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ALWYNNE PRITCHARD Rockaby ALWYNNE PRITCHARD Rockaby The Norwegian Naval Forces’ Band ensemble recherche SWR Experimentalstudio BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1999 20 YEARS 2019 ALWYNNE PRITCHARD (*1968) 1 Loser (2014) 09:28 2 March, March, March (2013) 05:41 3 Decoy (2004) 19:03 4 Rockaby (2016) 11:57 5 Graffiti (2006) 13:49 6 Glorvina (2012) 03:20 7 Irene Electric (2013) 13:03 TT 76:00 1 Klaus Steffes-Holländer, piano / voice / objects 2 The Norwegian Naval Forces’ Band Bjarte Engeset, conductor 3 ensemble recherche SWR Experimentalstudio 4 Alwynne Pritchard, voice / movement BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Ilan Volkov, conductor 5 Christian Dierstein, percussion SWR Experimentalstudio 6 SWR Experimentalstudio 7 Victoria Johnson, violin Thorolf Thuestad, electronics Children from the Philippine High School for the Arts, voices 2 Design: Lisa Simpson 3 Gun on the Table be related too. The pianist coughs five of translation takes place in Graffi- times (should we read this as embar- ti for percussion and electronics: the rassment?) before launching, unex- sounds of drums are transformed into pectedly, into a deranged and disso- those of gongs. The drums are played nant riff that vaults across the entire through a loudspeaker set-up whose keyboard. soundwaves activate two large gongs and a tam-tam; these sounds in turn Alwynne Pritchard: I like that you no- are transformed through contact mics tice these things. Actually, I’ve revised and live electronics. the score so you don’t see the bag: the piece should now be performed behind AP: I have a need for extreme order in a curtain so only the pianist’s ankles everything I do. So these very organ- A telling moment comes about two are visible. You use the word embar- ised things that I set up are a way to minutes into Alwynne Pritchard’s rassment, and I think partly concealing escape that. They’re like booby traps, Loser, for piano, voice and objects. the pianist, like a bather in a changing or they’re like the box and I’m the jack A cluster of keys is silently depressed, room, adds to this mood; something is coming out of the box. The early piec- the piano’s hammers lifting to let the being partly concealed from the pub- es are only the box, I think, and now I strings resonate sympathetically. lic but of course it is also being partly make these structures that I can then A small bag of sand is used to hold exposed. There’s something funny and burst out of or I can have the perform- them in place. The bag is open, we sad about that. Naked ankles are funny ers burst out of; it’s full of unpredict- notice, as it perches precariously on and sad in themselves! able energy, it’s funny, but still there the keyboard’s edge. We can feel its are these contradictory forces and this weight, a ball of potential energy, over Connections and contradictions, em- obsessive need to control. … I think al- which the pianist’s hands continue to pirical and esoteric, run throughout ready in Graffiti it’s using the electron- play. Pritchard’s music. Decoy, for ensemble ics to break out of the extreme order and electronics, derives its form and of the percussion part. It’s that first cry Suddenly, the spell is broken. With a rhythmic structure from a six-by-six for freedom. swipe of the hand, the pianist casts magic square (using the numbers 1 to the bag onto the ground. It lands with 36). This act of pragmatic translation In Loser the pianist speaks short ex- a squelching thud, its contents spilling has roots in another, more mystical tracts from Thomas Bernhard’s 1983 across the floor. One thing follows an- one, since the square is identical with novel Der Untergeher, in which a other (the swipe and the thud), joined that devised by the sixteenth-centu- youthful encounter between two pia- by a physical force (gravity). More ry occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrip- no students (Bernhard’s narrator and things follow, and somehow, they must pa to represent the Sun. Another kind his friend Wertheimer) and Glenn 4 Gould in 1953 launches the students Rockaby is perhaps the most com- palette for my costume as it moves. into self-destructive spirals of inade- plex work here. Written for orchestra And everything the live foley artists are quacy and anxiety. There are Gould- and vocal performer it also calls for doing is visible to the audience. But I’m isms in Pritchard’s score: it concludes two foley artists and a prominent (al- wondering if that should be the case in with a desiccated reworking of Bach’s though not virtuoso) pianist. In addi- future. Maybe I will also hang a curtain Goldberg Variation no. 30 (the piece tion, the vocal performer is required in front of them, so that only the top of Gould played at that fictional meet- to wear an elaborate, custom-made their heads and a strip lower down is ing). Gould’s devotion to technology is costume – equal parts geisha, crazed visible, revealing some hint – nothing ironically represented, in the form of steampunk inventor and military com- more – of what they’re doing, the ob- a karaoke machine and a noisily skip- mander – that is transformed through- jects they’re using. It could be more in- ping CD. And, of course, the pianist is out the course of the piece by way of triguing, less demonstrative that way. I asked to whistle. Wertheimer’s travails zips, hidden panels and velcro strips. don’t know. Very often with my pieces (it is he who Gould names “the loser”, The resulting work is therefore a rich I feel as though there are a number of and who eventually takes his own life) mix of words, music, sound effects, alternative possibilities. Certainly, with are conveyed in the cries, coughs and dance and textile art, with all the sen- pieces where there are these process- strangled expression of the vocal part, sual depth and polyphony that this es that are theatrical, let’s say. They the bag of sand knocked angrily to the implies. can be directed differently each time. floor, perhaps even the comically inad- equate sound of a small, battery-pow- Tim Rutherford-Johnson: What you’re The choice of Beckett’s Rockaby is ered milk frother attempting to play doing with the curtain in Loser is al- suggestive: the playwright’s image of along with the real Bach at the end. most an inversion of the foley idea in a dying woman in her rocking chair of- Rockaby. Foley is about using things fers another collision between human Writings by others inform several of that sound like something else, and being and gravity. Pritchard’s vocal the works on this disc: not only Loser, in Rockaby you’re actually showing text is not taken from Beckett, how- but also Rockaby (after Samuel Beck- what’s going on, breaking bits of celery ever, but is made up of fragments as- ett’s play) and Glorvina (after a novel and so on. sembled from readings of Cervantes, by the early nineteenth-century Irish Moshé Feldenkrais (founder of the author Sydney, Lady Morgan). Yet al- AP: Yes. Just to clarify, celery is used Feldenkrais Method for increasing though Pritchard’s works frequent- by foley artists to create the sound ef- self-awareness through movement) ly echo aspects of them, in no sense fect of a nose being broken, of bone and the psychologist Daniel Stern (au- are they depictions: her sources serve being crushed. I expanded these kinds thor of Forms of Vitality). Beckett’s more to activate a field of themat- of conventional foley effects with, for text, meanwhile, is translated into ic possibilities than to circumscribe a example, the sound of scraping met- the piano part, using a simple cryp- palette of ideas and images. al, to build a sort of hybrid sound effect tographic technique in which each 5 new word is assigned to the next note was composed as part of a Lon- other half of the woman’s story? The down on the chromatic scale, starting don “Music Walk” that marked John part that Beckett chose not to show with the fourth A above middle C (the Cage’s centenary in 2012. Once again, us, but that might be hidden behind play’s first word: “More”) and reach- words, music and visuals are brought the shocking “fuck life” (words 107 and ing its lowest point seventy semitones together and interrelated. The work’s 108) at the very end of his play? down the scale at the word “some- rhythms, pitches and text are all de- where”. (In fact, Beckett’s play con- rived from the preface to St Claire; TR-J: Texts haunt many of the works tains 108 different words, more than or, The Heiress of Desmond, by the on this disc. At one stage wasn’t there the piano’s keyboard could accommo- early nineteenth-century Irish author also going to be a vocal part to March, date, but Pritchard avoids this prob- Sydney, Lady Morgan (who was nick- March, March as well? lem by not setting its fourth and final named Glorvina after the heroine of scene.) her most famous book, The Wild Irish AP: March, March, March was original- Girl), and the piece was written to be ly composed as it’s presented here – TR-J: Was part of the appeal of the listened to in front of her bust, which for navy band alone. But since writ- Beckett text this in-built clock-ness? is held in London’s Victoria and Albert ing it, I’ve imagined a vocal part (with Museum.
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