LSO Panufnik Composers Workshops

_{Edwin Hillier}
Ghost Sign (after Siskind)

A ‘ghost sign’ is an early 20th-century advert found on the side of a building, usually hand painted, now faded and referring to a product that may no longer exist (brands of tea, cigarettes, household soap). There is one such sign, for Red Hackle Whisky, on the side of the brick-built offices at 37 Otago Street in Glasgow. During lockdown, Hillier would pass it on his daily walks and in 2021 made it the subject of a chamber work for the Red Note Ensemble. ‘Revisiting this image with routine, almost ritual, I became fascinated by its complexity and changeability’, he said then, ‘Its disparate elements enhanced, recoloured, embroidered by the light, affected by the time of day and year’. 

Ghost Sign (after Siskind) is a further revisiting, examining again the ideas and sounds that were first developed in his piece 37 Otago Street. Its subtitle points to the American photographer Aaron Siskind (1903–91), whose images of urban surfaces invented a kind of abstract expressionist photography of graffiti, peeling paint and worn brickwork. Similarly, in Hillier’s composition, sounds are distorted, blurred and dissolved. Like Siskind’s images, they are encountered in close-up but are no clearer for that. And as with the advert for Red Hackle Whisky, something legible is occasionally glimpsed behind the worn and damaged surface – yet it is something obsolete and tinged with nostalgia.

_{Rafael Marino Arcaro}
i swallow clouds

Writing a piece for symphony orchestra is already quite a challenge; dividing it further into three movements only raises the difficulty level still higher. But this is what Rafael Marino Arcaro has done with i swallow clouds. ‘At the time, I had just finished work on my violin concerto, in which I wrote five movements for a total duration of twelve minutes’, he says. ‘And I thought it would be fascinating to push the challenge even further. I felt I needed to try to make my musical statements as succinct as possible … The real challenge then became how to have three distinctive but aesthetically connected movements without drowning the piece with textural and musical variety.’  

Scale informs not only the technical aspect of the piece but also its imagery. The title is inspired by the great Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros (1916–2014), whose poems invoke the playful and free-form creativity of children. In Marino Arcaro’s piece, that manifests in the idea of making something big (an orchestra, a symphonic structure) into something equally small and fragile, both at once. Like clouds, the music appears both massive and weightless, through delicate melodies that take on outsize importance. Influences from Marino Arcaro’s homeland are apparent too in the music: the intonation, timbre and melodic qualities of the second movement are evocative of the bandas de pífano tradition (music from the northeast of Brazil for two traditional flutes and percussion). But more important, the composer says, is ‘a flavour of mango and cotton candy and an unserious seriousness that is deeply Brazilian’. 

_{Robin Haigh}
DRIFTWOOD

Robin Haigh is drawn to materials and inspirations that are corny, abject, perhaps even a little vulgar. In previous pieces he has pursued an expression of ‘millennial nostalgia’, an emotional oscillation between ‘transcendental elation and disengaged ennui’. DRIFTWOOD moves beyond these specific concerns but shares similar aesthetic ground. Its setting is the beach – or, more precisely, the sort of beach found in luxury advertising, on calypso records, or possibly in James Bond films. The beach as Hawaiian guitars and lurid drinks with cocktail umbrellas. 

But if this suggests simple tropicalia, Haigh has other ideas. This is the beach of The White Lotus, or Alex Garland’s 1996 novel: imagined, heavily mediated and with a dark underbelly. Ukuleles are evoked at the beginning but distorted via the medium of massed and detuned pizzicato effects; the oboe (and later other winds) makes an appearance as a kind of microtonal seagull; and plucked strings swell and recede in queasy rhythmic waves. Like driftwood, the listener is passively afloat – but also buffeted, displaced and at the mercy of much larger forces. ‘In Norse mythology the first humans were made of driftwood’, Haigh says of his inspirations. ‘Somehow this set my mind racing with the metaphor of the modern lives many of us experience as being somehow akin to living as a piece of driftwood, unable to control anything around us in a half-serene, half-anxious state of flux.’ 

_{Robertt Crehan}
DUTCH PLASTIC.

In his recent music, Robert Crehan uses bold contrasts, interruptions and abrupt cuts, often inspired by the work of visual or literary artists who have shared similar interests. HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S DAILY ROUTINE. (2012) itemises over a jagged, impulsive ensemble accompaniment the gonzo journalist’s eye-opening daily intake of alcohol, cigarettes and hard drugs; September 6^th, 1951 describes the evening another frequently inebriated writer, William S Burroughs – known for his ‘cut-up’ method of creating texts from rearranged fragments of existing prose – drunkenly produced a handgun at a party and accidentally shot and killed his wife, Joan. 

DUTCH PLASTIC. is somewhat cooler in inspiration but pays similar attention to sharply delineated edges. It is named for the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), who adopted the name ‘neo-plasticism’ for his iconic abstract style of primary-coloured rectangles and thick black lines. (Plastic is used here in its older sense of the physical manipulation of a medium in the visual arts.) In his short composition, Crehan attempts to translate these key visual elements into sound. Each of its six, roughly equal sections draws on the same pool of basic musical elements, reconfiguring them each time: sudden stabs, ethereal chords, semi-improvised cycles of pitches. These are analogous to the fundamental elements of Mondrian’s paintings: the precisely drawn horizontal and vertical lines, the white backgrounds and the fields of colour. Like Mondrian’s paintings, Crehan’s piece is not narrative but spatial, articulating a field of objects and the network of possible relationships between them. 

_{Lara Agar}
suntime bedtime moontime

‘I wanted to write something I’d be happy to live with, have it playing in the room’, says Lara Agar of her piece. ‘suntime bedtime moontime – the music is like a companion for that, just the cycle of the day, quite an ordinary day, a routine’. The work’s composition came not from an intellectual position but directly from her physical and emotional state. It is slow, she says, simply because she was always sitting down while writing. (‘If I were running about it would be faster.’) And composing it allowed her to lean into her introverted nature, to use the music as a source of comfort and energy. 

But this is not to say that the music itself is simple or soporific. Agar’s musical interests are in found objects, accidents and messy experiments. She embraces mistakes and the unknown as ways of generating ideas and solutions. Writing for orchestra does not allow for the same degree of improvisation as, for example, a collaboration with just one other artist; but Agar found ways to introduce unpredictability into her compositional process by juxtaposing fragments of material to see what they set off in each other. The chords she uses are tonal in origin but detuned slightly, to add ‘a pinch of pain’ as she puts it. The orchestral timbres are altered with mutes and air tones – and, in the work’s magical, moontime ending, a soft humming over the underlying harmonies. The atmosphere may be soothing and childlike; but it is never straightforwardly so. 

_{Litha Efthymiou}
Through that Twilight Sky

Twilight is an in-between time of day, when the sun is low, shadows lengthen and things become blurred and less distinct in their appearance. But it is also a time of high contrasts, when light and dark meet; a time when stories end – riding off into the sunset – or begin, as monsters come out of hiding. 

In Through that Twilight Sky, Litha Efthymiou touches on both sides of twilit atmospheres. ‘I wanted to give a sense of travel through space’, she says. ‘But the twilight sky also implies colour and the combination of light and dark, something I was interested in musically’. In its short span, the piece moves smoothly through a number of musical states, allowing each to grow into the next, somewhat like the swiftly changing colours of the setting sun. The musical drama is heightened by a deliberate use of highly contrasting materials: a static or slowly shifting harmonic ground in the strings, made up of pitch collections that expand and contract like wedges or dissolve into microtonal clouds; and loud, even brutal interjections from the brass and winds that create a forceful sense of movement across this harmonic space. From its energetic, sprightly opening, the music moves through a range of emotional states – calm, aggressive, majestic – before concluding with a diffusion of rising vibraphone and celeste, and descending strings, like the light finally disappearing below the horizon. 

_{Christian Drew}
Aquarium Drifter

Ten-minute commission, 2020/22 cohort

Aquarium Drifter began life under a very different title. As Double Chorus, it was Christian Drew’s contribution to last year’s LSO Panfunik Composers Workshops. Commissioned following the workshops to further develop his ideas, he adapted it as the first of four short movements of a longer piece, rechristening it ‘ShopRite Lobster Tank 1997’ along the way. With the others titled – with similar evocative flair – ‘Rococo Vivarium’, ‘Subtropical Oceanographic Club’ and ‘Sunset over the SuperSewer’, it’s clear quite a change in emphasis took place between the two versions of the piece. That extended from thinking more about the musical qualities of Double Chorus itself – its destabilised, floating soundworld of drifting timbres and sliding harmonies. This brought Drew to the idea of a disparate collection of aquariums, or ‘aquarium-adjacent things’, as he puts it. Specifically, a childhood memory of live lobsters for sale in a New Jersey supermarket; woozy, lounge-style jazz; the muffled (perhaps even underwater) sounds of a Hawaiian guitar; and the sun setting over the Thames Tideway construction site in Bermondsey, south London. 

Working with the LSO last year, Drew was especially drawn to the sounds of existing Classical and Romantic repertory – ‘stuff that the LSO play incredibly well and are extremely knowledgeable about’. Yet, inspired further by the deconstructed indie rock of US band Wilco and the watery, reverb-heavy doowop of The Flamingos, Drew sought ways to tweak or twist his materials, through tuning, orchestration, layering or juxtaposition.  In this way, Aquarium Drifter engages with elements of that classical tradition but also allows them to sway slightly in the current.  

_{Stef Conner}
Hateful Grace

Five-minute commission, 2021/22 cohort

In The Rot and the Shimmering Moss, her three-minute composition for last year’s Panufnik Composers Scheme, Stef Conner evoked a nightmarish amalgam of the ancient and the technologically advanced, her score dotted with expressive markings like ‘creeping entropy’, ‘heavy industrial hell-machine’ and ‘pockets of unrest’. In revisiting and expanding that work for Hateful Grace, she has retained a lot of the same musical imagery: notably, a ripple of random col legno tapping that spreads across the string section at the beginning (evocatively described as a ‘Mexican wave of spiders’ in the earlier score) and a sudden, night terror-like awakening at the end. There is also a similar juxtaposition of opposing images: rot versus shimmering, hate versus grace.

But Hateful Grace is a subtler piece than its predecessor – many of those textual indications have been removed from the later score, presumably for being too specific or closing down too much the expressive possibilities. And events that were tightly pressed together have been given greater room to breathe and develop. Yet it is also more sharply drawn: in opening up the spaces in her earlier work, Conner has heightened its contrasts, using orchestrational tricks learnt from her workshop experiences to widen its variety of timbre and dynamic. So among the creeping, prickly textures we also find warped fanfares, smeared melodies and broken marches. A dark kind of grace indeed. ~