Black Angels

AUDIENCE SURVEY →

Gabriella Smith Carrot Revolution 11”
Edmund Finnis String Quartet No. 2 14”
Moor Mother DREAM CULTURE 10”

Rakhi Singh Music Director, violin

Emily Nebel Violin
Alex Mitchell Viola
Hannah Roberts Cello
Joe Reiser Live electronics

In Émile Zola’s novel ‘The Masterpiece’, the protagonist sees the subversive potential in the humble carrot: “The day would come when one carrot, originally rendered, would lead to a revolution.” The section that quote comes from is all about ways of seeing art – representation and realism, or expressionism and abstraction – and it formed the perfect conceptual starting point for San Franciscan composer Gabriella Smith.

Smith’s piece came from a commission from the Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia-based art collection that prides itself on housing stylistic juxtapositions in the same place. But rather than the open expanses of historic art museums, Smith’s composition is like a private gallery above a high-street shop, featuring claustrophobic spaces of different shapes, sizes and colours that listeners navigate like a rabbit warren. It features lots of string trickery: in the scratching, sawing, strumming and thwacking, Smith pits clean against gritty, while never losing a sense of character.

You can hear what you want in ‘Carrot Revolution’ – my ears find Steve Reich, Joni Mitchell and ‘Baba O’Riley’ by The Who – but there are any number of references, brought together by Smith’s energetic voice. (My favourite part of the score is the direction “ecstatic, raucous, off-kilter Perotin sung by rough, nasal folk voices”). The performers are there to magnify the musical patches they find most enchanting.

HUGH MORRIS

What might thread together the disparate sounds of Moor Mother, George Crumb, Gabriella Smith and Edmund Finnis, past the string quartet? One idea is the artist-as-critic – not only pulling at threads from different worlds, but existing with differing proximities to that material – in essence, putting their sounds on trial.

“It begins and ends with musical ideas that were in the back of my mind in some form or other since my teens,” Finnis writes. “In the process of moving house during 2020 I rediscovered some old minidiscs containing rough demo recordings I’d made nearly two decades before.” Burrowing into his early adulthood, Finnis finds something gentle and understated, with notes of Arvo Pärt or Vaughan Williams.

HUGH MORRIS

I.
II.
III.
IV.

Locating Moor Mother requires a journey into the underground. Co-leader of Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss, two of the most exciting groups in free jazz and noise rap, Camae Ayewa blends composing, poetry and activism. She is “a study in nonstop movement” according to the New York Times. 

But movement is overcome by stasis in ‘DREAM CULTURE’, a new commission for the Collective. “It speaks my want to explore and examine ambient sound works,” Ayewa says, “but it also speaks to the everyday aspects of human life in which I believe humans to be sleepwalking through. So, the dream culture for me is happening in our daily exchanges. It is a piece about the continuation of a dream state once we leave our places of rest.” Expect fragile, sustained sounds and gradual distorted swells.

HUGH MORRIS

Completed in March 1824 as he inched closer to death, Franz Schubert’s fourteenth quartet gains its nickname from the second movement, based on the song ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ written seven years previously. In the space of just 14 minutes, Schubert spins his pre-planned funeral march into a macabre theme and variations, flashing through a range of emotional states, before turning in on itself and expiring. It’s here where George Crumb, writing almost 150 years later, enters the story, conjuring another variation on the Schubert song – marked “grave, solemn… a fragile echo of ancient music” – in the sixth movement of ‘Black Angels’.

HUGH MORRIS

II. Andante con moto

“At the outset, I wasn’t planning anything like a political statement; I was just writing a piece of music,” George Crumb said of his 1970 work, ‘Black Angels’. “But very soon after I got into the sketching process, I became aware that the musical ideas were picking up vibrations from the surrounding world, which was the world of the Vietnam war.” ‘Black Angels’ is experimental music as protest music, that Crumb, following Joseph Haydn, inscribes ‘in tempore belli’ (in time of war). 

Fate, ritual and symbols abound in ‘Black Angels’. To best chart the procession of the soul – from departure through absence to return – the piece is arranged in thirteen parts orbiting a central seventh section, a structure drawn from numerological ideas about destiny.

Getting to that endpoint is a journey through notational purgatory too. Gone are staves that process uniformly process across the page: the score is a melee of sweeping organic curves, angled parts colliding recklessly, and music that hits a dead-end and disappears from view. On top of all that, it’s a technical tour-de-force: amplification is critical, players play tam-tams, thimbles and maracas, instruments are turned upside down, foreign languages are whispered, chanted and shouted. Crumb acts as a vessel for the subterranean rumbles of a furious world.

HUGH MORRIS

I.  DEPARTURE

1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects
2. Sounds of Bones and Flutes
3. Lost Bells
4. Devil-music
5. Danse Macabre

II.  ABSENCE

6. Pavana Lachrymae (Der Tod und das Mädchen)
7. Threnody II: Black Angels!
8. Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura
9. Lost Bells (Echo)

III. RETURN

10. God-music
11. Ancient Voices
12. Ancient Voices (Echo)
13. Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects