to Jonathan Harvey, my teacher, At the same time, however, the defamiliarization to rob the voice of its materiality and physical gestural materials and moments of relative mentor and friend’. Harvey died in 2012; the of the string sound is not an end in itself, and it nature whereas voices ‘with grain’ (he names clarity, sustain and stasis (or intermediate score is dated 2013-14, although that may not is instructive that Hayden does not appear to go Charles Panzéra, who was a major fi gure in his states), but never settling one way or the other.’ cover the entire gestation period. Harvey wrote beyond what are by now fairly well-established own age but whose reputation has otherwise Complex though the texture often appears, a distinguished cycle of four string quartets (the playing techniques and makes no obvious somewhat faded) allow us to hear ‘the tongue, these gestures have a direct force, usually last of which with electronics) over the course attempt to invent entirely new ones. It is the the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, expressed in easily perceptible contours: of his career, and it seems reasonable that consistency with which these techniques are the nose’. Similarly, in instrumental playing, the highly episodic form is characterised by 64 75 sections in upward, downward or wave-like Ensemble’. What keeps the listener from being by very dense, busy textures, and these too a large orchestra. Moreover, not all instruments movement, but rarely complex combinations or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material are structured vertically through the layering allow such a nuanced modifi cation of sustained successions thereof. Note, for instance, how is the layering of the ensemble: there is a heavy of the orchestra and horizontally through notes as strings.

Load more