“I often hear it said that the novel has exhausted all its possibilities. I have the contrary impression: during the four hundred years of its history, the novel has missed many possibilities; it has left opportunities unexploited, roads unexplored and calls unheard.”

It’s an intriguing thought, and one that doesn’t sit well with the conventional mindset that culture should always be evolving in some aggressively unique way. Contemporary music in particular still values the acquisition of new forms and compositional techniques (above the importance of content) even if it’s many years since anything genuinely ‘new’ came along.

For most composers the trajectory of their creative development is a linear one – an unbroken line connecting each work with the next – and I’ve experienced this myself, gradually modifying the way I write as new ideas and influences are assimilated. So I was surprised to find that when I came to composing tangos I could creatively vanish and immediately arrive somewhere else in a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ fashion: materialisation within an alien musical language.

Tango arrived in my life by chance – the opportunity came to compose a new work for the London group Tango Volcano and I just jumped at it because like many classical musicians I’d fallen in love with the music of Piazzolla. At first I saw this as simply a fun and curious thing to do, without realising the musical possibilities it would open up. This first piece, Milonga Azure, has since been played in over twenty different instrumentations, from duo versions right up to an arrangement the BBC Concert Orchestra commissioned for a ‘Discovering Music’ programme on Radio 3 on the history of tango; I was the example of the ‘living tango composer’.

Tango has given me the chance to journey down some of those unexplored roads that Kundera writes about.

Alba was one of the tangos that followed soon after Milonga Azure. I’ve rarely written a piece so fast; the first two pages emerging virtually complete as quickly as I could scribble them down (by contrast, another work of the same period, Spanish Café, took several attempts, and four years, to reach its final shape). Alba was first played at the Chelsea Arts Club in a saxophone and piano version by Sarah Field and Simon Lepper, although it’s more often been performed and recorded by violinists. There’s a performance on soundcloud from a Wigmore Hall recital given by Sian Philipps.

The mood of Alba is one of melancholy and nostalgia; emotions that are central to tango. This backward glance – a re-imagining of the past – is something that has always been part of Western culture. It can be traced from Homer and Virgil, through to Picasso, Cocteau, Maillol, and many others. The intersection of different styles and periods blurs the boundaries of the artwork, producing a quality that transcends the differences of idiom, time, and place. Alba emerges from impressions of earlier violin repertoire, but seen through a 21^st century lens; refracting its tonal and rhythmic constituents in ways that are unfamiliar.

Alba can be heard in Washington this month, performed by Noah Getz and Jacqueline Pollauf (they also recorded it a couple of years ago for their innovative CD ‘Voyage’), and in Cambridge in June, played by Mifune Tsuji and Yukie Smith.

The woodcut illustration for this post is by Aristide Maillol.

The post Alba – revisiting the past appeared first on Graham Lynch.

The harpsichordist in question is the brilliant Assi Karttunen – whose recordings of Froberger and Rameau I’ve really enjoyed listening to – and she is collaborating with Petra Frey (actress), Jone Takamäki (musician and sound engineer) and Pauliina Hulkko (director). They’ve worked together before on other projects.

Admiring Yoro Waterfall was based on a woodblock print by Hokusai, and the music is very much to do with perception: the sound of the waterfall gradually emerging into the piece before fading away at the end. The new compositions are called Present-Past-Future-Present, and in a slightly different way they explore the question of how we perceive the things around us, both as physical objects as well as the contents of our own minds. This can be immediately heard in the opening piece, Present (subtitled, ‘The Road’) in which a strictly paced ‘walking’ motif periodically appears and disappears, being intercut with episodic material that is freer in nature; the mind flickers between outside reality and inner reflection. Past and Future expand fragments of material that were heard in the opening piece, before returning to the walking motif at the end.

It’s always tricky writing music that has a specific cultural connotation – in this case, Japanese culture. In trying to establish a link with the subject matter, whilst not sounding crassly ‘oriental’, I’ve returned somewhat to the musical language of Admiring Yoro Waterfall. But at the same time, the experience of composing the two White Books for piano (2002 and 2008) gave me an opportunity to develop my keyboard writing in different and richer directions, and this shows in this new work for Assi. Within these three pieces the differing harmonic colours unfold in counterpoint against each other, resolving into an overall balance that has no real sense of linear progression. Things change, but without direction or implicit meaning.

Assi and Pauliina will be giving a presentation at Surrey University in April – as part of the conference ‘What is Performance Philosophy? Staging a new field’ – and both Present-Past-Future-Present, and Admiring Yoro Waterfall, will be played then. The first performance of the complete production will take place in September in the new Helsinki Music Centre, followed by other venues.

The post Basho in Helsinki appeared first on Graham Lynch.

Ay! is a Spanish exclamation that denotes surprise or pain; one hears it in the cries of flamenco singers. It also features in the early poetry of Lorca, some of which I used for my choral piece Graphic of the Petenera  where it’s normally translated as ‘Oh’. The piano piece, which is slow and melancholic, fuses a tango rhythm with elements of modal Spanish harmony.

It’s taken a few years for Ay! to find its way onto the piano as it was originally written at the request of Serbian harpsichordist Smilja Isakovic, and given its first performance by her at the National Library in Belgrade. After that it sat on a shelf for a while until the recording sessions for my CD Undiscovered Islands. The original plan had been to include on the disk, and it was beautifully played by Mark Tanner during the sessions at St George’s Bristol. However, once the recordings were done we discovered that there was too much music for the CD and something had to be left out! Given that most of the other pieces were grouped together in sets then Ay! was the logical choice as the one to put aside.

French harpsichordist Hélène Diot – who will soon be playing Admiring Yoro Waterfall in Paris – recently sent me a recording of Ay!, which is the first time I’d heard it on the harpsichord as I didn’t get to its premiere in Belgrade. It’s fascinating to hear the music on both the harpsichord and the piano; you can listen to Hélène’s recording here

The post Ay! – piano version in Toronto appeared first on Graham Lynch.

I’ve known Mike for a few years now, and he’s been playing my music both as a soloist as well as with the Presidio Saxophone Quartet – I wrote the Three Cuts Outs at Mike’s request, early in 2012.

These pieces take their titles from the late artworks of Matisse, which were produced by the scissor-cutting of paper that had been painted with gouache: Matisse referred to them as “painting with scissors”. For me, their appeal comes from the clarity of the images, the way the colours interact and harmonise, and the exciting control of line. All of these things are very suggestive from a musical point of view, especially as solo instrument pieces.

I had originally intended that the pieces would written at an advanced student level, but in the end they turned out to be rather tricky to master, especially at the tempi I’d imagined!

The first piece, Two Dancers, tries to capture the vigorous leap and movement of the figures, the angular exuberance. To achieve this the saxophone starts with an opening gesture that rises through the instrument’s register before releasing it into a flurry of daring high pitched activity. The articulation of each fragment of this melody, whilst remaining airborne,  is one key element of the music; the other being sections of spiky and off-beat rhythms.

The next piece is Icarus, which is one of the iconic images from the collection Jazz. For this I took a programmatic view of the Icarus story. The saxophone starts with a mysterious low melody that gradually ascends until it breaks out into a series of increasingly wild flourishes, before finally falling to earth again.

The final piece, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, draws on the energy and vibrant colour of the Cut-Out. This is the most cheerful and melodic of the pieces – with its energetic rhythms bouncing off from the lively pulses of colour and shape that threaten to burst out from the rectangular confines of the Matisse.

The post Three Cut-Outs for solo sax – USA appeared first on Graham Lynch.