Metier msvcd92104. Kreutzer Quartet, Neil Heyde, Peter Sheppard Skærved, Roderick Chadwick. Produced by David Gorton. Sound engineering by Jonathan Haskell. Photographs by Richard Bram. Booklet notes by Simon Shaw-Miller. Available on iTunes, Amazon, and Play.
Out Now - Trajectories: Music by David Gorton
The Trajectories CD, released on the Metier label in February 2010, represents the culmination of a couple of large-scale collaborative projects. The first of these was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship that I held at the Royal Academy of Music for the academic years 2004-2006. For this project I wrote a series of pieces that each have a ‘malleable’ musical structure; that is a piece that allows the performer(s) a number of choices in how they interpret and present both the surface and the structure of the musical material. One example is the Sonata for Solo Cello, which was the product of an extensive collaboration with the cellist Neil Heyde. In this piece the performer may choose the order of certain sections as well as the placing and relative intensity of the climaxes. There are also a series of choices to be made in the surface of the music, including choices in dynamics, tempi, and gestural presentation that help in the articulation of the larger structure. All of the pieces on the Trajectories CD were written in the duration of the Fellowship, and all except the Caprices have a ‘malleable’ structure.
The second project was a series of residencies at the Tate Gallery in St
Ives, Cornwall between 2005-2007, in which musical performances, improvisations,
workshops, and lectures were presented in the gallery spaces amongst the art
works and exhibitions. The residencies involved the members of the Kreutzer
Quartet, art historian and musicologist Professor Simon Shaw-Miller, and
composers Gloria Coats, Michael Alec Rose, Jim Aitchison, and myself. The
activity of the project was captured by the photographer Richard Bram, whose
powerful images are used throughout the packaging of the Trajectories CD. All
of the pieces on the CD, except for Melting Forms, were performed
at Tate St Ives, with the Sonata for Solo Cello receiving its premiere there. String
Quartet: Trajectories was commissioned by Tate St Ives as part of the
project and premiered there (as was Passacaglia, not recorded on
the CD), with its ‘malleable’ structure allowing a variety of possible ‘installations’
in the large sea-facing gallery.
Booklet notes for 'Trajectories: Music by David
Gorton'
by Simon Shaw-Miller
The music of David Gorton is difficult. That is a problematic word to use, I know, but it is certainly true of the technical demands his music often makes on performers. For the listener however, it is complex, certainly; challenging, undoubtedly; because the task faced is to comprehend music that rarely sits still. Perhaps the best way of describing this marvelous music is to say it is in a constant state of restless evolution.
The composer once confessed to me that he has a short attention span. What he meant was that he likes, and is engaged by, music that changes moment by moment. This means that we, his listeners, have few opportunities to take our eye off the ball (to use an analogy his teacher, Harrison Birtwistle, would appreciate). We have to listen carefully and attentively, focusing on the detail. The results are tremendously rewarding.
Gorton’s music is rich, multi-faceted, tremendously well crafted and, from an instrumental viewpoint, beautifully, idiomatically written. What is surprising, then, is that in its challenges, it is also fun; this is sound tracing trajectories, melting and mutating. But it is not just the sound of this music that is important, and here we have the disadvantage of the CD medium; Gorton’s music it is also dramatic to watch, and often conceived as such. Gorton is fascinated by the physical enactment of music, how sound is actually produced (this in part explains his interest in electronics, options in both his 2nd Cello Sonata and his Erinnerungsspiel for oboe, not recorded here). The choreography of performance is eloquently explored in many of his works. Perhaps this visual dimension is most evident in the work that gives this CD its title, Trajectories, which was commissioned as part of the Instruments of Abstraction events at the Tate Gallery, St Ives in 2006. The quartet is designed so that it can be ‘installed’ into the performance space, initially the large gallery at Tate St Ives, with the players able to sit at the edges of the space surrounding the audience, or in the middle of the space surrounded by the audience. The microtonal tuning of the quartet creates different beating patterns depending on space and disposition.
This interest in performance and its phenomenology also manifests itself in the responsibilities the composer gives the players of his music, and in this he in fortunate in working with a number of outstanding musicians. The solo violin Caprices (an ongoing project, there are 4 to date), based on Paganini’s famous example, are ideally suited to Peter Sheppard Skærved’s marvelously extravagant technique. Gorton often plays on the edge of music, pushing instruments and performers to the periphery of the playable, an approach that places similar demands on listeners, but one that ultimately extends our musical horizons.
The cello sonata and the piano trio Melting Forms demonstrate another dimension of this concern with performers and their role in the realization of the work, through their malleable approach to musical form. Melting Forms, like Trajectories, contrasts frenzy and calm (a calling card of Gorton’s), allowing the players to choose their route through the piece, as well as in their own relationships with each other. The reordering of sequences in the cello sonata, two versions of which bracket this recording, results in works with two very different large-scale gestural shapes.
Scordatura is also regularly used by Gorton: notably in the micro tuning of the string quartet Trajectories, but also to great effect in the cello sonata. Here the G-string is tuned a third of a tone flat and the A is tuned a third of a tone sharp. The work also employs quarter, sixth and third tones to produce a scintillating and coruscating soundscape. Such a concern with the ‘fine tuning’ of sound is what makes this music difficult: technically it has a very narrow margin for error. But, like the thoughtful and skilful performer, the assiduous listener to this filigree world will, in overcoming these difficulties, return with great rewards.
Notes © 2009 Simon Shaw-Miller