As you may be aware from a previous post, recently revised an orchestral piece for a recording project with the London Symphony Orchestra. The piece - but today we collect ads - is over ten years old. I was twenty-three when I wrote it and less than a year out of studies. The reason to revise it came by invitation. I was excited to learn that the original commissioners wanted to record the piece for an upcoming CD, which is now available as Panufnik Legacies III.
There was no doubt in my mind that the piece needed revising. In its original version, the orchestra struggled with it - and that was entirely my fault. The piece contained much in the way of unnecessarily complex metric writing that really hampered the ensemble playing (as well as some other rather unhelpful barring/beaming/scoring decisions). What can I say? I was young and naive. I was less experienced and I made some mistakes. They just needed to be fixed.
Interestingly, their initial contact email contained the following highly considerate caveat:‘[we are] aware that you may have moved away from this style, so would this be something you’d be willing to consider?’
It is certainly true that my ‘style’ (whatever that may be at present) might been seen to have changed quite considerably since making this piece. but today we collect ads comes from a period after graduating from the Royal Northern College of Music and before embarking on doctoral study at the University of Huddersfield. It is thus sandwiched between two hugely important periods in my creative and personal development. I suppose I’ve always thought of these years as a kind of liminal time, when I was still working things out. Perhaps unfortunately, I’ve previously looked back on these years with a kind of embarrassment. As a time when my ideas and aesthetic were quite underdeveloped and immature. I certainly remember an active move to reject the traits of my work from this time as I transitioned into my doctorate. But now (for various personal reasons that lie alongside the orchestral revisions project - but that’s another post), I’m wondering why I thought quite so dismissively quite so readily.
I do constantly try to stand by all the work that I’ve made - even if they come from a time when I was interested in things quite different from that which preoccupy me now. I say try because such an objective often grates up against my naturally protective instinct - that being to withdraw anything unrepresentative of the absolute here and now. I have to remind myself that this latter strategy is wholly unrealistic. In reality, it would mean perpetually deleting everything older than a few years, or even months (even sitting here now, I find myself thinking “well maybe that’s a good thing?”)
The combination of these things made revising this piece a very interesting experience indeed. On the one hand, it became a process of remembering - remembering my creative interests, instincts and preoccupations of the time - but at one and the same time, also forgetting - forgetting that which came after. I had to revise the piece as if I was a 23-year-old again, but with the wider practical experience that 10 years of professional work brings. It was certainly not my intention to aesthetically upgrade the work in any sense. To work out what I was trying to do originally and then try and do that better.
Such a process dragged up lots of old sketches, memories, and ideas. These traits were not just limited to this orchestral work, but to other pieces from the same period of my early-to-mid twenties, including:
three visions in a grove of trees (2009, for ensemble commissioned by ensemble 10/10)
the temples at ogden and provo (2009, commissioned by BCMG)
this was not a film about a drowning man (2009, commissioned by the house of bedlam)
somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine (2010, written for Michael Perrett)
In undertaking this work of revision, I became aware of commonalities between pieces of this time that I had not seen before, or at least had not been quite conscious of. As I submerged myself back into this time of my work, I found myself able to articulate - or at least see - what I was trying to do back then in a way that I couldn’t really before. In doing so, to my surprise, I found myself asking myself why I had abandoned some of these little quirks and conceits. “Why don’t I do _that_ anymore?”
I thought I might make a little list of these things and write them up here, as a future aide memoire more than anything else. This is not a list of simply features of facets of work from this time, its a list of the things about which I’m questioning why and where they’ve gone. I’m currently thinking about how I might fold some of these ideas back into my current practice - not abandoning any approaches I’ve encountered more recently - just maybe adding some ingredients back into the mixture (although I’m not going to speculate too much about how that might take place just now). Maybe you might spot something in the things I write next.
1. Macro-repetition
In essence by ‘macro-repetition’, I mean a kind of variation, as in the discrete developmental process found in classical variation form. But I think I was thinking about it slightly different to that. What I mean to describe is my tendency to repeat, repeat-with-variation, or simply temporally revisit really quite large blocks/chunks of music in their entirety (sometimes a minute or more). I’ve come to think if this as a kind of macro-repetition, and by that I want to distinguish what I was doing from the immediate repetition (looping) of smaller cells or cycles (although whether such a counter-action denotes a ‘micro-repetition’ is, of course, very much up for debate). This macro-repetition is discrete, rather than continuous. Each recurring instance of the repetition is separated, rather than flowing continuous from the previous as a loop. A more direct version of this can also be seen in the temples at ogden an provo, where movements i, iii, and vi are all essentially macro-repetitions of the same material - the same movement, in fact. I suppose I was thinking about these interlocked variations and repetitions as somehow bending the temporal plane of the music - of returning to a previous fork in the road and taking a different path.
This aspect was probably one of the more self-conscious aspects that I’m identifying in this list. At the time (and also now), I was extremely interested in the music of Bryn Harrison, whose use of repetition (especially growing up in an educational environment where direct repetition felt like an unspoken sin) fascinated me - and still does (his recent Piano Quintet (2017) is absolutely beautiful). I went on to study with Harrison through my doctorate. Whilst cells and loops remain in my music even now (though usually now much disguised), its interesting to me that this larger-scale aspect got lost somewhere along the way. I’m not really sure why.
2. Multi-movement Forms
I suppose that it is interesting in itself that, for a composer who, at present, has not written anything in more than one movement for ten years, that everything I wrote in the period of 2008-10 is multi-movement. I suppose I never really thought of my movements as ‘Movements’ in the conventional sense - they are certainly not self-contained. Often they serve as a means to break up larger musical narratives into concrete/tangible junctions (or forks in the road, to return to the above) which can be easily returned to, restarted, or revisited, as in drowning man (three movements), three visions (seven movements), or temples (six movements). At other times, they serve as a kind of omission - breaking the flow of music that could (in another guise) be structured to flow continuously on to the music of the next - this is the case with both but today we collect ads (seven movements) and somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine (eleven movements) - as if pages were torn from a novel and the remaining narrative is read. There is something missing or removed.
3. Blunt binaries
In life, I’m generally opposed to simply binary oppositions between things. They’re generally indicative of something far more complex being constrained. Yet, within the multi-movement structures defined above, practically everything I was writing takes a kind of exaggerated binary form. but today we collect ads itself plays a typical game with this. Written sequentially, each of the movements (for the most part) takes a kind of arbitrary binary form, pivoting around a central event. Each movement takes up something from the latter portion of the previous, before applying a new arbitrarily imposed ‘twist’ that sends the music in a different direction again. Essentially is a musical version of the telephone game, often played at kids’ parties. The process continues across the piece, until we reach the final movement (vii), which itself (partially through its unexpected diatonicism) operates as a kind of binary-answer to all the movements that have come previously.
More complex interlockings of binary movements take place in three visions in a grove of trees, for example. Movement i, iii and iv are all in a kind of oblique binary, the opposing sections - lets call them ‘A’ and ‘B’ for ol’ time’s sake - being conjoined by pulsating semiquavers. Combining this with the methods of of macro-repetition/variation mentioned previously, the ‘A’ and ‘B’ materials are essentially the same in all three of these movements. More substantial variations on the ‘B’ materials comprise the other movements (movements ii, v, vi, and viii), which act as quasi-interludes. Various sections of this is not a film about a drowning man are also organised in a similar way.
In works like this, I have come to realise that what, perhaps, I was engaging with here was the kind of inherent absurdity in the arbitrary binary opposition. The foregrounding of a kind of rift emerges as the two planes of material collide. It somehow reveals the absence of connection and continuity.
During this time – and long before Trey Parker and Matt Stone produced their award-winning Broadway musical – I became somewhat obsessed (some of my close friends might say unhealthily so) with, of all things, Mormonism (or, more formally, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). the temples at ogden and provo as well as three visions in a grove of trees both make references to the faith in their titles. As somebody of no particular religion, my interest was certainly not as a believer or potential convert (three visions in a grove of trees is, with its seven movements, is something of a mocking critique). Although I doubt I would have been able to express it like this at the time, I think my interest in Mormonism came from viewing it as a transformative act of disruption. Mormonism throws something of a stone into the (somewhat) calm pond of the standard Christian narrative. Mormon theology claims that the Jewish people formed a pre-Columbian society on the American continent; that Jesus visited that continent in resurrected form and will return there at the end of days; and that human beings can themselves become Gods and rule over their own planet.
To read this in Birtwistlian terms, Mormonism stands as an example of ‘a logic that has been disturbed’ on an epic scale. And perhaps that’s another way of reading the final aspect of this period of work that my attention was drawn towards, although perhaps with an altogether less epic level of ambition.
4. Formal Constraints
When beginning a piece, I would often set an arbitrary formal plan or conceit prior to developing any actual material. This material would then be forced through this plan (whether it wanted to or not). In doing this, I would feel as if I was forcing the material to move along unexpected narrative paths, or simply to where I would not have taken it otherwise - or where maybe ‘it wasn’t supposed to go’.
One of my final student pieces Convenient Approximations (2007, solo viola, withdrawn) serves as an introductory example. Work on the piece started with an abstract formal question: what would it be to create a multi-movement structure where a first movement (with a duration measured in several minutes) is followed by a series of tiny miniatures (with durations each measured in seconds)? Similarly, this occupies the work mentioned elsewhere in this piece of writing. And at times, the generation of these constraints was motivated in part by a kind of gimmicky absurdism. this was not a film about a drowning man was born, in part, of the abstract question: what would it be to have a piece with a sustained single pitch (of considerable duration) at its formal core? How could this be set up musically? And what are the ramifications?At the time, I considered the resultant pieces as my answers to these kinds of compositional puzzles. But now I think about what emerged somewhat differently.
Returning to the notion above of ‘forcing material along unexpected paths’, the intent of working in this way was not, I realised, to create a strong sense of audible frictional counterpoint between the container and contents (as has been the case in some of my more recent work), but nor was it trying to remove the conundrum from the problem either. I think what I was aiming for was something in between, of a kind of weirdness that emerges in the answer to a nonsensical question. You might offer an answer to the question ‘why is a raven like a writing desk?’ but it is never going to be wholly satisfactory. And that’s part of it.
Coda
I don’t think this exercise in self-archaeology is a form of nostalgia. At least I hope not. In fact, I think there is something of a self-critical subcurrent running beneath the surface.
I hugely admire those composers who have ‘stuck with one thing’ for years, sometimes even a lifetime. I am envious of the cohesiveness of their outputs and the ability granted by their single-mindedness to track their travels through and across a defined field of operation. I have never been lucky enough to be one of those composers. My output is divergent, especially recently. That is not to say that there is no trajectory. Things that interest me lead me to new things that interest me. And the process continues. But it’s always moving forward. I never really stop to look around.
In reviewing aspects of the work above, I suppose something has occurred to me. I’ve come to realise that it can take time and distance to actually see what you saw. The eyes through which something is viewed are never the same twice. Even if one stares, there are often lateral glances, a wider context is derived. One’s depth of field changes, and what was considered as previously acknowledged and understood is now not no longer what it once was – the thing itself has changed. And that might be good reason enough to look at an old thing again anew and think about what it could be now.
But I suspect everybody else knew that already.
Matthew