S p e a k , B e S i l e n t

R i o t E n s e m b l e

C h a y a C z e r n o w i nA n n a T h o r v a l d s d ó t t i r

L i z a L i mR e b e c c a S a u n d e r s

M i r e l a I v i č e v i ć

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S p e a k , B e S i l e n t

Recording venue: AIR Studios, London, 7-9 September 2018Recording producer/mixing: Moritz BergfeldEditing/mastering: Aaron Holloway-NahumBooklet notes: Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Chaya Czernowin, Ayre … published by Schott MusicAnna Thorvaldsdóttir, Ró published by Chester Music Ltd.

Liza Lim, Speak, Be Silent published by Casa RicordiRebecca Saunders, Stirrings Still II published by Edition Peters

Mirela Ivičević, Baby Magnify/Lilith’s New Toy commissioned by the Riot Ensemble

Cover photograph: Francesca RengelDesign: Mike SpikinProject management: Aaron Cassidy and Sam Gillies, CeReNeM

for Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR)in collaboration with NMC Recordings

Kate Walter – flutes [1-6]

Philip Hayworth – oboe [4-6]Ausiàs Garrigós Morant – clarinets [1-7]Ruth Rosales – bassoon [4-6] Amy Green – saxophone [4-6]

Andy Connington – trombone [4-6]

Sarah Saviet – violin [1-3, soloist 4-6]

Riot Ensemble

Carla Rees – flute [7]

Fraser Tannock – trumpet [4-6]

Jack Adler McKean – tuba [4-6]

John Garner – violin [2, 4-6] Stephen Upshaw – viola [1-6]Louise McMonagle – violincello [1-6]Marianne Schofield – double bass [4-7]

Claudia Maria Racovicean – piano [7]

Adam Swayne – piano [1, 3]

Aaron Holloway-Nahum – conductor David Royo – percussion [1-7]Anneke Hodnett – harp [4-6]

Neil Georgeson – piano [2, 4-6]

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At the start of her score, Ró, the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir writes to her players, ‘When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling.’

Ró is full of such ropes. They may be thin but, sustained by bass flute, bass clarinet, and strings, spun out into tight melodic tendrils, and staked by sharp interruptions from the piano, they convey an undemonstrative inner assurance. Inspired, like much of her work, by the Icelandic landscape, Ró – whose title is the Icelandic word for serenity – is a piece of soft but threatening moods; a volcano shrouded in mist.

As the ropes continue to spin out beneath our feet, a sinuous 10-note motif keeps re-entering the space, like a memory or an incantation. Eventually, the ropes become thicker and our confidence – just slightly – grows. Towards the end, the strings begin to assert themselves a little more, with new melodic lines that thread their way amongst a dense tone cluster. The instruction reads ‘soloistic, with calm ease and subtle sense of brokenness’. By ‘brokenness’, Thorvaldsdóttir tells us, she means a ‘subtle vulnerability and fragility … a fragile sense of wholeness’. On the work’s title page the Chinese equivalent of ró, 安, is written. Intriguingly, this may also be rendered as Ann, that is, the composer herself. Thus serenity and a whole, if fragile, sense of self are found to be the same thing.

The music of US-based Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin often deals in forms of movement and the physical forces that accompany them: resistance and release, friction and flow. In Ayre the line is not narrow, confidently centred, as in Ró, but exploded outwards with an almost exuberant sensation of everything it passes through. Towed through plumes, thicket, asphalt, sawdust and hazardous air I shall not forget the sound of, as the piece’s subtitle describes. Czernowin describes her piece as ‘a small window looking, as with a microscope, into what makes small things move’. Moreover, she is interested in ‘what makes tissues of moving noise/sounds into a song’, that is, an ‘ayre’. Yet this is not a song in any conventional lyrical sense, but a study in the limits of song; not song as the free vocalisation of lungs and voice, but as a raw sense of musical line.

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At first the music appeals directly to our senses of touch and motion. A piece of plastic is rubbed against the coils of a low piano string, a bow is drawn across a large Alpine bell, and bass flute and bass clarinet play forms of white noise that emphasize the passage of breath over tongue and palette. Later, as the microscope zooms in, a sort of ‘negative space’ is revealed within these movements’ sounds. A strangely coloured silence emerges, simultaneous with the sounds themselves; a yielding of tension, a poetry of absence. The music seems to take place within a vacuum. This is an ayre with almost all the air sucked out.

These are worlds of sonic fragility and delicate balance; against them the pungent blast of brass and gongs at the start of the Australian Liza Lim’s Speak, Be Silent seems to sound from an entirely different place. Yet this is another illusion. Her work also describes a sort of movement, between one state and another: ‘What is a concerto but a work that is somehow about “sounding together” and “sounding apart”; it is a form that deals in unison and separation’, she has written. Yes, Speak, Be Silent is a concerto, but Lim’s solo violin, played here by Sarah Saviet, frequently melts into or is smelted out of the ensemble surrounding it. The opening ‘tuning’ gesture – the whole ensemble in theory playing the same note; in practice playing a hundred variations of it – is only the clearest example of this. ‘Within any unison’, Lim continues, ‘one can see myriad differences in the weave of each participating strand; within forms of difference one can also see similitude’. The scale of the composer’s commitment to this vision is reflected in how un-violin-like the rest of that ensemble is, dominated as it is by brass, piano and abrasive percussion.

Just remember when you’re in union, you don’t have to fear that you’ll be drained. The command comes to speak,and you feel the ocean moving through you.

Then comes, Be silent,as when the rain stops,and the trees in the orchardbegin to draw moistureup into themselves.

Lim prefaces her score with lines by the 13th-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi:

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Rumi’s poem references connection and union, but it also emphasizes the ecstasy that comes at a moment of change or transition: from an ocean passing through you to moisture being drawn up through roots. It is the moment of fullness just before breathing out, a child’s weightlessness at the top of a swing, the first contact of bow hair with string.

The title of Baby Magnify/Lilith’s New Toy by the young Croatian composer Mirela Ivičević (commissioned as part of Riot Ensemble’s 2017 Call for Scores) needs some explanation. ‘Magnify’ refers to the Magnum opus of alchemy, the process of transforming base materials into the philosopher’s stone over four distinctly coloured stages: nigredo (black), albedo (white), citrinitas (yellow), rubedo (red or purple) – all of which are represented in Ivičević’s piece. Lilith, meanwhile, is a demon from Jewish mythology: she appears first in the satirical medieval text The Alphabet of Ben Sira as Adam’s first wife, created not from his rib, like Eve, but from the very same clay as him. A creature of the night, she is a seductress and a stealer of babies; but she is also, in defying both Adam and God to bring her marriage to Adam to an end, an early and enduring symbol of female empowerment. She is a recurring archetype in Ivičević’s music, in several works taking the form of ‘Dominosa’, a shape-shifting mistress/muse/witch who lives in the dreams of a (male) composer.

Ivičević’s Lilith is more playful: like a child she delights in her raw sonic materials, carelessly, even mischievously tossing them together. Rare are the slow transformations of the careful alchemist; in their place are wild combinations and experimental mixtures, bright and vital with sparks and flame.

Stirrings Still was the last prose work by Samuel Beckett, published in 1989, a few months before his death. Words from Beckett’s text are quoted in the preface to the score of Rebecca Saunders’ piece, as are lines from another text, Company, of 1980. These words set Stirrings Still II within a network of pieces by Saunders that includes Stirrings Still I (2006; an earlier version of the work without double bass) and company (2007–8), as well as Stirrings (2011) and murmurs (2009), both of which also feature lines from these texts. The violin concerto Still (2011) takes its title from yet another Beckett story, published in 1976 as Fizzle 7.

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Saunders’ music often sits on the brink of silence, the edge of nothing: stirrings, murmurs, traces (the title of another Saunders work in Riot’s repertoire). But even in such asymptotic approaches to nothing, nothing can be assumed. A murmur, as the critic Simon Cummings has astutely observed, is not the same as a stirring. This fascination with minute activities on the edge of extinction (or, equally, at the moment of their creation) is one of the things Saunders’ music takes from Beckett.

Another is a swinging movement: to and fro, as Beckett loved to write; now faint now clear, as he writes in Stirrings Still. A similar pendulum-like rocking is encouraged by the work’s unusual construction. There is no combined score; instead each instrument has its own part and a simplified timeline of the whole piece aids ensemble coordination. The instruments themselves are thus not bound to a rhythmical grid but rather to the ebb and flow of each other’s sounds.

Like Beckett’s final work of prose, Saunders’ Stirrings Still II concerns what happens next; what happens after it has finished. The timeline makes this clear: the musical threads are long and continuous until the final minute or so, when several instruments repeat short sections that they have played before, all of them entering quickly in turn. And then, just at this moment, it stops: ‘Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more’ as Beckett writes in Company and as Saunders quotes him. A moment, a movement, but is it a beginning or an ending?

This CD was recorded at a time, autumn 2018, that feels like the cusp of profound social change – for good or for ill – not least in terms of our understanding of power in the public sphere. The music written by the five women on this CD is about many things, but it is also a timely reminder of alternative forms of strength. Speak, yes, but also be silent; and listen.

Tim Rutherford-JohnsonOctober 2018

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The Riot Ensemble is one of the UK’s most ambitious new music ensembles. Our twenty Artistic Board members work as performers, curators, commissioners, and collaborators, creating and producing a diverse array of projects in the UK and Europe. We are particularly active in bringing emerging international voices into the British new-music scene, and since 2012 have given 184 world and UK premieres by composers from more than thirty countries. Our annual call for scores has resulted in almost twenty commissions, many of which have gone on to feature in our growing discography. Our other initiatives have included a Young Composer of the Year programme which, in collaboration with the foreSOUND School of Music, has commissioned more than a dozen teenagers to write their first pieces.

Riot has performed at hcmf// (UK), Dark Music Days (Iceland), Tampere Biennale (Finland), Nordic Music Days (Sweden), Spitalfields Music Festival (UK), and Música en Segura (Spain). Riot has performed many times live on BBC Radio 3, and at venues ranging from art galleries and pubs to major concert halls such as London’s Southbank Centre and LSO St Luke’s. riotensemble.com

Sarah Saviet is an American violinist who lives in Germany. She is a member of Riot Ensemble’s Artistic Board and is director of the concert series Sequence in Berlin. She performs frequently with ensembles such as Ensemble Modern and Musikfabrik, and has held residencies at the University of the Arts Berlin, Harvard University, and Aldeburgh Music. sarah-saviet.com

Huge thanks go out to our generous sponsors: the Arts Council England, Ambache Trust, RVW Trust, Opus 2 International, and everyone who donated to make this CD possible – in particular Nigel Burch, Mary Gallivan, Evan Johnson, Liza Lim, Colin Matthews, Andrew Mitchell, Avi Nahum, Carl Rosman, and Helen Walter.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is the author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press) and a member of Riot Ensemble’s Artistic Board. He blogs about contemporary music at johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com

Rehearsal for ‘Speak, Be Silent’ UK premiere, 3 March 2017© Ben Cube

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