Speak, Be Silent Riot Ensemble Chaya Czernowin Anna Thorvaldsdóttir Mirela Ivičević Liza Lim Rebecca Saunders Speak, Be Silent Riot Ensemble Kate Walter – flutes [1-6] John Garner – violin [2, 4-6] Carla Rees – flute [7] Stephen Upshaw – viola [1-6] Philip Hayworth – oboe [4-6] Louise McMonagle – violincello [1-6] Ausiàs Garrigós Morant – clarinets [1-7] Marianne Schofield – double bass [4-7] Ruth Rosales – bassoon [4-6] Adam Swayne – piano [1, 3] Amy Green – saxophone [4-6] Neil Georgeson – piano [2, 4-6] Fraser Tannock – trumpet [4-6] Claudia Maria Racovicean – piano [7] Andy Connington – trombone [4-6] Anneke Hodnett – harp [4-6] Jack Adler McKean – tuba [4-6] David Royo – percussion [1-7] Sarah Saviet – violin [1-3, soloist 4-6] Aaron Holloway-Nahum – conductor Recording venue: AIR Studios, London, 7-9 September 2018 Recording producer/mixing: Moritz Bergfeld Editing/mastering: Aaron Holloway-Nahum Booklet notes: Tim Rutherford-Johnson Chaya Czernowin, Ayre … published by Schott Music Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, Ró published by Chester Music Ltd. Mirela Ivičević, Baby Magnify/Lilith’s New Toy commissioned by the Riot Ensemble Liza Lim, Speak, Be Silent published by Casa Ricordi Rebecca Saunders, Stirrings Still II published by Edition Peters Cover photograph: Francesca Rengel Design: Mike Spikin Project management: Aaron Cassidy and Sam Gillies, CeReNeM for Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) in collaboration with NMC Recordings 2 At the start of her score, Ró, the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir writes to her players, ‘When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling.’ Ró is full of such ropes. They may be thin but, sustained by bass flute, bass clarinet, and strings, spun out into tight melodic tendrils, and staked by sharp interruptions from the piano, they convey an undemonstrative inner assurance. Inspired, like much of her work, by the Icelandic landscape, Ró – whose title is the Icelandic word for serenity – is a piece of soft but threatening moods; a volcano shrouded in mist. As the ropes continue to spin out beneath our feet, a sinuous 10-note motif keeps re-entering the space, like a memory or an incantation. Eventually, the ropes become thicker and our confidence – just slightly – grows. Towards the end, the strings begin to assert themselves a little more, with new melodic lines that thread their way amongst a dense tone cluster. The instruction reads ‘soloistic, with calm ease and subtle sense of brokenness’. By ‘brokenness’, Thorvaldsdóttir tells us, she means a ‘subtle vulnerability and fragility … a fragile sense of wholeness’. On the work’s title page the Chinese equivalent of ró, 安, is written. Intriguingly, this may also be rendered as Ann, that is, the composer herself. Thus serenity and a whole, if fragile, sense of self are found to be the same thing. The music of US-based Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin often deals in forms of movement and the physical forces that accompany them: resistance and release, friction and flow. InAyre the line is not narrow, confidently centred, as inRó , but exploded outwards with an almost exuberant sensation of everything it passes through. Towed through plumes, thicket, asphalt, sawdust and hazardous air I shall not forget the sound of, as the piece’s subtitle describes. Czernowin describes her piece as ‘a small window looking, as with a microscope, into what makes small things move’. Moreover, she is interested in ‘what makes tissues of moving noise/sounds into a song’, that is, an ‘ayre’. Yet this is not a song in any conventional lyrical sense, but a study in the limits of song; not song as the free vocalisation of lungs and voice, but as a raw sense of musical line. 3 At first the music appeals directly to our senses of touch and motion. A piece of plastic is rubbed against the coils of a low piano string, a bow is drawn across a large Alpine bell, and bass flute and bass clarinet play forms of white noise that emphasize the passage of breath over tongue and palette. Later, as the microscope zooms in, a sort of ‘negative space’ is revealed within these movements’ sounds. A strangely coloured silence emerges, simultaneous with the sounds themselves; a yielding of tension, a poetry of absence. The music seems to take place within a vacuum. This is an ayre with almost all the air sucked out. These are worlds of sonic fragility and delicate balance; against them the pungent blast of brass and gongs at the start of the Australian Liza Lim’s Speak, Be Silent seems to sound from an entirely different place. Yet this is another illusion. Her work also describes a sort of movement, between one state and another: ‘What is a concerto but a work that is somehow about “sounding together” and “sounding apart”; it is a form that deals in unison and separation’, she has written. Yes, Speak, Be Silent is a concerto, but Lim’s solo violin, played here by Sarah Saviet, frequently melts into or is smelted out of the ensemble surrounding it. The opening ‘tuning’ gesture – the whole ensemble in theory playing the same note; in practice playing a hundred variations of it – is only the clearest example of this. ‘Within any unison’, Lim continues, ‘one can see myriad differences in the weave of each participating strand; within forms of difference one can also see similitude’. The scale of the composer’s commitment to this vision is reflected in how un-violin-like the rest of that ensemble is, dominated as it is by brass, piano and abrasive percussion. Lim prefaces her score with lines by the 13th-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi: Just remember when you’re in union, Then comes, Be silent, you don’t have to fear as when the rain stops, that you’ll be drained. and the trees in the orchard The command comes to speak, begin to draw moisture and you feel the ocean up into themselves. moving through you. 4 Rumi’s poem references connection and union, but it also emphasizes the ecstasy that comes at a moment of change or transition: from an ocean passing through you to moisture being drawn up through roots. It is the moment of fullness just before breathing out, a child’s weightlessness at the top of a swing, the first contact of bow hair with string. The title of Baby Magnify/Lilith’s New Toy by the young Croatian composer Mirela Ivičević (commissioned as part of Riot Ensemble’s 2017 Call for Scores) needs some explanation. ‘Magnify’ refers to the Magnum opus of alchemy, the process of transforming base materials into the philosopher’s stone over four distinctly coloured stages: nigredo (black), albedo (white), citrinitas (yellow), rubedo (red or purple) – all of which are represented in Ivičević’s piece. Lilith, meanwhile, is a demon from Jewish mythology: she appears first in the satirical medieval text The Alphabet of Ben Sira as Adam’s first wife, created not from his rib, like Eve, but from the very same clay as him. A creature of the night, she is a seductress and a stealer of babies; but she is also, in defying both Adam and God to bring her marriage to Adam to an end, an early and enduring symbol of female empowerment. She is a recurring archetype in Ivičević’s music, in several works taking the form of ‘Dominosa’, a shape-shifting mistress/muse/witch who lives in the dreams of a (male) composer. Ivičević’s Lilith is more playful: like a child she delights in her raw sonic materials, carelessly, even mischievously tossing them together. Rare are the slow transformations of the careful alchemist; in their place are wild combinations and experimental mixtures, bright and vital with sparks and flame. Stirrings Still was the last prose work by Samuel Beckett, published in 1989, a few months before his death. Words from Beckett’s text are quoted in the preface to the score of Rebecca Saunders’ piece, as are lines from another text, Company, of 1980. These words set Stirrings Still II within a network of pieces by Saunders that includes Stirrings Still I (2006; an earlier version of the work without double bass) and company (2007–8), as well as Stirrings (2011) and murmurs (2009), both of which also feature lines from these texts. The violin concerto Still (2011) takes its title from yet another Beckett story, published in 1976 as Fizzle 7. 5 Saunders’ music often sits on the brink of silence, the edge of nothing: stirrings, murmurs, traces (the title of another Saunders work in Riot’s repertoire). But even in such asymptotic approaches to nothing, nothing can be assumed. A murmur, as the critic Simon Cummings has astutely observed, is not the same as a stirring. This fascination with minute activities on the edge of extinction (or, equally, at the moment of their creation) is one of the things Saunders’ music takes from Beckett. Another is a swinging movement: to and fro, as Beckett loved to write; now faint now clear, as he writes in Stirrings Still. A similar pendulum-like rocking is encouraged by the work’s unusual construction. There is no combined score; instead each instrument has its own part and a simplified timeline of the whole piece aids ensemble coordination. The instruments themselves are thus not bound to a rhythmical grid but rather to the ebb and flow of each other’s sounds. Like Beckett’s final work of prose, Saunders’ Stirrings Still II concerns what happens next; what happens after it has finished.