SERENITY 2.0

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Bryce Dessner Aheym 10’
Nabihah Iqbal What Psyche Felt (new commission) 13’
Ben Nobuto SERENITY 2.0 13’

Rakhi Singh Violin
Julian Azkoul Violin
Alex Mitchell Viola
Alice Purton Cello
Beibei Wang Percussion
Nabihah Iqbal Electronics (‘What Psyche Felt’)

Bryce Dessner, guitarist of The National, has made a strong transition into notated composition. You’ll recognise his music from many acclaimed films of late: The Two Popes, The Revenant, and, most recently, We Live in Time starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

‘Aheym’ dates from towards the start of Dessner’s composing career. Meaning ‘homeward’ in Yiddish, Dessner describes ‘Aheym’ as “a musical evocation of the idea of flight and passage.” His paternal family were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, and, as a child, Dessner would regularly ask his grandmother searching questions about how and why she came to America. Knowledge of this gives the composition’s constant movement an added poignancy.

In ‘Aheym’, rhythm is king. It’s like electronic dance music for acoustic string quartet: the thing to grab onto—as different shapes, textures and metres threaten to knock you off course—is the constant, head-nodding pulse. It never settles into an easy groove, though; this is music that’s constantly alert.

HUGH MORRIS

Nabihah Iqbal’s artistic career is the definition of multifaceted. A longtime resident on NTS Radio, a regular host for BBC Radio, a collaborator of visual artists like Wolfgang Tillmans, a former guest curator of the Brighton Festival, Iqbal now tackles writing for string quartet for the first time. It’s the latest stop on her adventurous musical journey – from the electronic, club-focused music she made under the alias Throwing Shade, through to her most recent album, 2023’s DREAMER, a blissfully melancholic shoegazey cut, with wafts of house from under her hazed-out textures.

‘What Psyche Felt’, Iqbal’s first classical commission, seems to dovetail with the mood of DREAMER, as if the composition were a B-side or a long-lost demo. Its name comes from the John Keats poem ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’, where Keats’s speaker encounters the goddess of the soul asleep in a forest. Scored for quartet and electronics, ‘What Psyche Felt’ is a gentle piece of music that finds joy and relaxation in the simple calm of its material. Elsewhere in the programme, you’ll hear music on the balls of its feet; this is a moment where everything reclines.

HUGH MORRIS

On Facebook, you can choose to declutter the endless targeted ads by spamming the ‘cross’ button. When asked why I don’t want to see ads for clothes I definitely can’t afford, I usually tick the box that says “this ad knew too much.” I feel SERENITY 2.0 knows too much too: a frazzled brainscape of endless shifts and changes. You feel the disorientating effect of something that’s simultaneously of-the-moment and fundamentally unstable.

SERENITY 2.0 presents a very modern-day phenomenon—the guided meditation—with a modern-day type of critique—poking fun while leaning further and further into the bit. And so, the guided meditation gets roundly blitzed by an onslaught of musical ephemera: snippets of news headlines, techy clicks and bleeps, memes, shouts, whizzes, gurgling. Somehow a tranquil state arrives towards the end, but it’s never clear if the guided meditation has worked, or if we’re all too exhausted to do anything other than crash.

With layer upon layer of internet culture—so much of which is earnestly in-your-face—SERENITY 2.0 transforms from a composition into a sort of hyperobject: artwork, political critique, cornucopia of soundbite culture, and a brave attempt to find a path through the madness.

HUGH MORRIS

Dobrinka Tabakova, ‘Insight’

String trio, 2002

If ‘SERENITY 2.0’ works with a language of stabs and punches, then ‘Insight’, by British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova, works with a vernacular of long, lustrous sweeps. This piece, a study in unity for string trio, is slow to reveal its beauties, and eludes simple answers: are the sounds of the opening meant to be an organ, a brass fanfare, something like a harmonium, or a cluster of veering drones? It could be any of them.

The piece is in three parts, all contained within a single span of music. The pace picks up in the middle, as the music begins to skip, nervously. (The marking on the score at this point is “muttered.”) The third part revisits music from the start: are we any clearer to working out exactly what Tabakova is getting at? Perhaps the act of freely associating in itself. “The title,” the composer writes, “is a reminder that aiming to visualise sound is one of the most satisfying experiences our imagination can give us through music.” Through music that offers few easy answers, Tabakova encourages our minds to be free.

HUGH MORRIS

‘Squint’ deals with some of life's essential topics: love, isolation, finding joy in grief, and female Christian mystics in the Middle Ages.

Gainsborough began with an opening. Back in times when churches would divide their congregations up along social class lines, entire sections of churches would be walled off. A squint is a small hole in those walls that allowed partitioned worshippers to see the altar.

I hear a nervous sensuality in the beginning, as acoustic and instrumental, recorded and live, sung, hummed and bowed all gingerly confront one another. Voices sing an ancient French song and speak in optimistic affirmations that shatter into energetic shards. Around rhythms and repetitions, rituals begin to form, swelling then dissipating. A second climax forms, as spoken texts become mantras, and repeated cycles cartwheel off course. Finally, it cools, and the heat of the ritual freezes.

This is elemental electroacoustic music: only a few years old but already feeling ancient.

HUGH MORRIS