Places We Know

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Missy Mazzoli You Know Me From Here 16”
Oliver Leith will o wisp – World Premiere 18”

Zoë Beyers Violin
Sini Simonen Violin
Simmy Singh Violin
Magdalena Riedl Violin
Jonathan Martindale Violin
Donald Grant Violin
Lily Whitehurst Violin
Anna Tulchinskaya Violin
Julia Sandros-Alper Violin

Ruth Gibson Viola
Lucy Nolan Viola
Christine Anderson Viola
Christian Elliott Cello
Peggy Nolan Cello
Rebecca Knight Cello
Clara Hope Simpson Cello
Hugh Kluger Double Bass

It’s coming on Christmas, and, rail-strikes permitting, people will soon be returning to their familiar routines, battling their way across the country to try and find a few days of collective recuperation. Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 piece for the Kronos Quartet suggests a soundtrack to that experience: beginning with a trek through chaos (‘Lift Your Fists’), a pause to realise loneliness (‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’), and eventually arriving in a place of security (‘You Know Me From Here’).

‘You Know Me From Here’ is a piece of musical psychogeography – a sonic description of the psychological feeling of places, and how those feelings change with travel. “At its core,” Mazzoli writes, it‘s “music about loss, but in the most positive sense,” about losing your old self and the beauty of finding solace in something new. After a period of wistful isolation in the middle movement, the gestures from the first movement return renewed in the third: less chaotic than before, more focused too. A glow-up in musical form? Maybe.

HUGH MORRIS

I. Lift Your Fists
II. Everything That Rises Must Converge
III. You Know Me From Here

Sitting in lockdown, thinking about people and socialising, Oliver Leith concluded that in this part of the world, “we’re all fermented souls.” The North European tradition of sitting in dark hovels, consuming any number of fermented foodstuffs, making up silly stories and playing happy/sad music is well-established, and popular. “It’s an alluring world, that is sort of disgusting,” he says. Leith often writes music in and about that hyper-emotional state: “that warm buzz of confusion, where everything’s in lag.”

One folkloric idea that probably comes from people stumbling home from the pub is the will-o’-the-wisp, a phantom light over the moorlands that offers passing hope to observers. Leith’s work is equally fleeting, built on murmuring, swelling gestures that come in and out of focus, but which never definitively arrive at either state. It’s an approach to composing that leans into ideas around folkloric mythmaking; yet when it reaches its closest folky moment – a patchwork jig in the third movement – that idea is quickly buried under various versions of itself. Leith’s abstract score is like sand through a clasped fist: grasp it with it too much force and it runs away, but let it just sit there, and you might feel its presence more deeply.

HUGH MORRIS

I. boom push fairy spook
II. rot spook
III. magic
IV. knot face

Dumbarton Oaks is a big country-house estate in Washington D.C. that has supported composers from Joan Tower to Igor Stravinsky over the years. For their 75th anniversary celebrations, Shaw was commissioned to write something about the place. But instead of responding to the grand, bourgeois interior, she decided to go outside.

The phrase ‘plan and elevation’ is familiar for any budding home renovators. Here, the two ways of looking at an architectural structure – from a bird’s eye view and a sideview – becomes a gentle metaphor for life endeavours: “Often, the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan,” the composer says.

But, as well as describing these structures, ‘Plan & Elevation’ also becomes an exercise in placing her own voice in these places. Shaw fans will recognise references to her own quartets ‘Valencia’ and ‘Entr’acte’ in ‘The Cutting Garden’, rubbing up alongside snippets of Ravel and Mozart (Shaw is a violinist and singer as well as a composer, and conversations between those three backgrounds punctuate her work). The result is unabashedly tonal, yet surprisingly fragile, ending under ‘The Beech Tree’ in her favourite corner of the gardens.

HUGH MORRIS

Why does the name ‘Shostakovich’ mean so much in music? Here’s my theory.

People generally know about the DSCH motif, a pattern of notes that spell out part of his name, which he carved into a lot of his compositions (if you’re hearing it for the first time, listen carefully to the opening idea, and see if you can trace it through the piece). 

But there’s something particularly interesting about how that sequence of notes feels. Film fans will know the ‘Dies Irae’ chant, the ominous sound that prefigures the demise of characters in The Shining and Sweeney Todd. The DSCH motif is similar: tightly restricted, uncomfortable, as much about its musical shape as the specific pitches. So, when Shostakovich gets a bit verbose – like the huge opening movements of his symphonies – what binds them together is this signature gesture. Regardless of the notes, *rest* dun dun dun dunnnn tethers us to a person, a place, and a bigger musical structure. It’s a stroke of genius.

The Chamber Symphony, based on his 8th String Quartet (dedicated “to the victims of fascism and the war”), is Shostakovich at his most anguished. The second movement is fast and feverish, similar to the unhinged fury of his 10th Symphony, but it’s surrounded by slow, bleak, even more terrifying strains.

HUGH MORRIS

I. Largo
II. Allegro
III. Allegretto
IV. Largo
V. Largo

Oliver Leith’s new work has been co-commissioned by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and is funded by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants and the RVW Trust.