Hidden Mechanisms
Setlist
Line-up
Eva Thorarinsdottir Violin
Sarah Brandwood-Spencer Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Nick Trygstad Cello
Junyan Chen Piano
Programme Notes
Oliver Leith, ‘The big house’
String quartet, 2014‘In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland’ by Simon Marsden is a photo book, where mysteriously composed pictures of Ireland’s derelict colonial-era houses are accompanied by sharp social commentary from writer Duncan McLaren.
The monuments Marsden captures are strikingly political: physical representations of repressive regimes, reclaimed by the natural world around them, while still casting a haunting shadow today. But he sees the buildings as something more than their politics: “symbols of a vast stillness, a silence more powerful and lasting than man.”
Often enthralled by the possibilities of myths and mythologising—Collective regulars will remember his piece ‘will o’ wisp’ from a few years ago—Oliver Leith’s ‘The big house’ takes Marsden’s work as an imaginative starting point and inherits the photographer’s peaceful interpretation of these symbolic relics. His is a quiet, slow composition, where not a lot happens. The movement titles are not literal, rather interesting sparks that turn into characterful studies. ‘The big house’ prises apart a circling unison violin line, and revels in the resulting out of tune-ness. ‘Blue bottles’ is a study on ‘waterfall’ glissando technique, repeated over and over. Tuning and being out of tune, returns as a theme of ‘Home chapel organ’ and ‘Pomegranate’, creating a reality-warping effect as multiple versions of reality appear at once.
If ‘The big house’ has an overarching theme, it’s the idea of composing as an effect in itself: imagine putting a quiet sound through an amplifier with all the buttons pushed— chorus, reverb, vibrato, distortion—and you’re close to getting into Leith’s mind.
HUGH MORRIS
I. Big House
II. Blue bottles
III. Sunshine choir
IV. Cornicing
V. Home chapel organ
VI. Pomegranate
VII. Fish eggs
Héloïse Werner, ‘Hidden Mechanisms’
Piano quintet, 2025In contrast to Leith and Miller, the composer and soprano Héloïse Werner is often drawn to busy, fast-moving textures. ‘Hidden Mechanisms’, a world premiere, continues in that vein.
The piece works on different conceptual levels. On the surface, ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ is made up of five short movements, resembling music boxes, with Werner adding movement directions and vocal lines for the musicians to give the work a theatrical dimension. (Expect hissed whispers, freeze frames, and performers imitating musical marionettes.)
The concept goes deeper still. “I thought about the piece when walking in the woods, imagining all the small hidden things in the trees and under the ground which we don’t see,” Werner writes; all the natural mechanisms that create a functioning ecosystem. This translates, metaphorically, into the composition, which is full of moments where processes, mechanics and inner workings are revealed. This is done, however, in slivers and moments, always partial, and always alluding to something bigger.
HUGH MORRIS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Cassandra Miller, ‘Leaving’
String quartet, 2021Often, you can hear Cassandra Miller’s compositional processes unfold in her music. Through years of composition, she has settled into a rhythm she calls “transformative mimicry,” which involves discovering a source sound, recording it, imitating it in improvised solo sessions, then transcribing the result and scoring it loosely for players to perform.
Miller wrote ‘Leaving’ in part as a fundraising project. She was living on Canada’s Pacific Coast and was bound for Europe for further study, so decided to auction off as-yet-unwritten bars of music to fund her travel. That piece became ‘Warblework’. ‘Leaving’, originally part of the set, stood slightly apart from the rest of the birdsong-based quartet. The piece is “a kind of ode” to the regional sounds Miller would soon leave behind, and aches a little as a result.
‘Leaving’ is dedicated to her mother: she writes of the “unsolvable heartache” of living in different cities, and of writing music to mitigate that feeling. Her first sound source was the Canadian violinist Zav RT, a neighbour who helped fundraise for the move, and whose piece ‘Leaving’ was a starting point for Miller’s improvisations. Her second source was the “warblings” of the late Oliver Schroer, another violinist.
HUGH MORRIS
Olli Mustonen, Piano Quintet
Piano quintet, 2014The music of Olli Mustonen, a Finnish composer, conductor and pianist, is deeply engaged in the language of the classical tradition. In the first movement of his Piano Quintet from 2014, you hear flashes of Shostakovich, Liszt and Stravinsky, all put through a filter of minimalism. Some of the virtuosic flourishes of the Romantic tradition are retained—especially in the piano part—but the filter focuses everything on maintaining a driving rhythmic propulsion.
Despite lacking a subject, Mustonen’s Quintet is intensely descriptive—it’s like ballet music without the dancers. The first movement is not unlike Stravinsky’s ballet ‘Rite of Spring’; a choreographer would have a field day with its bold lines, rhythmic juttings, and impassioned delivery. The second movement still has a balletic poise, but is altogether more mysterious, lurching through variations: melancholic, obsessive, frenzied, wistful, listless, weird.
To close, Mustonen recaps material heard previously, as if obsessing over it might point to an answer. (“It seems as if the music is searching for a way forward, but in vain,” he writes.) Somehow, clarity emerges: listen for the bare, austere chimes of the piano, suddenly given so much space. Rejuvenated, the rhythmic energy returns, snowballing into a joyful finish.
HUGH MORRIS
I. Drammatico e passionato
II. Quasi una passacaglia
III. Finale