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National Portraits (2006) |
9 Motets in the form of Sonic Portraits, for mixed voices a cappella
In at least one sense, all music could be described as a form of portraiture; this provided that it (re)presents a form of observation/record(ing) of ‘something else’. In designing an intention to make a set of ‘sonic portraits’ of several famous persons, I set about treating a ‘subject’ (sitter) as a painter might but with sound as an outcome and not visual images.
Perhaps unlike many portrait-painters/sculptors, I chose to research my ‘sitters’; in depth, before meeting with them. This being so, my sound-work is made from ‘the inside-out’ and not from an ‘outside-looking-in’ as a visual artist might work. For many years, my musical composition processes have been filtered/shaped by means of forms of visualizations in the form of detailed drawings; fragments of text; musical notations and arrangements of representational and/or abstract notations that test/interrogate formal possibilities before through-composing. I cannot, as a musician, make art-work about a person which shows (via seeing) what a person looks like. But I can make music that represents/evokes/simulates/ a life; a body of work; a collective of ideas and experiences; a quality (timbre) of speech and more.
This, via an elaborate system of research-drawing-experimentation (mainly in sound), is how I have made nine pieces for a combination of voices drawn from (or including) the 24 voices of the infinitely gifted and ‘plastic’ skills of The BBC Singers.
My subjects (with the exception of Norman Foster, who was too busy for face-to-face sessions) worked with me in a collaborative conjunction between sitter and composer. The rest ( and there is a great deal of it), is now in the music……….
Daley Thompson , when I met up with him in a Putney café, crowded an already confined space with a primal energy and mercurial charm. Here is a man fabulously gifted in ten physical, athletic (almost choreographic) skills; a man born (it seems) to run, jump and throw. His motet consists of ten vocal episodes- each a sonic treatment of the decathlete’s Herculean labours. Watching film of him in action, I noted surging, explosive, and yet sometimes highly contained and shapely rhythmic activity, forms of shaped-energy easy to simulate in sound. At the close, however, (and learned during our ‘sitting’) Thompson loves children and grew-up listening to their voices at play in a school-yard close-by…..these sounds….close the motet after a series of vocal events that seek to run in parallel with those of the athlete on the field!
Sir George and Lady Mary Christie, is the only double portrait in the set of nine. In the world of music-making; opera especially, they are indeed ‘icons’ of inspired patronage and cultural invention. It is impossible to make music about them that does not include direct or veiled references to opera. In fact, at one point, I construct a kind of ‘maze’ of sounds, naming many of the major composers they have supported and nourished over the years, and of course, a direct quotation (of a sort) from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But this fabulously gifted couple are also lovers of landscape in general; gardens especially so that the textures of the motet are (at the same time) ‘operatic’ and ‘pastoral’. Why did I choose six tenors for their sonic portrait? Well, I couldn’t resist the two-fold musical pun on ‘the three tenors’! Six sounds so much more elaborate and rich…..full of dramatic sonorites…….
Sir John Sulston, (frantically busy with committees, conferences, and genes – as ever), met me in a Southampton hotel. We talked of astonishing things; of the ‘music’ of laboratories; humming computer programmes and scanning microscopes, but more, also of his love of the sound of sea birds rising against sea cliff faces in northern Scotland. More still, his surprise and delight (when on a back-pack-walk across northern England recently), the plush whisper of an evening wind through pine trees at his chosen campsite. I found him to be an extraordinary blend of the rational(ising) scientist and of deep sensual curiosity. Both qualities; those of the marvels of genetic behaviour(s) and sounds from wild nature are blended in his motet…
Fiona Shaw ; easily accessible on film and via recordings, proved to be (face to face in a central London café), as complex and diverse as her performance ‘history’. We spoke of Ireland ; of philosophy; passions; curiosity- even fears. I’d already (through her recording of Eliot’s The Wasteland and study of her childhood landscapes), discovered a pervasive flow of water; estuaries and lakes. For reasons I cannot remember, sketches appeared, (like well-springs) from Shakespeare’s Twelth Night. In Shaw’s penetrating eyes; a smile and voice of great feminine beauty, avenues and insights (sounds) arose that led me to make a music sometimes angular and dynamic, at other times lyrical and melismatic. What I carried away from the sitting was a collection of affirmations of familiar forms of energy; signs, signals and symbols already drawn from studying her work as an actor. But her art and life is also cast in turbulence and change..something that had to find its way into the close of the motet, benediction though it seemed to call-for…
Lord (Norman) Foster was the only subject of the 9, that was too busy for a face-to-face sitting though we collaborated by other means, and Norman seemed happy to risk my making his motet through my study of his works., especially the sketches. These I found beautifully free and dynamically rich and natural. In a way, his sketches seem to illustrate Leonardo’s often-quoted aphorism, the sketch is all. But in a long and illustrious career making buildings and of course transforming sites (sights), his projects offered many possibilities – too many to put in a 7-8 minute piece! What most excited me, was his work on the invention of bridges. These forms suggested the making of a vocal work that moved from span to span; that rose and fell in arched configurations. But then, there is also the factor of material(s), glass; steel; concrete, all interplaying with time, space and light. There was a time when architecture and musical composition were virtually synonymous (Alberti for example). This was a perfect opportunity for me to test that implicit ‘harmony’ between building and musical form……..
In a winter sitting-room, nourished by a crackling log fire and a glass of good red wine, Julian Bream unleashed a continuous stream of anecdotes and observations about music in general; his love of J.S.Bach in particular. An impressive seascape hung on the wall before me, and to the side, two guitars (still-life) lay in front of a cabinet full of 18 th century drinking glasses. Bream is a curious mix of formal and informal (a big clue/cue as to how to make his piece). His motet opens with a full vocal fanfare; the sound of all the plucked strings on a classical guitar- moving to ‘filtrations’ of Bach (from the ’48)- and on to a kind of ‘blues-cruise’. But always (and throughout the entire motet), reflections of his domestic as well as rural habitat; things he clearly loves and relates to like all else that has drawn him in. Above all, like the music he has so long exquisitely crafted and made, an intricate architecture of form and sonic shapeliness….
Alan Ayckbourn, (we met in a ‘snug’ in a Bath hotel) playswith words- often to imply more improbable fictions. Reading (and seeing) several of his plays, I was struck by a curious inter play(more play) between transparency and opacity; like the undisturbed clarity of calm sea-water and the turbulent murk of wave-smashed beaches. For him, I knew I had to make a kind of music-theatre piece!
Two couples (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) meet in a Sushi Restaurant fresh from a viewing of the latest Ayckbourn play, Improbable Fictions. …
Background restaurant ‘business’ (the remaining 20 voices of the BBC Singers); the solo quartet banters and reflects on the play, unaware of the encroachment of the sea…’there’s something fishy going on here’…….Ayckbourn’s Scarborough Beach rolls-in: fog-horns honk- waves move- words shift and twist.. music moves….
The A.S. Byatt motet is drawn (literally at first) from a tremendous and inspiring flux between elegant complexity and highly ordered simplicity. Her writings (and rich conversations) abound with shape-shifting and experience-altering perceptions. Casting a musical ‘plumb-line’ into her writings revealed many-layered depths of motifs; deluge and inundation; insects (of course!); botanical (a)maze(ment); textual webs and tissues from Milton and Dante; Paradise Lost and hells found. She has, I discovered, a Protean mind, one that can move from experiential desolation to ecstatic lyricism.
Our conversations, (there have been many) and e-mails, led me to compose music in the form of a sonic labyrinth; weaving and wefting with voice/text(s), but closing with a kind of ‘hymnus’, a swarm of bees (and names) and the paper-crisp clatter of dragonfly wings………….
The Stephen Hawking motet focuses on time. Time (since Einstein perhaps) is considered as ‘material’ as (cosmic) matter. Before meeting him, I researched his writings and had already decided to include a sonic-setting of the entire substance of The Periodic Table (such as aitch for Hydrogen), drawing the musical structures from the atomic weights of each element and transforming these into note-clusters and rhythmic motifs. This is the only motet from the nine that uses 24 voices in 24 parts. Like Hawking’s preoccupation with TIME, the music attempts many relativities of ‘states of time’ (complex/simple: fast/slow). Face to face- eye to eye actually, he has a gaze of fabulous depth and energy. I’ve tried to evoke the potency of that gaze in the sharpness and focus of the vocalizations, even trying to make a music that stretches and bends time, as a Black Hole may do in (T)ime and (S)pace. But then we talked of Wagner and Mozart, and ‘ghosts’ of their music are woven into the piece. And there’s more- Hawking is an avid collector of fine art. His motet tries to celebrate his many-faceted intellect whilst at the same time being a form that hovers (as much science still might), between order and chaos….
Edward Cowie, 2006