SHAKER LOOPS

“Memory’s gaze should not remain exclusively retrospective,” Jeremy Eichler writes in Time’s Echo, a book about the musical memorials created by Shostakovich, Britten, Strauss and Schoenberg. “What we choose to remember is also what we preserve, and what we preserve can be built upon… the memorialist is a historian, angled toward the future.”

Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Terra Memoria’, bearing the dedication “for those departed,” adds to this theme of afterlife: “Those of us who are left behind are constantly reminded of our expe­riences together: our feelings continue to change about different aspects of their person­ality, certain memories keep on haunting us in our dreams.”

This in turn, informed the way that Saariaho treated musical material in her second quartet, appearing some twenty years after her first. Some themes are established as constant, like unshakeable memories: a person’s outline, a particular look in their eye, a way they made you feel. Other themes develop and resolve through contestation, as if they were names, dates, movements, motives.

Performing ‘Terra Memoria’ today is a particularly meta thing: Saariaho, who died in 2023, becomes one of the departed devotees. There are also a lot of similarities between this and her first quartet, Nymphéa, particularly in the continuation of musical argument: Saariaho was fascinated with the timbres and textures available to string players, like trills, tremolandos, and bowing techniques such as playing at the bridge or fingerboard of the instrument (creating a scratchy and airy tone respectively). It’s exciting, diverting music that moves speedily between musical moods—delicate, sweet, expressive, mysterious, energetic, heartfelt, calm, mysterious—with arresting intensity.

HUGH MORRIS

In the Christian liturgy, ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ stresses the need for spiritual guidance and inspiration. A gracious, mellifluous hymn usually attributed to the 9th-century monk Rabanus Maurus, its musical settings are numerous, perhaps most famously by Gustav Mahler in the first movement of his Eighth Symphony. The hymn is traditionally sung at Pentecost, the Christian celebration that remembers the pouring out of the Holy Spirit onto the Apostles and the Virgin Mary.

This short, free-flowing arrangement by Rakhi Singh begins with the solo melody, intact as a whole across the ensemble but splintered at various stages. The texture thins, to a solo voice and drone accompaniment, rubbing up against each other in chromatic half steps to create brief moments of friction. The changes of notes go from precisely divided to connected, the strings sliding between each note, before returning to clean; muddy to crisp. Gradually, harmony becomes the focus over melody, more a hymn than a single chant, and voices are added, improvising over looped progressions. Melody returns as the focal point of the close, as Singh builds “a cacophony of fragments” from shards of this ancient tune.

HUGH MORRIS

John Adams, ‘Shaker Loops’

String septet/string orchestra, 1978

Imagine believing in something so hard that it causes you to shake with ecstasy. The Shakers, a pacifist Christian sect formed in the North West town of Bolton in the 18th century, certainly weren’t the first to be struck down with these moments of ecstatic devotion. (If you want an interesting Wikipedia rabbit hole, have a search for St John’s Dance, the dancing plague of the Middle Ages that caused adults and children to move so much that they eventually dropped down dead.) But, rather than a hedonistic mania, a glance at historic recreations of Shaker services today reveals something altogether more coordinated, somewhere between line dancing and Morris dancing.

So John Adams’ ‘Shaker Loops’ begins with fast, shaking, yet contained motions. But perhaps it’s more instructive to note that this piece began as a piece titled ‘Wavemaker’, featuring “long sequences of oscillating melodic cells that created a rippling, shimmering complex of patterns like the surface of a slightly agitated pond or lake.” This makes more sense when this ecstatic energy dissipates in the second movement, ‘Hymning Slews’. Loud chattering morphs into lone cries—a perspective change. The music chugs back to life, as if reenergised by a period of introspection, and concludes with more of Adams’ shaken, stirring music.

HUGH MORRIS

Christ Bryan’s Instagram bio reads: GOD ART SEX DEATH. With a name like his, it’s perhaps obvious that the North West-based poet and performance artist has a preoccupation with themes of faith, but, of late, this has come to the forefront of his practice. Notwithstanding the idols, crosses, and Catholic-coded fug of his workplace, The White Hotel, recent Bryan creations have included his prophetic spoken contribution to the Rainy Miller album Joseph, What Have You Done, and The Book of Abundance, a poetry collection written during Bryan’s pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. Who better then, to tie a modern spiritual malaise to the North West’s eccentric faith traditions, and propose a vaguely hopeful future.

HUGH MORRIS

ACT I; GENESIS

the towns waters are no longer used for baptism
crucified new to the crux of commerce
see the river slowens, see the river blackens
soon the space between the houses will closen 

not long since bodies still swung
limpen from the neck
over a lame lamb, beer turned sour, a daughter disappeared 

when folk trusted in the wildness of their own visions
that come in raids over ginnel walls
or in float fastened fog atop moorland peat
awaiting the seekers witness
scythes open the smog and the suffering
before the coming provocation of concrete 

a study in discovering sustenance together
be pulled towards one another
in shared seeking dissatisfaction
to unearth those languages that exist beyond these words
in spare rooms where no rooms are spare
heads blown, limbs flailing
the heart awash with the whole of it 

when new things are birthed
from being torn from another
Ann Lee; The Seer
Ann Lee; God The Mother

ACT II; EXODUS

the provocation of concrete is now in bloom
the endless bankrupt brick blossom
building torn from meaning like a demolition
married now in the era
of weights & of measures
calculators held clasped like prayed hands
turned to the architecture of God
the mathematics of music
and ask 

what happens once the shaking ends?
the old stories; swapped
for the nag of notification
laconic sabbaths in shopping cathedrals
one hundred thousand aeroplanes
whip the heavens constant
atop an ever searching sea of weekend

nature itself; the wars frontier
demand an eye that never blinks
bloodied tears fall and stain the shirt
as we pick at the loose stitching
pulling threads between thumb and nail
worked fibres rebecoming cotton bale

ACT III; REVELATION

Nights silvery starts melt in the mornings soft blushes
6am the city still i feast on its waking cinema like breakfast
The sun gilds the hills in golden ecru edging
Sedate estate air lined in ruby brick brushstroke 

We gracefully share of lifes bounties external
Bored spectral shadows glide noiseless away
Glazen the moors where the early mist lay
Come like a day dream, nor yet come to stay 

Great oak waves stoic in the towns cobbled square
Our natures swathed in their deep reverent hushes
Awakes to the call of the woodland and meadow
Call to our loved ones and recall those now breathless
Echoing the eternal parade of the seasons 

From brook and from fountain come voices of welcome
To look beyond to that region where the supernatural lay
Where beameth forever a beautiful day

Poet’s Notes

In creating this small suite of poems, I wished to produce something that was conceptually close to Adams’ piece, touching on his desire to explore languages beyond words, such as the transcendental power of music and also bringing in the Shakers themselves, an 18th-century religious movement born out of Industrial Revolution Lancashire.

The subject matter has been fertile ground for me as a writer; God, my hometown county of Lancashire and my somewhat side-eyed take on the malaise of modernity have all been intrinsic to much of my work so far.

‘Shaker Loops’ is a piece of music I’m very fond of, and out of respect for the music and also out of respect for the audience, I wanted to ensure the piece was the main focus. So my overriding wish was for brevity in my words and the mission, really, has been to do the subjects justice in the small windows for words I found in the music – I shall let you, as an audience, be the judge of whether the mission was a success or not.

‘ACT I’ is situated in the heart of 18th-century industrial Lancashire and introduces the Shaker story. It ends with the figure of Ann Lee, the original founder of the Shakers.   

‘ACT II’ is situated more in the present day and remarks on the spiritual malaise of modernity and on materialism of all forms – theological, philosophical and economical.

On beginning my research for this project, I discovered a close friend of mine had actually visited the last ever Shaker community a couple of times and he lent me a Shaker hymnal book he was given from Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. ‘ACT III’ is my own reworking of an original Shaker hymn, ‘A Beautiful Day’. It was wonderful to end on a positive note and work with some original Shaker material – I think it provides a lovely arc to the suite of work.

I think each piece is quite different in its style, which is not something I’d ever usually entertain but seeing as classical music is sometimes composed of movements, often very different in their energy and key, I felt this gave me the freedom to be a little looser in my approach too.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy listening.

© Christ Bryan