NMC232-Flux New Music Booklet Itunes.Indd
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new music · new dance Gavin Higgins Atomic Café Mark Bowden Airs No Oceans Keep Cheryl Frances-Hoad The Madness Industry Kate Whitley Duo for Violin and Viola Quinta Themistocles is Captured Flux 1 Gavin Higgins Atomic Café 11’16 Rambert Orchestra · Paul Hoskins conductor 2 Mark Bowden Airs No Oceans Keep 14’28 Fidelio Trio 3 Cheryl Frances-Hoad The Madness Industry 9’36 Onyx Brass 4 Kate Whitley Duo for Violin and Viola 11’04 Eloisa-Fleur Thom violin · Asher Zaccardelli viola Quinta Themistocles is Captured 5 I A Ship for Asia Minor 3’14 6 II I have with me two Gods 2’08 7 III The Likely and the Rich 3’27 Quinta violin, magnetic resonator piano, electronics Total timing: 55’46 photo © Johan Persson Introduction from Paul Hoskins Rambert Music Director When I thought up the idea of a Rambert Music Fellowship in 2009, I had nothing more than a hunch that Rambert could be an interesting and inspiring place for a composer to be for a year. Since then, the fi ve composers featured on this album have helped to make the fellowship what it is today: a scheme widely admired for the way it supports new music and new dance, and facilitates connections between artists in different fi elds. Mini-residencies and associated projects have also proliferated under Rambert’s fellowship umbrella. Dozens of brilliant ideas have been brought in through the doors of our studios, collided with the people there, and allowed to bubble away. Some of the results have disappeared into the ether, some have had short lives in studio performances, others have been immortalised in established dance works or musical scores and recordings. Collaboration is a diffi cult thing in any walk of life, and it can take many forms. Things that can infl uence the process include the personality of the participants, the scale and context of the project, and past experience. Good teams usually include people who have both strong ideas and the confi dence to listen to others. Composers, choreographers, dancers and musicians all benefi t from being given time and support to develop their practice and to mature. As organisations we can similarly improve our ability to commission work effectively, if we have the confi dence to be patient, develop long-term relationships, and work alongside composers throughout their careers. Enjoy the range of work on display here, and please feel welcome to dance in response. 3 Note by Jenny Gilbert It may be necessary to clear up some hands. One of those versions stuck, misconceptions about music for dance. and Frederick Ashton’s La Valse (‘The For a start, there’s nothing very special Waltz’) – set to the very music rejected about it. One person writes some music, by Diaghilev, with not a note changed – another some choreography, and these is still some 70 years later performed activities may happen simultaneously around the world. or months or even years apart. There Is some music especially danceable may be a great deal of discussion and other music less so? The story (‘collaboration’) between creatives of La Valse would suggest that (with the set designer in on it too), or perceived suitability is more a matter of there may be very little. It was Serge temperament, fashion and expectation. Diaghilev, the business brains behind the Nor does a dance score need to have a phenomenal Ballets Russes company strong rhythmic drive (though many do). some 100 years ago, who fi rst hit on What is crucial, most choreographers the idea of bringing together upcoming would agree, is that the music should music talents with the choreographers possess an interesting and distinct of short ballets. A young unknown by character, whatever that character may the name of Igor Stravinsky was one of be. The compositions on this disc are his discoveries. He wasn’t unknown for very different one from another, they are much longer. written for different forces, they sprang from different points of inspiration. What Not all Diaghilev’s hunches hit the spot, they share is an abundance of character, though. He commissioned an orchestral and a commitment to excellence on the piece from a Frenchman named Maurice part of each composer. Ravel and pronounced it “undanceable”. Some years later that score was picked It was on a visit to Manchester’s up and re-choreographed by various Imperial War Museum that composer 4 Gavin Higgins found the germ of note chord. From this chord emerges his inspiration for Atomic Café. On much of the material in the piece, and display were a number of British Civil the insistent buzz of clashing semitones Defence public information videos throughout suggests a landscape of from the 1970s giving practical, yet in treeless desolation. all likelihood quite useless, advice on Although writing for a smallish ensemble, surviving a nuclear attack. Researching pitch and dynamics are pushed to the topic further, Higgins came upon the 1982 documentary fi lm The Atomic the limits, demanding considerable Café, a blackly comic compilation of virtuosity, not least from the horn player similarly misleading American archive who is required to execute swooping material from the 1940s, 50s and early demisemiquaver runs, marked each 60s. Typically, a US Army training fi lm time with the instruction “fff blazing”. declares: “Viewed from a safe distance Elsewhere, contrabassoon and bass [sic], the atomic bomb is one of the clarinet are pushed to their most gravelly most beautiful sights ever seen by man”. register with violent eruptions marked Higgins now had his theme, and its “ff honky”. The work ends with a return sardonic tone. to the material of the opening bars and fi nishes in a haze of glassy string Thus Atomic Café is a work that harmonics. explores both the horror of nuclear Armageddon and the tragi-comedy Mark Bowden wrote Airs No Oceans of the complacency surrounding the Keep, for piano, violin and cello, in 2009. prospect of it. The piece opens with “When writing a string quartet,” he says, a long-held unison D that gradually you’re working with a homogenous blurs into its neighbouring semitones, soundworld, one where the instruments eventually unravelling into a pulsing fi ve- blend with or at least balance each other. 5 A piano trio is quite a different beast. create his material from this severely Dynamics, texture, ensuring that each restricted number of notes. voice has its own space, its own light, all Representing the sea, sudden crashes demand consideration.” and melodic fl urries whip up a three- His starting point was Emily Dickinson’s part storm. Between these colouristic poem ‘I Think that the Root of the Wind extremes the musical material surges is Water’. Within a few lines, the poet as if riding an ocean swell – sometimes considers the elements and refl ects rippling, free and calm, at other times on the sound of the wind: ‘It would not tumultuous and climactic. Fragments of sound so deep / Were it a fi rmamental sea shanty and fi shermen’s song offer product … There is a maritime conviction glimpses of human life at sea. There are / In the atmosphere’. no quotations as such, merely suggestive folk elements and a kind of dancing The composer set himself the task of energy. exploring oceanic weather, contrasting and blending airy sounds with those In contrast, Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s The suggesting a body of water, chasing Madness Industry resists the impulse the elusive point where one ends and to tell a story. The piece was inspired the other begins. A through-composed by Jon Ronson’s best-selling book The work in contrasting sections, it contains Psychopath Test, in which the author two dominant musical ideas. The light meets and talks to psychopaths and the and airy element is summoned by the professionals who diagnose them, and use of natural string harmonics – fl uting, suggests how to spot a psychopath from ethereal sounds produced by the player a bullet-point checklist. The tone of the lightly bowing an unstopped string at book is humorous but it asks serious specifi c points along its length. Since questions about how we defi ne normality only certain notes are available as in a world where slight eccentricity is natural harmonics on the violin and cello, seen as an entertaining asset – in reality Bowden’s greatest challenge was to TV, for example. 6 Frances-Hoad’s piece for brass quintet The pair’s inspiration was a sculpture (two trumpets, horn, trombone and called ‘Wrestlers’, by Henri Gaudier tuba) is not programmatic, but instead Brzeska, in which two fi gures are applies some of the characteristics of interlocked. Their “wrestle” could almost the typical psychopath to the process of be a dance, their pose striking a balance composition. Harmony is “manipulated”, between force and elegance and it’s not chords gradually transformed; calm easy to tell whether they are fi ghting textures and plangent melodies are or embracing one another. Whitley’s disrupted by sudden, violent outbursts; composition proposes the two musicians frequent changes of time signature are as the two dancing/wrestling fi gures, jittery and unsettling, the pace overall each line built on a trill-like fi gure – is relentless, what we might call “mad”. variable in both interval and tempi. Instructions to the players are detailed These two lines sometimes make a joint and highly specifi c, suggesting materials statement, vibrating peaceably in parallel. for home-made mutes and how they At other times one takes a secondary are to be applied. If the piece has any role, the trill continuing as a barely recognisable forbear, it is Stravinsky’s discernable support – like a cushion of writing for the warring fairground puppets in his ballet Petrushka.