I was treated to a live performance by violinist Sarah Saviet at the All That Dust launch, playing Soosan Lolavar’s solo suite Every Strand of Thread and Rope. It’s a rough and hairy piece, even in its most delicate sections. The four movements were added over the last few years, as part of an exchange between Lolavar and Saviet, with Lolavar applying her experience of Iranian santūr music and tuning to new ideas, and Saviet responding by retuning her violin down a minor sixth, slackening the strings and altering the timbre and intonation. Saviet uses Lolavar’s score to dive into the textural potential of the looser strings, the softer tone of the lowered pitch modulated by guttural buzzing, thickened timbre and faint rattles. The presence of unpitched sounds get cranked to 11 in the final movement (‘Chainmail’), made out of repeated, hacking patterns of double-stops, to the point it dominated my memory of the piece until I heard the recording and rediscovered how lightly the effects are used in the gentle (but still hairy) ‘Fibres’ that precedes it. The All That Dust release is a binaural recording, a stand-alone download.
Every Strand of Thread and Rope turns out to be a suitable entree for Saviet’s full album of solo works, Spun, just released on Coviello Classics. Exotic timbres abound throughout, beginning with Liza Lim’s 2018 piece The Su Song Star Map. It’s also a piece written for retuned violin and exploits the possibilities of colouration, albeit in a less obsessive way. Saviet moves easily between the light and bright melodic passages and the thornier timbral shadings Lim calls for, sometimes only for fleeting moments or in transition from one tone to another. It’s a lovely sample of Lim’s more recent style, embracing directly florid melody but grounding it in denser and darker patches of complex sounds to cast the solo in a more sophisticated perspective; Saviet fuses both of these tendencies in her interpretation, with one highlight being the blaze of contrapunctual harmonics near the work’s centre.
The sleeve notes make repeated references to ‘throaty’ and ‘digging in’, reinforcing Saviet’s relish for the lower strings. Even Lisa Streich’s Falter, made out of feathery apreggios, is occasionally anchored by a barking low note. The most aggravated case is Evan Johnson’s Wolke über Bäumen, a piece from 2016 which shows this composer’s use of extremes to particularly stark effect. The piece demands gut strings, played with a baroque bow, but the idiom is blasted and barren, using techniques that eke out the strange and sour in the organic inconsistencies of the physical materials. To hear the intricacies in each of the faint wisps of sound, you must also accept being battered by the sudden outbursts of violent noise; as a pastoral, it depicts nature in its harshest light. Arne Gieshoff’s spun is also discontinuous, but in a more capricious way, flitting from pizzicato glissandi to double-stops, trills to smeared and heavy bowing. The final work, Lawrence Dunn’s Habitual from 2017, works here as a kind of bookend to Lim’s piece. A deceptively simple patchwork of brief melodies, Habitual creates a formalised unselfconsciousness. Dunn stipulates just intonation be used, making the tunes sound both natural and personal, as though played without an audience. Patterns never quite settle into a regular grid, or even settle at all, and the structure you anticipated hearing at the outset unspools into an unhurried soliloquy of thoughts not yet fully formed. Saviet maintains a warm but contemplative mood throughout, even when the music turns unexpectedly sprightly.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Arne Gieshoff, Evan Johnson, Lawrence Dunn, Lisa Streich, Liza Lim, Soosan Lolavar
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Juliet Fraser, spilled out from tangles
Thursday 23 April 2020
It’s good to remember that music is still being made. There’s a new album out soon by Juliet Fraser – I’ve raved about her singing before. In terms of presentation, spilled out from tangles is more of a showcase for the singer herself than for a particular composer. Four pieces, each by a different composer, all of them for soprano with only electronics for accompaniment. All four works were written for Fraser; the oldest composer here is in her early forties, the youngest not yet thirty. Throughout the disc, electronics are used only to provide backing: the emphasis here is less on advanced technology and more on how it is used in different ways to provide a sympathetic pairing with the voice.
Nomi Epstein’s collections for Juliet is a simple arrangement of glissandi in vocalise, with several recorded versions of Fraser heard simultaneously. Strangely, with nothing but voice, this piece sounds the most electronic: as tones merge and diverge in slow sweeps, beating frequencies and modulations arise in ways that augment the voice into something more than human. Fraser sings pure tones – almost; there is always some warmth in her voice, a vibrato more felt than heard. What seems at first a technical exercise becomes a much more reflective and intimate experience as the piece progresses. Epstein places much of the construction and interpretation of the piece on the singer; it’s a much more complex process than appears to the casual listener. Fraser’s realisation imbues the music with a sense of development and direction, making it sound natural and deceptively easy.
Lisa Illean’s A through-grown earth sets lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins to an ensemble of sampled and recorded strings, bowed and plucked, but subtly transformed. Harp and zither gain a harmonic sheen that hovers in the background, high overtones joining Fraser’s duplicated voice in ghostly chorus. She sings delicately, but with a quiet strength, her vibrato more expressive when signing poetry. Illean’s music often has that delicate quality too, which in the past has occasionally threatened to retreat into preciousness but is redeemed by her interest in just intonation and microtonality. Colouration inevitably takes on a darker, deeper hue and both composer and singer avoid the easier choices. The electronics in this piece allow more control of the tuning and add to the otherworldly atmosphere.
In this context, Sivan Eldar’s Heave feels the most conventional work. Fraser sings with great sensitivity and sincerity “a story of growth: out of the earth, into one’s own body and, finally, memory… body into light”, with an elegantly composed electronic soundscape. There’s plenty of tastefully detailed geological sounds reminiscent of the BBC Natural History Unit at its most accomplished, and I can’t help but feel that I’ve heard it all somewhere before, more than once. Lawrence Dunn’s While we are both returns to the same form as Illean’s work, of Caitlin Doherty’s poetry set to music in just intonation. The unfamiliar tuning is played on purely electronic instruments, with no obvious acoustic model. Just intonation lends itself well to unhurried music, and Dunn’s piece slowly unfolds in a dreamlike haze. Fraser sings with even greater expressivity here, almost like a lied, which just adds to the strangeness when the suspended harmonies break into high-pitched little trills. It feels simultaneously like a very early work for FM synthesisers and something very new.
The sleeve notes list two of the works as receiving their first public performance at Kettle’s Yard on 2 April. Sadly, that never happened, of course. Hopefully Fraser will be able to perform this programme live, sooner rather than later.
