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ELISION ensemble strange forces Richard Barrett Timothy McCormack Aaron Cassidy Klaus K Hübler Liza Lim Evan Johnson ELISION ensemble strange forces Track 1 Liza Lim: Wild Winged One [8m43s] for solo trumpet (2007) Track 2 Richard Barrett: Aurora [9m45s] for quarter-tone flugelhorn and alto trombone (2005-10) Track 3 Klaus K Hübler: Cercar [6m12s] for solo trombone (1983) Track 4 Evan Johnson: Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum) [5m47s] for quarter-tone flugelhorn and alto trombone (2009) Track 5 Aaron Cassidy: Because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking (or, Second Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) [5m07s] for solo trombone (2010) Track 6 Aaron Cassidy: What then renders these forces visible is a strange smile (or, First Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) [4m32s] for solo trumpet (2008) Track 7 Timothy McCormack: Disfix [9m23s] for bass clarinet, piccolo trumpet and trombone (2008) 2 ELISION ensemble Richard Haynes clarinet/e-flat/bass clarinet Tristram Williams trumpet/piccolo trumpet/quarter-tone flugelhorn Benjamin Marks trombone/alto trombone Daryl Buckley Artistic Director ELISION 3 Recording venues Tracks 1-4 Sendesaal Radio Bremen, Germany Tracks 5-6 St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, UK Track 7 Hall Two, Kings Place London, UK Recording dates Track 1, September 3rd 2009, Tracks 3, 4, September 4th 2009 Tracks 5, 6, November 26th 2009 Track 7, February 8th 2010, Track 2, June 9th 2010 Engineering Gisela Kniemeyer Tracks 1-4, Aaron Cassidy Tracks 5, 6 Bruno Silva Track 7 Editing Christine Potschkat Tracks 1-4 Mastering Christoph Romanowski Recording producers Renate Wolter-Seevers Tracks 1, 3, 4 Fabian Frank Track 2, Aaron Cassidy Tracks 5-6 Bruno Silva Track 7 Executive producer Marita Emigholz RADIO BREMEN Production assistant Radio Bremen Friedrich-Karl Plinke Tracks 5, 6, 7 are live concert recordings Programme notes Tim Rutherford-Johnson Photography Rolf Schoellkopf, Justin Nicholas Cover image Carl Warner Design Mike Spikin Project Management CeReNeM www.cerenem.org HCR is a joint collaboration between CeReNeM, 4 the University of Huddersfield and hcmf// ELISION: strange forces At one point in Klaus K. Hübler’s Cercar the trombonist is required to add then remove his mute, without playing a note in between. This silent, precisely rhythmicised gesture is a moment of absurdist theatre, but it is not musically pointless either, for it visually articulates one dimension of this work’s construction as multiple, often conflicting physical actions. In the early 1980s Hübler (following precedents set by Holliger, Kagel, Lachenmann and others) developed a system of performative polyphony in which the individual actions required to play a single note are composed independently of one another. In the case of Cercar, the parameters thus separated relate to harmonics, slide, mute, trigger valve and breath impulse, but others might have been chosen. Such dismemberment of the instrument has also been explored in free improvisation, but in retaining the abstract formal rigour of composition, Hübler opened up numerous possibilities in the controlled, structured parametrisation of instrumental practice. This disc records a recent period of attention to virtuoso brass music, to which Cercar is an ancestor. Because of their age and their cultural ubiquity, brass instruments, more than most members of the Western orchestra, carry a host of cultural associations: angelic trumpets, royal fanfares, hunting calls, Last Posts and Louis Armstrong. No composer can be insensitive of that back story, yet it need not impose sterility or conservatism. Richard Barrett’s Aurora begins with a study in the harmonic series above a low C – the origins of one of the most strident and commercialised of all passages of brass writing, the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. But for Barrett, who reaches several steps higher up the harmonic series than Strauss, it is a world in which bold swagger is replaced with extreme trepidation and fragility. 5 Aurora takes its title from the writings of Jakob Böhme, a German theologian and mystic who proposed that humanity’s departure from God – through the Fall and the acquiring of free will – was a necessary dispensing with innocence made in order to evolve a new, redeemed and more perfect harmony. Disunity, conflict and self-awareness are thus necessary steps towards a better world. Aurora forms part of the composite work CONSTRUCTION (to be completed in 2011), a piece that addresses the tensions between a number of utopian visions and the pragmatic realities of human existence, and Barrett does not leave Böhme’s use of concepts like unity and disunity – and the value systems to which they attach – unquestioned. This begins with the instruments themselves. The unity even of the single resonating brass tube is revealed as a utopian illusion (is Böhme's hoped-for unity with God just as illusory?). Like Hübler, Barrett disassembles his instruments into dissociated elements, but goes one futher and reassembles them into new configurations and alternative unities. The innovation of new unities from deliberate dismemberments is continued on every level of the piece such that instrumentalism and form become inseparable. Liza Lim’s interest in instrumental virtuosity is more metaphysical, seeking to make present (to an almost erotic degree) boundary and transitional states. The trumpet solo Wild Winged One originates in the Angel of History’s aria from Lim’s opera The Navigator. In that context and in the solo piece, the trumpet is an extension of the Angel’s voice, building on the common imagery of brass instruments as apocalyptic heralds. Lim’s angel also speaks with an unearthly voice that is part human, part animal and part insect, an effect achieved through the distorting flutter of a wacky whistle pressed against the palette. This effect is reused at the start of Wild-Winged One and permeates the formal and gestural language as the trumpet fluctuates between a soaring lament and the intrusions of something more bestial. Yet the borders between the two are impossible to unpick as the angel is stretched between past and future, horror and powerlessness. 6 Where Lim draws on the cultural associations of brass instruments, Aaron Cassidy uses the facts of their demanding physicality to channel his metaphorical studies of Francis Bacon’s paintings, What then renders these forces visible is a strange smile and Because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking. Is that ‘strange smile’ the trumpeter’s embouchure? Are the ‘zones’ of the trombone piece the gaping silences or the islands of frenzied activity? Both pieces represent extremities of Cassidy’s ‘decoupled’ instrumental writing, in which the dissociation of performance actions into separate layers is pursued to such an extent that incidences of pitch, rhythm and even articulation are almost coincidentally arrived at as results of the interacting layers of air pressure and finger speed. Cassidy’s fundamental compositional materials are no longer beholden to the analytical grid of the stave and the bar, but the altogether more malleable forces of breath and musculature. This produces music that is both extremely energised, parsed to such impossibly fine gradations of timbre and rhythm that it has torn off the weight of traditional formal relationships. Although similarly interested in the physical limits of performer capabilities, Evan Johnson maintains a relationship with music’s lyrical tradition. Much of the music of Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum) is structurally commonplace: there are echoes, repetitions, miniature canons even, but a wealth of performance instruction renders these almost entirely obscure: the score is characterised, more than even the other works on this disc, by a superabundance of conflicting and contradictory instructions. ‘Effortful’ is a word that Johnson uses in his own descriptions of the piece and, when listening, one wonders whether the performers are helped or hindered by their instruments. Somewhere, deeply buried in this flickering twilight world is an echo of Gabrieli, but what we actually hear is a continual thwarting of its articulation. Although the music is meticulously notated (and thus highly transferable), its expressive grain is unrecreatable: the music exists not as the notes but in the frictions created live as the performers strive to attain those notes. 7 Although its notation is as complex as anything else on this CD (four rhythmically independent staves are required to capture the performance actions of each instrumental part), Timothy McCormack’s Disfix presents an entirely different expressive view. Rather than seeking a crippled, critical, absurdist or distorted world, McCormack’s physical parametrisations encourage a wildly energised, almost primal gestural language: an extravagant physicality that is electrified by the body’s possibilities and aided by additional agility and abrasive skronk from the bass clarinet. It is the difference between Joyce and Kafka. Contemporary brass writing has found great new expressive territories, and ELISION’s Ben Marks and Tristram Williams have played leading roles in developing its possibilities. Tim Rutherford-Johnson ELISION is Australia’s premiere contemporary music ensemble. Its musicians have established a reputation for delivering authoritative and virtuosic interpretations of complex, unusual and challenging aesthetics, often developed

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