Sky with the four suns

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Arvo Pärt Summa (6’)
Henry Purcell Fantasia in C Minor, Z. 738 (4’)
Benjamin Britten String Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op. 36, I. (8’)
Mica Levi You Belong to Me (17’)

Rakhi Singh Violin
Donald Grant Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Alice Neary Cello

In the 1970s, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt emerged from a period of creative crisis with a new musical philosophy: tintinnabuli, a style of writing taking inspiration from the pure ringing sounds of bells that reduces all musical parameters (like melody, harmony, or rhythm) to their primordial elements. Following a concert of works in this new style in 1976, Pärt wrote pages of solo melodies in his diaries to work out how he could incorporate text into this new musical outlook; a further refocusing of his style occurred, where he’d assign one syllable to one note. He decided to set the entirety of the Nicene Creed—the foundational statement of Christian belief—to music, which then became Summa. Originally a piece for choir, it was later scored for strings.

Rhythm is the main place you hear Pärt’s strictly controlled style. These dour, plaintive string lines wind in and out of each other in a single unbroken span. But listen closer, and you’ll hear the little breaths that give this structure its human form. That breathing begins at the mouth, then drops to the shoulders, then engulfs the entire body. Composition as breathwork.

HUGH MORRIS

Purcell’s collections of Fantasias pose many questions for researchers. Why was Purcell still writing music for viol consort, when this form—slower, more contemplative ensemble music—was falling out of fashion? Who were these pieces written for, and where, if at all, were they performed? Were they really just composition exercises? We’ll never really know.

What these exercise-like pieces do give us are models in lush, slow, multi-voice unfurlings of counterpoint. This one reaches up slowly from below the first section; then, there’s a faster—though no less knotty—middle section, and a long consolidation of those two musical arguments, as this little diversion tumbles to a close. This is extremely evocative music: of big, dusty drawing rooms, curtains opened by staff, meagre amber light, and pain swallowed by pride.

HUGH MORRIS

Following the success of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, Benjamin Britten was the young new star of British composition. He followed it with more work that looked backwards in British history, to Henry Purcell in particular. In Britten’s second quartet, premiered in a commemorative concert on the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death, Britten embraces the qualities he found in Purcell’s music: “clarity, brilliance, tenderness and strangeness.”

The first movement has all of these characteristics in abundance. It’s titled ‘C Major’, but any appearance of that key’s brightness here is rare, as it darts through themes, colours, and characters. Leonard Bernstein’s assessment of Britten’s music—”"there are gears that are grinding and not quite meshing, and they make a great pain”—makes sense here. The only moment this churn resolves is when, in another nod to Purcell, a low drone appears to bookend the movement.

HUGH MORRIS

Mica Levi, ‘You Belong to Me’

2015

You can find Mica Levi in many musical spaces: as the producer for London singer Tirzah; in bands like Good Sad Happy Bad; writing film scores for movies like Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest. In much of Levi’s work, experimentation and adventure is key. But there’s something in their string writing that feels woven into traditions. How much do they relate to Purcell and Britten’s chain of Englishness, or to Pärt’s sparse minimalism of before?

Elements of both emerge in their 2015 work ‘You Belong to Me’. It references much older source material—specifically, a 1950s song of the same name, the kind of swooning melancholy ballad that feels like a Netflix needle-drop waiting to happen. It tears up the original, and zooms in microscopically on a handful of these new shards. And overall, it shares with Pärt an economy of musical gesture, the idea of spinning large fabrics out of tiny fibres.

There are three sections to the piece, arranged in a fluid form. (The musicians can choose which order they’re played in.) ‘Hannah’ is made up mostly of trills, then a repeated phrase played as an ensemble; those two ideas then meet. ‘Jumping’ plays with sustain and vibrato—at what point does vibrato, on one note, become a trill, between multiple? ‘Sun’ is a low-slung texture, with darting string filigree above, hinting perhaps at some kind of sunrise.

HUGH MORRIS

‘Poems of Consciousness’ is inspired by various written works I have been reading recently, ranging from contemporary haiku, including works by Nicholas Virgilio, to the poetry of Anne Sexton. The piece explores how text can form the basis for melodies, particularly through internal rhymes and other phonetic patterns. I am also drawn to the space between words, which allows unspoken associations and other meanings to emerge, as well as to the cognitive shifts these texts provoke, such as misreading as meaning. Drawing on fragments of these poetic works alongside these influences, the work examines how language, music, and consciousness interact, and how meaning arises from both what is spoken and what remains unsaid. The poetry is assembled in my mind as a mixture where the music moves between existing in the spaces between words and becoming the words themselves, as it follows the rhythms of the text and shifts in landscape.

JASMINE MORRIS

Before he dedicated his life to composing, John Luther Adams was an environmental activist, working to prevent destructive mining and drilling in Alaska. He’s often lived in rugged, remote areas: in log cabins in Alaska, or, more recently, in the Chihuahuan desert near the Mexican border. His music is inspired by the natural world, and feels aware of its imminent destruction. But, as he explained to Slate in 2015, he refuses to write political music: “When I’m true to the music, when I let the music be whatever it wants to be, then everything else—including any social or political meaning—will follow.” 

I like to imagine Adams at a writing desk in the very north of Alaska, staring out at vast open skies for so long that the sky begins to play tricks on him. “In the Arctic sky,” he writes, “the low angle of the sun and heavy ice crystals in the air often produce vivid halos, arcs and sundogs. Sometimes these phenomena create the illusion of multiple suns.” These natural apparitions form the inspiration for these four Canticles.

Sometimes pieces need written descriptions to reveal their inner beauties, but this is open-hearted music, approachable to all. These washes are ones to lose yourself in, to bathe in, as fog becomes mist that rolls in and out, revealing something celestial. Much of the music on this programme asks whether its place is on heaven or on earth; Adams turns that either/or into an and/both.