Richard Barrett/Elision Ensemble

ELISION Ensemble's acclaimed recording of the chamber music of Richard BARRETT, including negatives ELISION Ensemble, Sandro GORLI conductor ETCETERA KTC 1167 Total timing 66:04 Released 1993

Ne songe plus à fuir (1985-6) 11:13

violoncello solo

EARTH (1987-8) 12:03

trombone and percussion

Another heavenly day (1989-90) 7:33

E flat clarinet, electric guitar, contrabass

negatives (1988-92) 34:35

flute/picc/alto/recorder, trombone, 10-string guitar/12-string guitar, mandolin/sitar, percussion/anklung, violin, viola, violoncello, contrabass

Extract from the Cover Notes

Barrett regards Ne songe plus à fuir for solo cello as his first solo piece; up to that point his work had been almost exclusively for chamber ensembles. With radical pragmatism, Barrett decided to strip the cello of all its "tradition", and treat it simply as four strings with a resonating body, and a certain physical disposition in relation to the player. In short, an "anatomy lesson" appropriate to the harrowing subject matter.

EARTH forms part of a cycle of eleven pieces entitles Fictions; the cycle's name alludes to the creative process, which in Barrett's words "proceeds from fictions which are necessary for the personality of the composer to believe, to make acts of faith to carry the work through".

The combination of trombone and percussion was chosen on a typically fatalistic basis: as a means of presenting "possible relationships between instruments incommensuate in timbre, technique and/or register, by forcing them together into ensemble rhythms". The outcome is an artistically regulated "catastrophe" whose basic strategy "collapses into alienation  . . .  a music hovering on the brink of irreversible incoherence or extinction".

However, Barrett's description scarcely prepares one for the furious vibrancy of the actual music. For the title EARTH refers not to the elemental, quasi-tribal dance of death which this music enacts, but also, more specifically, to the composer's attempts "to get towards a kind of folk music, though not one tied down to any particular place in the world. So it's as if there were some kind of Fourth World with its own folk music. And this is it".

Another heavenly day is the seventh part of the Fictions series. It takes its title (scarcely to be taken at face value!) from the opening line of Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, where Winnie, the only speaking character, is buried up to her waist in sand, emitting endless platitudes as her situation gets worse and worse. Barrett's piece is neither endless nor platitudinous, but like Beckett's play it is a study in progressive alienation: the three instruments' parts each consist of 8 sub-pieces, which rise in register, and get out of synchronism with those of the other players. At the end, each instrument is trapped in its top register, screeching in isolation. Another heavenly day is the first of several works Barrett has written for the ELISION ensemble.

negatives consists of five pieces (which partly overlap when all five are performed) for an ensemble of nine players, many of whom also feature as soloist in one of the pieces. The title could easily be taken as embodying the pessimistic stance of Barrett's earlier works, but in fact that's not the intention (with the exception of the final piece, entstellt). A more appropriate image would be that of photographic negatives, in the sense that each piece is in some sense a conceptual inversion of the one that preceded it (for instance, each piece involves a re-juggling of its predecessor's formal proportions).

However, the primary image for the cycle is that of voyages over landscapes--- landscapes in which geological features predominate, though not to the exclusion of flora, fauna, or civilisation.

delta emblematically starts ex nihilo with a fragmentary, one-note opening which splits up into tributaries: the sitar and anklung are used not to evoke exotic deltaic regions, but to effect an immediate removal from "normal" new music instrumentations. In colloid-E (the E sufix denotes the ensemble version of a piece which can also be performed as a solo) the solo 10-string guitar presents a sort of viscous, part granular fluid, scanned at the highest possible magnification, as if through an acoustic microscope, while in archipelago the solo mandolin is a traveller drifting past seemingly randomly disposed ensemble "islands".

After the elegance of archipelago, basalt-E, whose solo trombone part is a drastic extension of the independence of mouth and slide introduced at the end of EARTH, adopts a deliberately rough-hewn, "earthy" approach. Finally, enstellt is partly conceived as a traveller's return to the point of departure, only to find that it has become a ruin (and indeed, the piece incorporates elements from a so-far incomplete piece called ruin). In each of enstellt nine sections---separated by 15-second pauses---there is a gradual erasure of pitch content---a sort of excavation to uncover part of delta's framework: one by one, the instrument[alist]s pick up unpitched percussion instruments, until only the piccolo and cello are left, defiant, but deserted and disorientated.

---Richard Toop © 1993

Composer's Note

• playing, the personalities, the instruments of ELISION, without which this work would have been unimaginable; as well as Magnus Anderson, Barrie Webb, Frances-Marie Uitti and others that I have been priveleged to work with, and player/composers whose work recreates their instruments: George Lewis, Ray Anderson, Paul Rutherford, Barry Guy  . . . 
• the poetry of Paul Celan: compressed, resonant, poised at the threshold of the inexpressible (atrocity)  . . .  and Par Lagervist and Pierre Reverdy and of course Samuel Beckett
• the Noh Theatre: structure, interactions, simultaneities
• the music of Francois Bayle, to whom the entire cycle is dedicated as a 60th birthday tribute---and standing behind him, Pierre Schaeffer, Bernard Parmegiani, Francis Dhomont, les objets sonores, the forms and spaces of musique concrete and their antecedants in French surrealism
• physical and geographical phenomena, perspectives between aerial and microscopic views, dreamt and remembered journeys (the islands of Hong Kong, the forest and waterfall near Bowral, NSW, the remains of Thebes, Karnak, Saqqara, the gutted centre of Dresden beginning its metamorphosis into a new, government-approved kind of ruin, flights over the Swiss Alps, the Australian and African deserts)  . . . 
• Mahler's Abschied, from Das Lied von der Erde, some sense of irretrievable loss  . . . 
• "All that goes before forget." (Beckett, Enough)

delta

[n. 1. the flat alluvial area at the mouth of some rivers where the mainstream splits up into several distributaries]  . . .  from cataract to ocean/ an opening-up of spaces/ articulated by the textures of the angklung: to Peter Neville

colloid

[n. 1. a mixture having particles of one component suspended in a continuous phase of another component. The mixture has properties between those of a solution and a suspension].  . . .  the 10-string guitar as an instrument of fluidity/micro- and macro-turbulence/dissolving and precipitation: to Magnus Andersson

archipelago

[n. 1. a group of islands. 2. a sea studded with islands]  . . .  sound-objects in a sea of silence/extravagant instrumentations/mandolin-pointillism: to Stephen Morey

basalt

[n. 1. a dark basic igneous rock: the most common volcanic rock]  . . .  peroration/stratification/eruption/trombone monologue: to Liza Lim

entstellt

[a. disfigured, dis-/con-torted, misrepresented]  . . .  return to a ruin of the point of departure/lament of piccolo and 'cello, chorus of dislocated instruments, shattered landscapes of percussion: to Daryl Buckley

---Richard BARRETT (1993)

Critical Acclaim

This is music which appears to have been dug up rather than composed, and everybody who professes an interest in contemporary arts must hear it. But be warned: there is nothing nice about this disc.

--Andrew FORD, 24 HOURS, March 1994

L'interprétation, grandiose, est indissociable du processus creátif tant il apparaît que les exécutants ont travaille de prés avec le compositeur leurs moindres inflexions. Sans doute, l'un des disques de musique contemporaine pour l'île déserte.

---Pascal Brissaud, Repertoire, December 1993

EARTH for trombone and percussion reflects Barrett's solidarity with another master of transgression whose music has been all too accountably neglected in this country: Hans Joachim Hespos.

EARTH's  . . .  expressive strategy is one of conflict "between instruments incommensurate in timbre, technique and register, but forcing them into ensemble rhythms" (Barrett's note). In fact, thanks to the choice of beaters and a subtle use of mixing, prolonged resonance and overtone shimmer are held down to bolster the effect of a `falling out´ between the two strands of sound. When towards the end the `poor´ trombone seems battered by the `wretched´ bells (for there is more than a suggestion of arte povera here). It is in part because their `muzzles´ have been taken off: they are allowed, for the first time, to vibrate freely. The trombone material is impressive in its grotesquerie, even if intermittently dominated by that stumbling up and down of glissando iambs, with their suggestion of anxious breathing, which saturate whole stretches of Ne songe plus a fuir as well.

In any case EARTH is full of humour, in spite of its evident pathos, infectiously black, and utterly typical of its composer.  . . .  negatives is the great event of this CD  . . .  To detail the proliferation of textures would be like trying to describe how the paint lies on a Rothko or De Stael. It takes many listenings to be able to hear it all---or rather to know what else is going on in addition to what one is focusing on at any one moment.  . . .  The titles of the individual pieces follow a typically surrealist strategy, alluding to natural or `scientific´ phenomena rather than the realm of culture, to build a new vision of the world set free from traditional values.

 . . .  delta has the fullest textures of any of the movements, a mass of writhing polyphony that emerges from obsessively static percussion (Barrett quotes, as playing instructions, an aphorism of Cioran: "I have no ideas only obsessions", and encloses the whole with Celan fragments about night and silence) and finally stumbles upon a kind of rhythmic unison near the end, which falls away in an unusually delicate pizzicato.

colloid-E is  . . .  flanked by lines from Per Lagerkvist's Aftonland about the threatening flatness and stillness of sea and strand before the poet's gaze. The piece is dominated by flute(s) and 10 string guitar writing, at times astonishingly diaphanous  . . .  Even the percussion here clings to the melodic lines, drawing them out in eerie arboresence. archipelago with its two especially desolate Celan fragments, further thins the stream to help the solo mandolin be heard---a mandolin dreaming of banjos and steel guitars rather than the stylized Commedia dell'arte of the Schoenberg Serenade. In basalt-e it is back to EARTH with the trombonist once more singing on one stave and puffing on the other, with lots of `Barrett Seufzer´ on both, while the strings play at incompatibility; though this time the effect is made poignant by the shared figuration.

enstellt, the last piece of negatives, is an attempt to solve the problem of the finale in a large scale work; not at all an epilogue or a postlude. To understand the Barrett's strategy it is helpful to look at the quotations  . . .  On the title page stands this passage from Rien by Pierre Reverdy:

Le monde s'efface
       au point ou je disparaitrai
tout s'est eteint
 
Il n'y a meme plus de place
pour les mots que je laisserai
 
 
(The world fades away
       to the point where I shall disappear
all is snuffed out
 
There isn't even room now
for the words I leave behind me)

And in a blank before the double bar this fragment of Paul Celan:

du
du lehrst
lehrst deine Hande
du lehrst deine Hande du lehrst
du lehrst deine Hande
                     schlafen
 
(you
you teach
you teach your hands
you teach your hands you teach
you teach your hands
                    to sleep)

The result is a music in constant deconstruction, were it not for drifts of silence that rub out the sounds as the wind wears away a stone inscription. There are 15 such hiatuses in this chronicle of dissolution. Each time the music resumes one has the uncanny feeling that something has indeed been going on, unreported in the interval. Only Mattias Spahlinger in his recent works has brought off a dramatization of silence as effective as this. Thus Enstellt (= racked out of shape, skewed, as well as defaced, disfigured) is not so much a psychological description as a material one. As the music heads towards the point of no return the textures themselves are marred by the ravages of untuned percussion instruments which one by one the players take up, til the end we are left only with the piccolo and cello grinding out a musical equivalent of Jean Dubuffet's sophisticated version of art brut (miles away from the Boulezian elegance of colloid-e)---a penny whistle and a hurdy-gurdy in Bedlam: while the other inmates gaze dully on, having exhausted themselves with beating and shaking whatever lay to hand.

--Robin FREEMAN, extracted from TEMPO September 1994

Performers and Production

Paula RAE flute(s), Jane ROBERTSON E flat clarinet, Brett KELLY trombone, Detlef TEWES mandolin, Stephen MOREY mandolin and sitar, Daryl BUCKLEY electric, 10 and 12-string guitars, Peter NEVILLE anklung and percussion, Susan PIEROTTI violin and bowed 10-string guitar, Jennifer CURL viola, Friedrich GAUWERKY violoncello, Kees BOERSMA contrabass, Joan WRIGHT contrabass

Sandro GORLI conductor

Riccardo FORMOSA and Richard BARRETT producers, Jim ATKINS engineer, Michael COSTA additional engineering, Stephen SNELLEMAN ELISION/ABC recording projects coordinator, United Music Publishers Ltd., London publisher, Richard TOOP cover notes, Crow cover artwork.

Recorded March 1992 to May 1993, Allan Eatons Studios, Melbourne. Released by ETCETERA RECORDS, Amsterdam, 1993. KTC1167. Total timing 66:04 (DDD).