London Symphony Orchestra

_{Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade}
Sleep-Chasings

In the first section of his poem Sleep-Chasings (1860; later titled The Sleepers), Walt Whitman describes a vision of wandering through the night, seeing sleeping men, women and children in every situation. Babies in cradles, battlefield corpses, ‘livid’ drunkards, lovers, prisoners, the new-born and the soon-to-die: his vision visits them all; sleep is a democratic condition. ‘All, all sleep.’

Whitman’s poem is a long one (58 stanzas), but its compelling opening – a vision of humanity in all its shades – has inspired Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade’s short piece for orchestra. The piece is divided into four continuous sections, marked respectively ‘creeping’, ‘buoyant’, ‘blaring’ and ‘languishing’. The music of the first three sections closely matches its descriptor: 'Creeping' uses tickling, ‘mandolin’ pizzicato (played using the finger like a plectrum) and feathery flute tremolos; 'Buoyant' uses bouncing pizzicato glissandi and prickly wind grace notes; 'Blaring' uses herald-like brass fanfares. It’s not hard to imagine, with such strong musical imagery, the different characters of Whitman’s vision: perhaps the poet creeping at night, the restless children and the dying soldiers.

The final section, ‘languishing’, surely shows us the drunkards in the tavern, with bassoons and second clarinet marked ‘leering’. Yet it brings the other characters together as well, drawing out a wider aspect of Whitman’s poem, the way in which sleep and dreams allow us to to step between experiences and beyond our own identities.

^{Note by Tim Rutherford-Jones}

_{James Chan}
Tanztheater

James Chan’s Tanztheater originated in two dance-related inspirations. The first a performance at the English National Ballet in April 2019 of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a reproduction of dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch's legendarily visceral 1975 production. In Bausch's realisation the selection of the sacrificial girl is symbolised by the passing around of a red dress in atmosphere of absolute dread. The second for Chan was the 2018 supernatural horror film Suspiria by Luca Guadagnino, inspired by the 1977 film of the same name by Dario Argento. At the heart of both versions of Suspiria is a dance school run by a coven of witches, and a young dancer who must find a way to escape its terrors.

Seen a few months apart, Bausch’s choreography and Guadignino’s film came together for Chan in an orchestral exploration of physicality and magical transformation. The sound of breathing – wind and brass instruments breathing through their instruments, reeds removed as necessary – is heard throughout his piece, not as a rhythmic or meditative device, but as an asynchronous, communal respiration, like the anxious, effortful breaths of Bausch’s dancers. Beneath this respiratory surface, a transformation takes place as slow music for the lower strings gradually merges with faster, syncopated passages for the violins. Initially heard only very quietly, it then spreads across the whole orchestra before making way, finally, for the breathing once more.

^{Note by Tim Rutherford-Jones}

_{Caroline Bordignon}
Iridescent Flares III

There is an unusual line of text at the top of the score of Caroline Bordignon’s Iridescent Flares III. In small type, beneath the title, is written: ‘for orchestra and live painting’. Bordignon is an artist as well as a composer, and she has included a live painting element in many of her works. As a synaesthete (like Olivier Messiaen, and another Panufnik Composer Workshop participant from 2016, Deborah Pritchard), she feels the connection between sound and colour as instinctive and personal. She describes her experience of sound as ‘a constant, moving, visual image of iridescent colours and shapes’. Her paintings seek to present a glimpse of that world in parallel with the music itself.

In Iridescent Flares III, Bordignon will paint in front of the orchestra, with her canvas visible to the audience. While her painting will inevitably include some pre-meditated gestures, the synaesthetic image that she is conveying changes according to the performance, so it cannot be wholly pre-planned or predicted. It really is an image of the sound in that moment. And that sound is unmistakably full of colour. Bordignon’s piece for the LSO is the third in an ongoing series for orchestra and painting based on the iridescent colour of light striking a crystal. As music and image unfold in the performance, we also have a sense of time turning into two-dimensional space, like the effect of memory looking back over events. The completed painting at the end, Bordignon says, ‘can be thought of as a remembrance, preserving the musical experience onto canvas’.

^{Note by Tim Rutherford-Jones}

_{Joe Bates}
Muted the Night

The title of Joe Bates' piece comes from the poem Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915) by the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). A print of the poem hung above Bates' piano while he composed his piece, and he says it seeped into his writing.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Stevens' poem – based upon the story of Susanna and the Elders from the Bible Book of Daniel – is profoundly sensual and full of musical allusions. It is a form of ‘genuine verbal music’, according to the poet Janet McCann – music is turned into words, words are turned into music.

The line Bates has chosen for his title comes from the poem’s second part. Susanna, who has been bathing in her garden, stands naked on the bank; unbeknownst to her she is watched by two elders, who attempt to blackmail her. Although there are explicit musical references at this point in Stevens’ poem text – a cymbal crash and ‘roaring horns’ – Bates wisely avoids a literal rendition. Instead, he evokes something of the perfumed evening air with richly orchestrated waves of rising arpeggios and scales, using quartertones in several instruments to add a further layer of colour.

Elsewhere in the piece bassoon and cor anglais are asked to play approximately one twelfth of a tone flat: a very small alteration in pitch, but enough to produce a characteristic ‘beating’ effect that thickens the tone somewhat like certain electric organs do. Only in the last few bars is the spell broken as the predominant motion shifts downwards before a brief, hushed coda closing passage.

^{Note by Tim Rutherford-Jones}

On our blog: Joe Bates Woolgar gives us an insight into Muted the Night.

_{Jonathan Woolgar}
PROTO-SYMPHONY

Three and a half minutes is not enough time in which to fit several movements of a symphony. But what about just their beginnings? Something like this idea lies behind Jonathan Woolgar’s PROTO-SYMPHONY, a grand symphony in its smallest possible form. The effect is double-edged: the 200-odd seconds of the piece itself are rather compressed, almost ‘manic’ in the composer’s words. Yet the music seems also to be very much larger, as if by writing so little, Woolgar has given us great expanses that our minds fill in.

Each ‘movement’ starts confidently enough, but within just a page or so they each quickly fizzle out, leaving hanging the beginning of an idea that the next section attempts to build upon: it’s a symphonic logic, but without the symphony itself; a shadow-play of a grand narrative. A bold opening dissolves into the briefest moment for the violas, gives way to a scherzo that is sustained for a mere eight bars, and is followed by an aborted adagio, an attempt to revive the scherzo (more successfully, this time), and a slow conclusion. In the spirit of open-endedness, the work does not even finish with the customary double barline, but a violin solo that is cut off just as it gets going. ‘The piece isn’t unfinished or to be continued’, explains Woolgar, ‘but it doesn’t resolve fully or completely either – it’s left suspended, almost in a comic way as if to mock the piece’s (intentional) delusions of grandeur’.

_{Note by Tim Rutherford-Jones}

On our blog: Jonathan Woolgar gives us an insight into PROTO-SYMPHONY.

_{Louise Drewett}
The Daymark

The starting materials of Louise Drewett’s The Daymark are outwardly very simple indeed: a seven-note descending scale in D major, played initially by a trio of bassoons. Yet what Drewett 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 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. Twenty-four 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.

^{Note by Tim Rutherford-Jones}