LSO Panufnik Composers Workshops

_{Jonathan Woolgar}
Symphonic Message: "Wach auf!"

Five-minute commission, 2019/20 cohort

As a participant in the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme two years ago, Jonathan Woolgar wrote a short Proto-Symphony. Compressing the spirit of a grand symphony into just three minutes, it was made of possible beginnings without further development: a symphonic logic, but without the symphony itself; a shadow-play of a grand narrative.

Symphonic Message: "Wach auf!" is similarly inspired by aspects of the Austro-German symphony, reduced down to their essences and reconfigured into the smallest possible space. The subtitle refers to the last scene of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the chorus of praise sung upon the entrance of the beloved mastersinger, Hans Sachs. Jonathan borrows only Wagner’s blazing G major chord (sung on ‘auf’) but it is sufficient to start a symphonic process in miniature.

In a sense, the strident opening was too much too soon, and the next five minutes of Symphonic Message comprise attempts to rebuild that momentum: having woken up, the orchestra is forced to decide what it wants to do. As in Proto-Symphony the argument is built up out of false starts – phrases that swell in volume before tailing off, as though trying and failing to begin a conversation. Slow movements, fast movements, a recitative, a march: all are attempted. Only at the end, as some sort of calm is restored, does it become clear that the hairpin contrasts and sudden changes in manner weren’t missteps at all, they were the journey itself.

_{Stef Conner}
The Rot and the Shimmering Moss

The general atmosphere of Stef Conner’s The Rot and the Shimmering Moss may be interpreted from the evocative expression markings of its score, which intensify from ‘prickly’ and ‘sludgy’ to ‘creeping entropy’ and ‘the world is melting’. We are in a disquieting narrative, populated by ‘heavy industrial hell-machines’ and ‘pockets of unrest’: the rot of the work’s title seems as much social and political as natural and fungal.

As a composer and singer, Stef is known for her reconstructions of ancient musics and instruments. But although there is a medieval slant to the melody that emerges, ‘grinding’, out of the mouth of the hell-machine, this is not a vision of folkish pastorale, nor even a religious meditation, but a nightmarish amalgam of the ancient and the technologically advanced. The music begins with the disturbing gesture of a ‘Mexican wave’ of spiders’ footsteps in the form of a random col legno tapping of the back of the bow on the strings, that passes instrument by instrument across the entire string section. The prickling soundworld is sustained by a coarse percussion complement of cymbals, drums, whip brake drum and sleigh bells. Only with the last two bars – an abrupt series of timpani and double bass strikes marked ‘night terror’ – is the bad dream brought to a sudden, wakeful end.

_{Alex Paxton}
Love you's bus-eyed

Love You’s Bus-eyed is the title of an improvised painting by Alex Paxton. Lurid with colour, texture and cartoon imagery, it appears to be about the size of an A5 notebook but is packed (on the plane of the painting, and in layers on top of it) with stickers, craft materials (feathers, glitter, coloured powders), googly eyes and even miniature figurines, face down in the mess. As well as the eyes, among many other things, it’s possible to make out the outline of a bus, and an ‘I ❤️ YOU’ sticker. The syntactic peculiarity of the painting’s title derives from its calculated refusal to respect the norms of propriety (or grammar) in favour of technicolour, and occasionally tender, collisions.

Listening to Alex's orchestral piece of the same name is to hear the same approach: shades from Handelian fanfare to Hollywood glitz to 8-bit chiptunes are pressed into one another, smeared with woozy glissandos or trilling distortions. Trumpets play through kazoos; the percussionist whistles ‘like a bat trying to get out of a tumble dryer’. Layers are spilled upon layers in an improvisational frenzy like that of the painting. ‘Writing this short orchestral piece was a gushing-urge kind of feeling. I remember wanting to get it down quite quick and desperately’, says Alex. Infused with junk and joy the result is a glorious, chaotic song of modern love.

_{Christian Drew}
Double Chorus

That strange sound effect you can hear at the start of Christian Drew’s Double Chorus, played first by clarinet and alto flute, but soon spreading across the whole woodwind section, is a timbral trill: a trill between different fingerings of the same note to create an unstable fluttering pitch that is fixed, but has an inner life of its own. Combined with the use of wah-wah mutes in the brass, and slow vibrato glissandos in the strings, it contributes to an uncannily destabilised orchestral sound that persists to varying degrees throughout Christian's piece. Of the two choruses of his title, one sounds distinctly inebriated – the music is marked ‘wavy, woozy’, and later, in case of doubt, ‘still woozy’.

There are clues at the beginning, however, to a second, more poised kind of music. It begins as percussive chimes – vibraphone, glockenspiel, celesta, as well as pizzicato (plucked) strings – whose resonances fade into the hazy textures of the rest of the orchestra. But soon they transition into florid melodies, ornamental and sure of themselves, first played sotto voce (literally 'under the voice') and then with increasing certainty. Through the middle section of the work, it is this second chorus that has its hands on the wheel. But inevitably it too succumbs, and the piece concludes with an evaporation into fogs of glissandos and clouds of detached staccato droplets.

_{Emma-Kate Matthews}
A Study of Passing Objects In An Accelerating Landscape

Few inventions of the modern era did more to reshape our experience of time and space than train travel. Not only in our imagination of countries and continents (think of the transformations made possible by the European, North American or Trans-Siberian rail networks), but in our direct experience as train passengers. Viewed from the window of a moving train, a static, once painterly landscape is animated into layers of interlocking activity whose speed of movement is connected to their distance from us. The usual visual order of perspective is inverted as distant objects become legible in their stillness while close ones become blurred by speed. Static, trackside objects change continually in appearance as we rush by.

In her piece, Emma-Kate Matthews offers musical analogues for these visual phenomena. Her work begins with a glimpse of that static landscape, represented by a quick cross-section of the music that is to come. And then the train gets underway. We hear doppler-like effects of objects approaching (rising in pitch) and receding (descending), staggered entries of foreground and background, and a gradual smearing of surface detail and harmonic complexity as the music accelerates until only a two-note drone – the distant, unmoving horizon – remains.

_{Patrick John Jones}
Song of a Red Sprite

A red sprite is a rare optical phenomenon of the upper atmosphere associated with thunderstorms. Alien in appearance, red sprites are the product of lightning-like electrical discharges and appear in flashes up to 50 miles above the earth in the startling forms of glowing crimson jellyfish or jagged, branching figures. Although something like them has been reported for centuries, sprites were only formally discovered in 1989. They have since been observed many times, from the ground, from aeroplanes and from the International Space Station.

Appropriately for their ethereal, supernatural appearance, sprites are named after the elf-like creatures of European mythology (such as Ariel or Puck), and in his Song of a Red Sprite, Patrick John Jones gives voice to the atmospheric sprite who hovers in the sky, materialising occasionally to survey (or create?) the storms below. The work begins ‘nocturnal with thick air and electrical crackle’ as clouds of string and wind air sounds billow around a portentously descending chromatic bassline. Cutting across this thunderhead are jagged, pointillistic countermelodies, an irregular rhythmic ostinato and atmospheric shivers and sizzles. As these move around at unexpected speeds and across a wide instrumental palette the sprite may be heard to flash and flicker in hidden corners of the orchestra’s sonority.

_{Louise Drewett}
The Daymark

Ten-minute commission, 2019/20 cohort

The starting materials of Louise Drewett’s The Daymark are outwardly simple: a seven-note descending scale in D major, played initially by a trio of bassoons. Yet what Louise does is deceptively complicated. For one thing, the bassoons do not play quite the same thing: they follow the same pitch patterns, but rhythmically out of sync with each other. The same idea is picked up by three clarinets a few bars later, and then in various forms throughout the piece. Meanwhile, slower chords in the strings and horns, and splashes from the percussion and harp pick out fragments of the same scales and turn them into independent instrumental layers. The effect is something like the refraction of light as it hits a prism and is split into different speeds and colours. As the piece progresses, the different layers draw together even as they peel apart, pulling the music through a series of luminous climaxes and changes of texture.

The work began as a three-minute miniature for the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme in 2020. This, it transpires was just a first movement, to which Drewett has added a spirited second, similarly kaleidoscopic but now made up of curling scales and snapping, two-note fragments.

The Daymark itself is an octagonal stone beacon built in 1864 on the Devon coast as an aid for finding Dartmouth harbour from the sea. Standing on eight long arched legs it resembles an octopus, swimming upwards, or an arcane spaceship. At 24 metres tall, it works by dint of size alone, yet its octagonal shape means that it always reflects the light in interesting ways, and as the sun sets it can be glimpsed as a point of light between its arches.

_{Chris McCormack}
fold filament arc echo

In the literary style of magic realism – exemplified in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, among others – fantastical and realistic worlds are brought into conjunction and allowed to invade, infect, transform and accent each other without contradiction. Families are populated with ghosts and mythological transfigurations, dreams and prophecies become real, and time and landscapes are distorted.

Inspired by such fruitful juxtapositions, Chris McCormack combines in his fold filament arc echo contrasting musical elements: hushed, imperceptibly changing chords; a bright, threaded polyphony of piano and vibraphone; and gently resonating pulsations. Over the course of his work’s three-minute duration Chris allows these opposing materials to interact and comingle. And so the vibraphone’s melodic leaps become fragment into ornamental flourishes to held wind notes. Elsewhere, static harmonies are teased out into dynamic textures – or are pulses lengthened into held chords? Slowed down and harmonically warped, the piano’s sparkling liquidity becomes a thick flow of strings. Music is not strictly realistic so it cannot be magic realistic, but in Chris’ piece, as folds become echoes and filaments become arcs, what we first heard as the sure substance of the work becomes indistinguishable from the fantasies played upon it.