Do we even know what we mean anymore when we talk about drones? I seem to remember a definition given by Robert Ashley many years ago which turned away from descriptions of surface appearance to consider the internal mechanism; the exact details have slipped my mind and I’m not going to look them up now but the idea that stuck in my mind is that drone is a form of music in which the passage of time is experienced on its own terms. In popular and artsy genres, working with the awareness of this concept appear to be broadly assimilated into most modern musical thinking – you can work with it or against it, but it’s there.
Does it make sense to call the three pieces in Mara Winter’s The Ear And The Eye: Music For Four Renaissance Flutes (self-released) drones? Heard casually, each of the three rebuffs the ear with long tones held in apparent stasis. Winter and her colleagues in the Phaedrus quartet make the most of the thickened tones of their Renaissance flutes. She has done a similar thing before with Rise, follow, her duet for contrabass Renaissance flutes, but where the earlier work made use of resonant space and more overt interactions between the performers, the three new pieces use a more thoroughly research and composed approach. Closer listening reveals each piece to be a complex essay in timbre related to pitch and dynamics: Hyacinth harmonises its way through consonances and microtonal dissonances through overlapping pitches which highlight the difference in timbre between each instrument. Incarnadine moves the emphasis away from change in pitch to change in dynamics, exploiting the variations in colouration available without needing to move between registers. Smaragd focuses on sonority, expanding and contracting the pitch space between the instruments to reveal variances in intonation and clarity or complexity of tone. What may be taken for drones are really being used as a vehicle to express the flutes’ relationship between pitch and timbre, a concept made audible. Winter composed her pieces based on “historical sources which described color proportions analogous to the ratios of tonal musical intervals” and created a notation that used watercolours to convey variances in intonation. The colour analogy is studied here and applied to practice to produce ever more sophisticated manifestations of the initially observed phenomenon.
There’s a similar approach to material in Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release), a composition for string and harmonica quartet. Again, a drone, but in service of a more elaborate conceit. Løkkegaard draws upon the behaviours of bubbles in collision, how the forces at work may cause fluctuations in surface tension, or ruptures in which tension is released. That sounds like a principle behind a Xenakis piece, but Løkkegaard’s method and material are very different. It may not even be a method as such, more of a philosophical or poetic guide without seeking a direct analogy in what or how the musicians play; despite this, however, the piece expresses its principle through fundamental activity rather than through interpretation. String quartet and harmonica quartet are to be, one and the same: here, Quatuor Bozzini follow the composer’s instructions to play their usual instruments while also playing harmonicas. Both involve slow, constant tones, simultaneous throughout, presenting a challenge for the musicians. The Bozzinis can maintain diaphanous harmonies indefinitely, sure, but those even tones become more fraught when they’re also required to blow with a similar lightness. Despite the references to bursting bubbles, there’s nothing explosive here, just the constant unsteady and fragile balance between pitch and timbre as the colouration of the two sets of instruments clash and the pitch and force of each note wavers minutely. The piece begins in the high register, slowly descending somewhat lower before finding a sort of resolution, with the transition to a lower register bringing its own challenges in maintaining tone, even as the pitch seems to settle. Both here and with the Winter album, there’s a tension at work which drives the music, with a seemingly implacable surface that reveals itself to be made up of many softer strokes in combination.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Mara Winter, Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
No Comments »
Clara de Asís & Mara Winter
Wednesday 21 October 2020
Another product of this year’s lockdown and enforced isolation is the first release on a new label based in Basel, named Discreet Editions. Rise, follow is an hour-long composition by Mara Winter for two bass Renaissance flutes, recorded in April this year. The material of the piece is very austere, yet Winter and Johanna Bartz play with the type of concentration that keeps the sound constantly alive to the discovery of new details. The two alternate in overlapping, long-held tones, taking a long time to feel any need to add a second pitch. The music gradually opens out into a widening range of consonant harmonies, in a similar manner to a La Monte Young piece. The difference here is in the way Winter and Bartz happen upon harmonics and sonorites inside the resonant recording space and allow them to develop, feeling out the sound with small adjustments in their articulation and breath. Subtle variations in timbre and overtones become the substance of the music. The recording venue is the 500-year-old Kartäuserkirche in Basel, which comes across here as a cavernous space which is steadily filled by Winter’s elemental compositional framework. The two recorders sound huge and their combined tones with the church’s resonance create a deep, oversaturated sound from humble resources.
Rise, follow was recorded by Clara de Asís. Both she and Winter recorded another album in the same church, Repetition of the same dream, released on Another Timbre. Here, Winter plays flute, joined by Asís on percussion and electronics. Again, they both take full advantage of the church’s acoustics, making it a third player in their quarantine ensemble. It’s particularly clear in the first two collaborations: in one, Winter and de Asís use gentle blowing and rolling sounds that approach the softest, whitest noise they can make, coloured by their gestures and natural resonance. In the other, flute and bowed percussion work together to elaborate on the edges of pure tones. After a brief solo by each of them, the final piece is a solo work credited to de Asís, focusing on Winter’s flute. A passage through sounds like a companion piece to Rise, follow, with the flute’s notes again slow, but here separated. The steady alternation of repeated and alternating pitches here sounds more like an act of discipline than of exploration; Winter plays with a steady determination that gives the piece a reductive force, both opening out and narrowing down. The listener has to work harder too, and gets repeatedly nudged to seek out shape and direction amidst all the reverberation.
