Can we transcend our classical past?
Violinist Rakhi Singh. Photo: César Vásquez Altamirano
Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years and I think we all carry our ancestors in ourselves. We don’t need to be afraid of the past, but we also shouldn’t fear the future. It comforts me to take a piece of music from before and align or juxtapose it with something from the present. Finding connections makes me feel like I understand the world and my place within it a little bit better.
Sometimes it feels like our musical history and traditions can cast a very long shadow, but I’ve never really felt constrained by performance conventions. Actually, I lie, I’ve felt very constrained in the past but am increasingly realising the importance of challenging our own patterns of thought and habit. It’s the ongoing quest of all artists – to keep asking ‘why?’
Mixing old and new music tends to happen quite a lot in Manchester Collective shows, and now, in our recording projects too. Often, my goal is to cover a huge spectrum of emotional experience within a programme, and a varied repertoire can help with that. For The Centre is Everywhere tour in 2019, I wanted to explore the relationship between Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and Ligeti’s ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’ and so created my own musical collage. Further sculpting led to the Ligeti and Vivaldi becoming fused together by Bach chorales and specially commissioned vignettes by Paul Clark. I can’t really describe how this compilation came about aside from listening, thinking and feeling. This programme gave us the inspiration for Manchester Collective’s upcoming debut EP.
The way I approach music is often emotionally-led. I value learning about the music we play, but I’d never go about programming in a purely academic way because it’s easy to end up with a musical product that doesn’t excite me that much. When I am listening to music, I’m always observing how it makes me feel and how to translate that into something three-dimensional through curation. I’ll latch onto a strong feeling or fact that evokes an atmosphere, then try and build something around that.
When we begin work on a new programme, I start by studying a piece. I love looking at scores; they are beautiful things in and of themselves, even before you’ve heard a note of the actual music. You begin to see shapes and forms; you notice that the score is breathing and hear it come alive in your head. It’s then about taking the dots out of the page and shaping them into an organism. Throughout this process, I think a lot about energy flow. Each piece has its own flow of stopping and starting, times when the music moves forwards, and times when it looks back. I also think about character – what’s the mood here, am I feeling happy, or elated? As musicians, we look for the different emotions we are putting into the sound and then by doing that, the performance starts to sound different.
For me, it’s knowing whether to go with your brain, and when to follow your heart. Ultimately, we want to speak to people from the heart, so the heart usually leads, and then the brain compiles and builds. It can’t help itself…
Rakhi Singh is the co-founder and Music Director of Manchester Collective.