Neon

Cities change all the time. Their incessant pace of life can be equally energising and at odds with our humanity – cities can feel limitless and impersonal, but also places of mystery and self-discovery. In this show, we inhabit different times and spaces, encountering voices from the past and present in an attempt to make sense of our reality.

Although you will hear it last, we built this programme around Steve Reich’s Double Sextet. It is a monumental piece for an unlikely combination of instruments – strings, percussion and woodwind – which captures the fast-paced energy and peculiar mood of the metropolis. Minimalist music is often associated with driving rhythms that emulate the pace of our urban environment. And yet, there’s more to city life than the hustle and bustle. Newly commissioned pieces foreground subjective experiences – from reflections on the dying art of neon manufacturing, to meditations on the nature of time and being.

We hope tonight’s performance will inspire you to listen and observe deeply, to find your own meaning in the sounds and sights that surround us. This is, after all, where art begins.

Daniel Elms / Alexander Whitley ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’

LONDON, NOTTINGHAM AND LEEDS ONLY

The Age of Spiritual Machines is a new work for cello, violin, electronics and two dancers by composer Daniel Elms and choreographer Alexander Whitley. Exploring the philosophy of transhumanism, which seeks to enhance the capabilities of the body using technology, both artists have stripped away the technological components that they regularly employ in their work. The soft tissue of movement and music is revealed beneath, irreversibly altered by its past interactions with electronic and mechanical devices. Whitley’s dancers – Hannah Rudd and Jonathan Savage – embody principles of machine intelligence; their movements and relationship to each other informed by the way technology, rather than the human gaze, sees the world. 

The sources for Elms’ tempo, rhythms and harmony derive from his recordings of the hidden frequencies of electronic devices, made with a coil microphone. Once they had been used to create the form of the work, these sounds were removed to leave a freestanding musical structure. Live cello and violin – played by Joe Zeitlin and Eloise Macdonald – are electronically processed, sustaining the tension between natural and artificial. Costumes have been designed by Sophie Lincoln and light design is by Sarah Danielle Martin.

Hannah Peel ‘Neon’

Hannah Peel is an artist, music producer, Emmy-nominated composer, late night broadcaster… She’s also the type of collaborator we are immediately drawn to – someone who carves their own path in search for new sound worlds, operating at the boundaries of electronic and contemporary classical music making. Hannah wrote ‘Neon’ for us in 2021, and we’ve only performed the piece once before, giving its world premiere at Kings Place in London. So it’s with real anticipation that we are revisiting this place of wonder and mystery. In the composer’s own words:

“Neon lights are fascinating – a symbol of the city at night, iconic landmarks that are ever present through smog, rain, in film and still-imagery… Decadent and bustling, yet also with a taste of loneliness. It’s an artform born of breath, heat and a spark. When I started looking into the stories of neon manufacturing and how the once humming industry was quickly vanishing – being set aside for faster, brighter and cheaper materials – it felt like the right story to explore that collective memory. It’s a piece with three distinct movements, almost fading into one another, eventually disappearing into the atmosphere. There is a closely interwoven interplay between the acoustic instruments and the digital ‘tape’ performer, which I hope allows for a reflection on the presence and value of the hand, as we move ever quickly forward in the future.”

Listen out for the field recordings captured at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo – triggered from behind the sound desk by the seventh invisible member of the Collective, sound engineer and live electronics maestro, Joe Reiser.

Julius Eastman ‘Joy Boy’

It’s only in recent years that the music of Julius Eastman has started coming out of the shadows. Writing in New York in the 1960s and 70s – alongside giants such as Steve Reich, John Cage, Philip Glass and Terry Riley – Eastman was one of the first composers to combine minimalist processes with what he called ‘organic music’, incorporating elements of experimental pop and improvisation.

An openly queer black man, who often gave his pieces provocative, political titles, Eastman did not fit neatly into the American Minimalist school. Following struggles with homelessness and addiction, he died in obscurity at the age of 49. His compositions have a particular energy and a sense of curiosity that mark him out from his contemporaries and produce rich, interesting music to explore. We welcome the renewed interest in his work.

‘Joy Boy’ was written simply for ‘four treble instruments’. In the single-page, handwritten score, the composer instructs the musicians to ‘create ticker tape music’. Ticker tape machines – so called because of the sound they made – were used until the 1970s as the primary means for transmitting stock market information, from the trading floor to distant locations via telegraph lines. Eastman’s score emulates the sound they produce – constant, yet variable and unpredictable.

This is the first of two minimalist works we perform. Unlike the Reich sextet, which is almost mathematically notated, this piece requires a certain amount of openness and flexibility. In ‘Joy Boy’ Eastman encourages players to bring their own interpretation – listen out for the use of the voice, our way of humanising the ‘cogs in the machine’.

Lyra Pramuk ‘Quanta’

Known primarily for creating layered electronic sound worlds using her voice, ‘Quanta’ is a departure from Lyra Pramuk’s career as a solo artist, and a consolidation of her classical training into her first major work for chamber ensemble. Like Eastman’s piece, the score for ‘Quanta’ is intentionally open to interpretation, allowing each player to inject their individual artistic voice. In Lyra’s own words:

“‘Quanta’ was daydreamed into existence after I read ‘The Order of Time’, a kind of beginner's handbook and poetic treatise on the very nature of time, written by Italian quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli. His text lays out the fundamental constructs and idiosyncrasies of time as physicists now understand it, but it is also a deeply personal investigation into the nature of memory and human existence.

'Quanta' uses Rovelli's book as a point of departure to explore my own subjective relationship to time, life and memory. Time itself is a character in this piece, and it unravels as quickly as it appears. The musicians interact as quantum particles do, ‘appearing’ only as they rub against each other, each following a different flow and season. Each player must find their own time and meaning, and the resulting piece is an outcome of this game structure, where the ensemble can only come together in moments of blissful coincidence.

There is no universal time. 'Quanta' explores the notion that each of us has an individual sense of how time traces through our lives. This can feel lonely or liberating, depending on your perspective. What may feel like a prison of our own perception can actually bring us closer together, if we can become curious about the rhythms of others, united in the separate-but-equally-true experiences of our collective existence.”

Steve Reich ‘Double Sextet’

This piece is scored for two sextets, made up of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and vibraphone. Your eyes are not deceiving you – there are just six musicians on stage, with the second ensemble present through a previously made recording. You’ll see that the players are working with earpieces: this is because the live performance and the recorded music must interlock very precisely. “It is almost like playing with your own ghost,” according to one of the musicians.

The music itself is punchy and relentlessly driven forward by the piano and vibraphone. Its constant rhythmic changes keep the players on their toes whilst also inducing them into a trance-like state. Although it is a real challenge to perform, the act of doing so is almost therapeutic. The musicians are required to focus so intensely, entering a different space of mind to make it all the way through, that it becomes a form of meditation.

The work is split into three movements – Fast, Slow, Fast – although you won’t hear a pause or break in the music. Listen out instead for the contrasts between the parts and a sense of melancholy in the middle; perhaps born out of a moment of reflection on the incessant pace of life…