Heavy Metal

Setlist

Bryce Dessner Aheym
Dobrinka Tabakova Insight
Ben Nobuto SERENITY 2.0
Michael Gordon Industry
Sebastian Gainsborough Squint

Line-up

Beibei Wang Percussion
Rakhi Singh Violin
Julian Azkoul Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Stephanie Tress Cello
Joe Reiser Live sound / electronics

Programme Notes

When we think of music for strings, when we think of string players, we probably have something specific in our minds. Strings are lyrical. Strings play soaring, romantic melodies. Strings harmonise, exquisitely, in a quartet or a trio. Strings are genteel, well-behaved, and classical. Not in this programme.

This show is a kind of musical dress-up game. What happens when you force the sound of the cello through an overdrive guitar pedal? What happens if you take the blissed-out music of a ‘string quartet for relaxation’ playlist and put it through a virtual blender? What happens when we pair these strings with their very opposites… cymbals, huge drums, and big, heavy percussion?

The five pieces in this programme are all ‘heavy’ in their own way, and each of them brings something unusual to the table. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Bryce Dessner ‘Aheym’

Aheym means ‘homeward’ in Yiddish, and this piece is written as a musical evocation of the idea of flight and passage. Movement is a constant, and from the frenetic and intense chords of the opening through to the more lyrical sections that come later, the music never stops. There is an inexorable, kinetic energy that runs through the piece – the defining aspect of Aheym is not harmony or melody, but rhythm.

As with a lot of fast, intense music, the principle challenge for the performers is to keep the impact and the power of the work without ever slowing down. The only way is through.

Dobrinka Tabakova ‘Insight’

From the very opening of ‘Insight’, with its ambiguous drones and eerie pitch bends, it’s clear Dobrinka Tabakova is not going to give us any easy answers. Chords are impossible to pin down – harmonies are twisted, turned inside out. In much of the introduction, the three string players behave like one large instrument, an organ or a squeezebox.

As the work develops, we hear fragile, ethereal music alongside increasingly powerful material. When we move into the middle section the pace picks up, skipping along, full of nervous energy. The volume increases, notes become shorter, faster, and shorter again. The storm gathers.

‘Insight’ is a triptych. The final section takes us back to the start. Or does it? When we hear the opening material for the second time, it has changed. There is a new power in these chords. The uncertainty of the introduction has been replaced by a new confidence. We finish in triumph – string trio as brass fanfare, transformed and remade.

Ben Nobuto ‘SERENITY 2.0’

The score for ‘SERENITY 2.0’ begins with a product description:

This service offers:

Total, beautiful relaxation
Euphoric, always-on stimulation
All of culture, all at once
The end of boredom

With that dystopian warning, we’re off to the races – and after just a few seconds of Ben Nobuto’s dizzying, utterly contemporary musical collage, it’s clear that what you’re hearing is completely original, and often totally disorientating.

In many ways, this piece is about contrast. Ben talks about creating a world where impossible things can happen – he takes sounds that have no business being in the same room, and combines them in unexpected ways. The effect is often funny, sometimes disturbing, and occasionally both at once.

The music of meditation glitches into chaos. Serious, avant-garde material is juxtaposed with kitsch, 8-bit video-game sound effects. As Ben puts it, this is a world “where euphoria and anxiety melt into one ambiguous feeling, so you’re never really sure whether you’re having a good time”. Everything is bright, fun, and playful, but the carousel is moving fast. Very fast.

Michael Gordon ‘Industry’

Imagine you’re standing on a clifftop on a gorgeous day, looking out over the ocean. Blue skies. No wind. Smiling up into the warm sun. Cut to ten minutes later. Howling wind. Freezing rain, screaming through the air. Filthy black sea, crashing against the cliffs. A lot can happen in ten minutes.

Michael Gordon says that when he was writing this piece, he was thinking about the Industrial Revolution, about tools and machines. “I had this vision of a 100-foot cello made out of steel suspended from the sky, a cello the size of a football field.” There’s something oppressive about this music. The material of the opening, lyrical and human, is increasingly distorted as the work goes on. By the end of the piece, the overdrive on the guitar pedal has been turned up so far that even the act of taking the bow off the string causes a howl of feedback. In ‘Industry’ there is only more – more sound, more distortion, more power. This is music as a self-destructive force of nature.

Sebastian Gainsborough ‘Squint’

Seb Gainsborough is a musician who walks his own path. Whilst he emerged from Bristol in a haze of heavy, bass-driven electronica, his style is difficult to pin down. The last work he wrote for us was a musical treatment of John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ for three vocalists, violin, gamba, and electronics.

Religious themes recur through his work. The titular ‘squint’ is an architectural feature of ancient churches – a small opening in the interior walls to give worshippers a view of the altar.

This new work is a perfect fusion of material for percussion, strings, and electronics. Taped vocal parts, sensual and beguiling, meld with instrumental and synthesised sounds. There is a sense of storytelling in this music, of ancient legend. In many ways, this piece feels like the polar opposite of Ben’s ‘SERENITY 2.0’. ‘Squint’ is new music, electronic music, that somehow feels like it’s existed for millennia. It’s the new, made old.