Untitled - Carrier Records

Alex Hills (1974)
1. After and Before (2011-12) 26:45
Ensemble Plus-Minus: Roderick Chadwick, piano,
Marcus Barcham-Stevens, violin, Lucy Railton, cello, Vicky Wright,
clarinets, Tom Pauwels, electric guitar, Newton Armstrong,
electronics, conducted by Mark Knoop
2. Knight’s Move (2008-9) 7:16
Lucy Railton, cello and Serge Vuille, percussion
3. Some States Can Be Resolved Rhythmically (2009)
Aisha Orazbayeva, violin and Lucy Railton, cello
8.34
4. –verse (2012) 9.44
Aisha Orazbayeva, violin and Roderick Chadwick, piano
5. Alles (2012) 4.06
Mayah Kadish, violin, Lucy Railton, cello, Roderick Chadwick, piano,
Serge Vuille, percussion, conducted by Mark Knoop
6. Ostranenie (2009/2012)
Natalie Raybould, soprano, Lucy Railton and Alice Purton, cellos,
Serge Vuille, percussion, conducted by Mark Knoop
17.54
The Music of Making Strange
Ever since I first read it, most of 20 years ago, the Russian thinker Viktor
Shklovsky’s classic statement of the power of art to communicate through
making strange has been stuck in my head, and sometimes above my
composing desk as well:
Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our
wives, and at our fear of war…. And so, in order to return sensation
to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel
stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then,
is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight
instead of recognition.
Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 5-6.
I set this text, or broken Russian fragments of it (iskustva = art, kamen = stone,
zhizu = life, ostranenie is Shklovsky’s own neologism for making strange) in
the last piece on this disk, but its spirit, I hope, runs through all my music.
Strangeness can mean many things, but for Shklovsky it implies a kind of
tension between a recognizable object and its aesthetic transformation. This
can be achieved by, for example, metaphor, or through montage, cutting
between different images or stories; Eisenstein, the director of Battleship
Potemkin, was a close friend and collaborator. Narrative voice offers a way
to manipulate the reader’s perception – Shklovsky talks about Tolstoy’s story
Kholstomer, where we experience the world through the eyes of a horse – as
does the relationship between the events of a story and the way those events
are told, in, for instance, the folding of stories within stories in Don Quixote or
1001 Nights. Instead of simply recognizing a thing, through art we see it.
This tension can exist in music in many ways too: between the predictable
expectations of a formal archetype (rondo, sonata form and so on) and the
re-orderings and quasi-novelistic digressions by which Schumann might pick
those expectations apart; between the tradition of singing a national anthem
– grand, celebratory – and the chillingly nihilistic delivery of Nico’s version of
Deutschland Lied; during a single note in a Mozart violin sonata that starts as
a stable, tonic, B flat and ends up as a tense, desperate to resolve, A sharp.
In my own music the objects that are enstranged vary from the instruments
themselves, to other pieces of music – quite often in seemingly inappropriate
genres – to basic physical principles of cause and effect. More than
simply changing the context of known things, however, I seek to make the
enstranging process a two-way one: the things I’m working with also have
consequences for my own compositional language and in turn make that
language unfamiliar and new for me. On the one hand, I aim to make a simple
low C on the piano – in After and Before – a new experience, on the other,
having to explore a single thing so exhaustively forces me to write in ways
I might not if the language were less restricted. This becomes even more
extreme in pieces involving transcription – how can I express myself, or,
alternatively, what happens to my means of expression, when the musical
materials are, exclusively, California Über Alles by the Dead Kennedys and
Nico’s already ‘stranged’ Deutschland Lied?
Although enstrangement is a conceptual thread that runs throughout the
music on this record, it isn’t, of course, the only thing that my work is about,
and much more apparent in some pieces than others. I think all music has
a balance between conveying concept and being an experience that is
ineffable or irreducible. As I’ve developed as a composer I’ve sought to try
and articulate concept more and more explicitly, so the piece itself carries
Aisha Orazbayeva and Roderick Chadwick, Café OTO, January 2013
the idea, without relying on external explanation – the irony of these notes
notwithstanding - and on the other not to shy away from aspects of music
that are immediate and direct. This can come through sudden shock (it would
be giving the game away to say where), or through slowness, where music
unfolds in a gradual way that highlights the immersive and sensory. Very often
this latter quality comes from an approach to instruments that treats them as
means for producing sound rather than pitch or rhythm. The extreme limits
placed on the number of notes we hear – there are only 2 at all in Knight’s
Move, and the piano part of After and Before uses only 18 of the piano’s 88
keys, but we hear the note G in 6 different tunings – is designed to focus
attention away from local harmonic and melodic features and onto both the
sounds themselves and the longer-term structural relationships between all
these elements. Stripping back one dimension to reveal more complexity in
others is part of the continual tightrope walk composing is for me, between
austerity and richness, precision and chaos, the familiar
and the strange.
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After and Before (2011-12)
Some States Can Be Resolved Rhythmically (2009)
Two of the great limitations of the piano are that all 88 keys are tuned the same
distance apart from each other (at least nominally) and that once one has
played a note, the only control one has over it is to stop it sounding. Compared
to the infinite gradations of space on a fingerboard, of a bow, of breath, this
seems rather unfortunate! This piece is, amongst other things, my attempt to
come to grips with those restrictions – to explore the microtonal possibilities
of the piano, to find ways both to draw attention to and modify the piano’s
wonderfully rich and complex resonance; to make us listen to a low C, not just
to identify it. This is done by playing the instrument in unconventional ways,
by electronics, and by the presence of the ensemble. However, resonance
also implies something else – a dimension of cause and effect, where it is
an inevitable consequence of a fixed action. Here, I seek to destabilize that
relationship – effects become uncoupled from their causes, heard with the
‘wrong’ action, and indeed in some cases precede those actions altogether.
So the piece becomes a kind of laboratory for ‘impossible’ (or enstranged)
relationships between sound and time.
The title for this piece is from a notebook entry by the American poet Theodore
Roethke – ‘The serious problems in life are never fully solved but some states
can be resolved rhythmically’. In the piece, I’m concerned with rhythmic and
gestural patterns – paralleling poetic meter – that shift and change in relatively
simple ways. This is coupled with a static harmonic background (a sort of
dissonant perfect cadence derived from the harmonic series) as a way to draw
attention to the – following Roethke’s advice - reassertion of pulse and meter.
The presence of locally repetitive rhythms also informs the larger flow of the
piece, with an alternation between ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’ resembling verse and
chorus, something that has become increasingly important for me.
Knight’s Move (2008-9)
The earliest piece on the disc, this began as a sketch for, and became part of,
the much larger Everything In Life Can Be Montaged, a kind of Shklovskyian
Cantata, each part of which takes a name from one of his books. It sets out a
very closely circumscribed set of ten sounds, moving from dry and pitchless
to sustained and pitched – the overall trajectory of the piece, as well - which
are shared by the cello and the percussion. This creates an environment where
two instruments that shouldn’t have much in common fluctuate between
interchangeability and opposition, making paths through the sounds that are
sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflicting.
-verse (2012)
Verse and chorus are more explicit here, in what is a kind of creative reinterpretation through my own compositional language (or more simply perhaps
a transcription or cover version) of a strange and wonderful song by the Velvet
Underground, A Murder Mystery. Aisha Orazbayeva, the piece’s dedicatee,
introduced me to the song, and I was immediately struck by the contrast
between its incredibly repetitive materials and strict verse/chorus alternation
and the song’s long-term sonic evolution, toward ever increasing density and
distortion, not to mention its completely unexpected ending. To some extent,
what I’m trying to ‘cover’ here are those aspects of its formal unfolding, rather
than ‘the song itself’, but traces – or more than traces at the end – of the notes
and rhythms find their way into the music as well.
Alles (2012)
This piece is sort of a simultaneous transcription of two – conceptually but
not musically – linked songs, the Dead Kennedys California Über Alles and
Nico’s version of the German national anthem. The conceptual lies in the lyrics
(California and Deutschland ‘above all’) as well as in terms of tone: Jello Biafra’s
hilarious and brutal satire of California hippy ambition in Jerry Brown’s 70s spell
as governor, Nico’s entirely unsettling combination of sincerity and catastrophic
darkness (not least in her inclusion of the then illegal first verse) which leaves
me quite uncertain how to take the song. However, if –verse is a transcription of
structure more than sound, here I try to preserve the sounds of the originals as
best as I can given the limits of instrumentation available to me while imposing
my own structural principles: polyrhythm, layering, expanding and contracting
rhythmic sequences and so on. This means the songs run in parallel, but as
occasional, broken, snapshots, sometimes overlapping, sometimes one taking
over, always incomplete and fragmentary.
Ostranenie (2009/12)
Like Knight’s Move, this is part of Everything In Life Can Be Montaged, where,
with its setting of Shklovsky’s text, it forms the work’s finale. On one level it
extends and expands the instrumental relationships of Knight’s Move, with
a second cello allowing more complex and ‘stereo’ explorations of the same
sonic vocabulary, but also adds the voice as a further partner in this dialogue.
Again, this involves both collaboration – the voice and cellos sharing harmonic
and melodic materials very closely – and contradiction. The voice moves from
sharing its musical space with the cellos to gradually asserting a much more
colored, embodied, set of personalities, much as my own understanding of the
text evolved from something abstracted and theoretical to the personal and
emotional.
Alex Hills is a composer, pianist and teacher, based in London. His music
has been played at events in the UK such as the Cheltenham Festival, the
London Sinfonietta State of the Nation Weekend and the Cutting Edge series,
at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the South Bank Center to the Bethnal
Green Working Men’s Club, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and the German SWR,
featured on the BBC4 Classic Britannia series and recorded on the American
Innova label. He has recently worked with ensembles including Earplay
and Either/Or in the US, Plus-Minus in the UK and Mosaik in Germany. He
particularly enjoys developing long-term collaborations with performers, many
of whom appear on this record.
From 1998 to 2004 he lived in California, studying first at the University of
California, San Diego, and then at Stanford, completing a doctorate supervised
by Brian Ferneyhough. Prior to that his principal teacher was Michael Finnissy.
He is now a full-time lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, where he coordinates the analysis and theory programme. He also teaches piano and,
rather improbably, writes a monthly review column on rock and pop music for
Clash Magazine.
www.alexhills.com
Ensemble Plus-Minus is an Anglo-Belgian octet committed to presenting
new work alongside landmark modern repertoire. Formed in 2003 by Joanna
Bailie and Matthew Shlomowitz, +- is distinguished by its interest in avantgarde, conceptual and experimental open instrumentation pieces such as
Stockhausen’s 1963 classic, from which the group takes its name. +- has been
broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and London’s Resonance FM, and has performed at
the Borealis, Huddersfield, Transit and Ultima Festivals, as well as the Cutting
Edge Series in London.
www.plusminusensemble.com
Pianist Roderick Chadwick has a wide-ranging career as soloist, chamber
musician and also writes, especially about the music of Messiaen, which he
performs regularly. As a pianist he appears regularly with groups including
CHROMA, Plus-Minus and the Kreutzer Quartet, and has recently released
recordings of music by, amongst others, Gloria Coates and Michael Finnissy,
and a disc of Stockhausen’s Mantra (with Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong)
is forthcoming.
Mark Knoop is a pianist and conductor living in London known for his
performances of a wide range of contemporary and experimental music. He has
worked with many respected composers and ensembles, and his recordings of
the music of John Cage and David Lumsdaine have been critically acclaimed.
www.markknoop.com
Violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is in demand as a musician with a repertoire
extending from Bach and Telemann to Lachenmann and Nono, and has given
recitals for, amongst many others, Radio France, the BBC and worked with
ensembles including Ensemble Modern and the London Sinfonietta. Her debut
solo album ‘Outside’ was released on Nonclassical in 2011 and features a
highly original, multi-location, recording of Sciarrino’s Caprices.
aishaorazbayeva.wordpress.com
Lucy Railton works as both a cellist and concert organizer in a wide range
of contexts and genres. She plays with the Kit Downes quintet, as part of
the Akram Khan Company, with several new music ensembles and runs
Kammer Klang, a monthly night mixing classical, experimental, electronic and
improvised music.
cargocollective.com/lucyrailton
Soprano Natalie Raybould studied at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and the Royal
Academy of Music, London, and was awarded an Associateship of the RAM
in 2011. Natalie has worked with Opera North, ROH2, The Opera Group, Tête
à Tête, The RSC, National Theatre Studio, Little Angel Theatre, Aldeburgh
Productions and others in developing new operas, concert works, music
theatre and plays. Natalie is a regular guest artist with the French ensemble
L’Instant Donné and the Birmingham Doom Tuba duo ORE, and has most
recently devised, composed and performed in Lullaby, an interactive piece for
babies for Polka Theatre.
www.natalieraybould.co.uk
Swiss-born, London-based percussionist Serge Vuille has a wide-ranging
career playing music ranging from baroque timpani with Music for Awhile
to drums in the Martin Creed band, via a number of contemporary music
ensembles including the London Sinfonietta and the Collegium Novum Zurich.
He directs the ensemble We Spoke and co-curates Kammer Klang with
Lucy Railton.
www.sergevuille.ch
Acousmatic composer and sound engineer Erik Nystrom studied at the
School of Audio Engineering in London, and has recently completed a Phd in
composition at City University, where he was supervised by Denis Smalley. As
well as his work specializing in the recording of contemporary music – often
requiring unusual and creative approaches – his music has been played at
festivals and conferences internationally, including at the ICMC and the Hague
Institute of Sonology.
www.eriknystrom.com
Acknowledgments
I’m firstly grateful to all the performers for their time and incredible energy, and
especially to Roderick, Lucy and Aisha, who have been wonderfully thoughtful,
provocative and patient collaborators and friends whilst I’ve been writing all
the music on this recording. After and Before would never have been possible
without Roderick’s initial question, ‘Has there ever been a truly spectral
piano piece?’, but also not without the support of Ensemble Plus-Minus and
its directors, Matthew Shlomowitz and Joanna Bailie, nor the financial help
provided by the Royal Academy of Music. The RAM has also provided an
environment where I have time to think and people to talk to about the things
that I do, which has been a vital part of my musical life over the past years.
Peiman Khosravi and Newton Armstrong provided technical advice for the
electronic part of After and Before, and also their excellent ears.
Pascal Hervey lent not only his time as a designer but also his incredibly
beautiful painting Artifact for the cover and Eloisa-Fleur Thom her wonderful
pictures, taken at a concert of my music at Café OTO in London around which
these recordings were made. None of this would sound the way it does without
Erik Nystrom’s remarkable engineering, which brought my sounds to life in
ways closer to those I’d imagined than I’ve ever encountered before.