PATTErns IN REPEAT

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In Focus: Clarice Assad →

Meredith Monk Stringsongs, IV. Phantom Strings (4’)
Cassandra Miller Perfect Offering (19’)
Clarice Assad Sonic Landscapes, I. Continuum (6’)

Aaron Holloway-Nahum Conductor (Meredith Monk)
Haim Choi Violin
Lily Whitehurst Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Peggy Nolan Cello
Alex Jakeman Flute
Sergio Castelló López Clarinet
Helena Mackie Oboe
Andres Yauri Bassoon
Katherine Tinker Piano

For the past 60 years, vocalist, composer, director and choreographer Meredith Monk has created a unique body of work based on the principles of extension and expansion. Her music has always been in touch with vocality. In 2004, Monk wrote her first string quartet, ‘Stringsongs’, for the Kronos Quartet, the boundary-pushing West Coast ensemble who, over the past 50 years, have been loyal friends of the new. “The music came to life in surprising ways, coloured by the distinctive ‘voice’ of each musician,” Monk writes. There’s still a fair amount of Monk here, though: the rocking, vocal–like figures, hypnotic rhythmic cells, and raw timbres we associate with her oeuvre are all found here.

‘Phantom Strings’ is the final movement in a set of four. The lifeblood of the texture is a single chugging ostinato, a small repeated cell which seems to call every part to action. Notes spark off it, fly past, set alight.

HUGH MORRIS

In recent years, the Canada-born, London-based composer Cassandra Miller has become one of the most frequently performed living composers in this country. It’s worth reflecting on why that might be. Miller’s music—open-armed, the opposite of gnomic—feels indelibly connected to bodies and people. Her creative process translates her instinctive, improvised reactions to source material into sound, filtered by her artistic relationships. And, at a time of division and isolation across so many parts of society, there’s a longing for those relationships that’s encoded in Miller’s works.

‘Perfect Offering’, for chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, piano and string quartet, stems from a typically Miller-ish starting place. Writing music during a long recovery period from illness, Miller turned a Leonard Cohen quote over in her head—“ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering”. From there, she dived deeper into the sound of bells—specifically, a recording of bells from a French convent—translating it into composition through her usual process of listening, vocal improvisation and transcription. Unsurprisingly, this is a work that plays with sustains, rings, and resonances. There’s a tenderness to the work, even though its basis is in an object and its materiality.

HUGH MORRIS

2022, piano, string quartet

As a programme, Patterns in Repeat moves back and forth, from states of constant rhythm to moments where changing time is imperceptible. For Brazilian-American composer Clarice Assad, that swinging motion happens within the space of six minutes. ‘Continuum’, the first movement of her 2022 piece ‘Sonic Landscapes’, revolves around its opening idea: a thrumming, sextuplet figure, heard in the second violin and viola parts. (Think Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, but jerkier.) Listen for all the possibilities it becomes: it’s divided into patterns regular and uneven, halved in speed, and spread between hands of the piano to create a funky crossrhythm. Later, the texture chills, and an improvised piano solo emerges, driving us back into more helter-skelter rhythm to close.

HUGH MORRIS

Cassie Kinoshi, ‘ARTEFACT/AUTOMATON’

2026, piano, string quartet, electronics

The only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Blacks have clearly functioned as both. But so have machines, particularly when anthropomorphized, embodied, and subject to questions about their abilities to think and their possession of souls and feared for their potential independence. As analyzed and argued in the pages ahead, they become explicit and inexplicit ciphers for ambivalences and anxieties about both race and technology. This is even more the case when they become framed as quite monstrous threats to sovereign notions of “man” or “the human machine”.

Louis Chide-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015)

‘ARTEFACT/AUTOMATON’ draws on Louis Chide-Sokei’s concept of ‘black sonic fiction’to explore the Black body as automaton through sound and technology. It’s a space where Black music and sound become modes of critical reflection on technology, embodiment and power – human yet object, somewhere between man and machinery, then and now. In a world where artificial intelligence now sparks similar questions, the piece asks what it means to make music from that place. Realised through a combination of a Behringer 2600 synthesiser and the Arturia plugin emulation ARP 2600 V alongside amplified strings and piano, the piece is electronic and acoustic, simulated and embodied.

This work is also a personal first step toward bridging a longstanding love of ensemble writing with my love of synthesisers, shaped by the work of composer, synth player and programmer Dexter Wansel (in particular via the ARP Odyssey); Sun Ra’s use of electronics in live experimental performance; and the science fiction and music of the 1970s.

‘ARTEFACT/AUTOMATON’ takes inspiration from and attempts to understand these histories – sonic, technological, bodily – and asks what it means to make music from that place.

CASSIE KINOSHI

Monk is among the best-known living composers working today, though ‘Backlight’, composed for New York-based group Ensemble ACJW, is rarely performed. It’s one of a number of Monk pieces that are in communion with the fundamental or elemental—in this instance, playing with the idea of shadow and light. (If they’re pitted against each other in battle, it feels like shadow trumps light here.)

Musically, a key theme in ‘Backlight’ is bitonality: having two tonalities layered on top of each other at once. This is hammered home in the first movement, which sets in motion a ceaseless slow drawl, based on dissonant harmonies moving in lockstep. It reminds me of Romantic Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, and the slow movements of the cart in ‘Bydlo’ from ‘Pictures at an Exhibition.’ Melody lines sing out above; the texture simmers, then slackens. This dirge idea—fate, maybe?—never ceases.

Monk has always considered her voice an instrument. But, in recent years, she’s explored using acoustic instruments in conjunction with voices, or even instruments alone. Even in these instrumental pieces, vocality is streaked through her textures: the quality of the phrases, the manner in which they’re phrased, the way you could so easily attach syllables to their lines… The second movement is a song without words or voices, so full of singing. The final section picks up in tempo, breaking out of the fog of the previous two movements, though never quite leaving that unnerving atmosphere of before. It’s one of Monk’s most enthralling creations.

HUGH MORRIS

‘Constellation’

2023, piano and violin

Assad dedicates three movements to her own personal constellation of family members. This is gentle, accessible music, with hints of Ravel in the first movement, becoming jazzier in the second and passionate in the third.

‘Retrato em Branco e Pretro’

2023, voice and string quartet

Without Antônio Carlos Jobim, there would be no bossa nova movement. Best known for ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, ‘Retrato em Branco e Pretro’ (meaning “Portrait in Black and White”) is not a million miles from the see-sawing melody lines of Jobim’s biggest hit. Assad’s arrangement for strings adds some gnarly late-Romantic churn.

‘Oxygen’

2021, solo violin and tape

During 2020, the failure to breathe was a particular pressing concern. In response, Assad wrote Oxygen, for violinist Johnny Gandelsman and taped voices. Halfway through, those voices seem to lose their bodies, and creep around the background of the piece, haunting the lonely solo violin. Unnerving and thrilling.

‘A Tide of Living Water’

2019, piano

Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836—1896) was Brazil’s premier opera composer and the first non-European to have an opera premiered at La Scala. Much of this short piece (originally for guitar, performed by pianist Lara Downes) reminds me of his work; or, rather, an imagination of what his work might have become if Gomes had stayed in Brazil and continued his passion for lyrical opera living from Rio. Otherwise, ‘A Tide’ shows Assad’s complete absorption of a modern school of modal jazz harmony.