Voice of the Whale

Setlist

Molly Joyce High and Low
Alex Groves Curved Form (St Endellion)
Andrew Hamilton In Beautiful May
George Crumb Vox Balaenae

Line-up

Alex Jakeman Flute
Siwan Rhys Piano
Donald Grant Violin
Nathaniel Boyd Cello
Joe Reiser Live sound / live electronics

Molly Joyce ‘High and Low’

About ten seconds into my first experience of Molly Joyce’s ‘High and Low’, I knew we had to programme it. In many ways, it’s not an obvious choice for a Manchester Collective programme – it’s a solo work for a start, and we tend to perform chamber or orchestral pieces. But there’s something about the energy of this piece… it’s colossal and addictive. You hear it and you want to be near it. To soak up that resonance, to feel it seeping into your body.

This happens more than you might think. You programme a work because you just have to hear it live – you need that sugar rush. You can sense the potential high in a recording, but it’s never the same until you’re in the room.

Molly is a remarkable woman. As a result of a car accident, she has an impaired left hand, and much of her musical work is concerned with disability as a source of creative energy. Rakhi (our Music Director) and I once heard her play a live set in a noisy club in Rotterdam, just her and and an electric, vintage toy organ. Her performance that night had this same sense of tightly coiled energy. We chatted to her, and then the next morning we did some light googling, and then we found ‘High and Low’. And now here we are.

Alex Groves ‘Curved Form (St Endellion)’

‘Curved Form (St Endellion)’ isn’t about highs or lows – it’s about the line through the middle. Alex Groves’ work, commissioned by Manchester Collective in 2019, is a very visual piece – it’s about the line of the horizon over the sea, fading in and out of sight, viewed from a clifftop on the Cornish coast. To my ear, there’s something very impressionistic about ‘Curved Form’; it’s a musician’s memory of the rain and the mist, the cloud cover and the sea spray. You can almost hear the seagulls circling overhead, smell the salt and the seaweed. It’s music that sounds simple, until you realise that it’s never the same. Like the sea, it’s constantly changing, harmonies falling in and out of shadow, textures evolving. It’s tidal. You can hear the music breathing.

I don’t necessarily enjoy listening to all the work that we play, but I love Alex’s music. He’s written a whole set of Curved Form works, and I can completely understand the attraction – there’s something very compelling about these repeating patterns. I got particularly obsessed with ‘Curved Form (No. 4)’ a couple of years ago. You can find it on Spotify in a gorgeous recording by Eliza McCarthy.

‘Curved Form’ was one of our very early Covid casualties. We had originally planned to give the live premiere of the work in April 2020, in the shadow of the great whale skeleton at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. (More on whales later). Although that first performance never took place, it’s our great pleasure to finally give this gorgeous work it’s due.

Andrew Hamilton ‘In Beautiful May’

To say too much about Andrew Hamilton’s ‘In Beautiful May’ is to detract from the total, bewildering, ecstatic, childlike glee of hearing it for the first time.

What can I tell you? Andrew is the Irish son of a Methodist minister. He studied at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. He teaches composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He’s in his 40s. The title of his piece, ‘In Beautiful May’, is taken from the first song in Robert Schumann’s song cycle ‘Dichterliebe’.

Although it was written in 2008, ‘In Beautiful May’ feels to me like a very contemporary, ‘internet’ kind of piece. There’s a distinct aroma of Tik Tok or Instagram that hangs in the air around the fevered, frenetic snatches of material that make up the collage of this work. Anyway, I’ve said too much. Have a listen and let us know what you think after the show.

George Crumb ‘Vox Balaenae’

We finish the set with George Crumb’s ‘Vox Balaenae’. As a performer, the red flags with this piece start before you even pick up your instrument. The sheet music looks like a cypher, individual parts weaving in and out of each other, criss-crossing their way across the oversized pages. With Crumb, you always have the sense that he cares as much about how the music looks as he does about how it sounds – his writing is dramatic and performative. Even the full title itself is a performance direction: ‘Vox Balaenae: For Three Masked Players’.

You’re never on your own when you’re playing Crumb – the parts are full of messages and instructions. “The flautist sings while playing!” “Use a 5/8-inch chisel with smooth cutting edge.” “The glass rod will produce a jangling sound.” The marginalia are endearing; at one point, he includes a hand-drawn diagram describing how to bend a paper clip into the required shape. After you learn this music, you feel like you’ve gotten to know the man behind the manuscript.

It really is an astonishing piece. With just three players, he conjures up a staggering variety of sounds and colours. With other composers, these ‘extended techniques’ can feel tokenistic or pat – with Crumb they feel perfect.

The story goes that in 1969 the composer heard a recording of a humpback whale, singing deep under the surface of the ocean. The experience moved him to write ‘Vox Balaenae’, his tribute to the ‘powerful, impersonal forces of nature… nature dehumanised’. It’s 50 years old, and still feels fresh.

Adam Szabo