Cerulean Orbits by Delphian Records

JANE STANLEY (b. 1976): CERULEAN ORBITS

The Hermes Experiment (tracks 1–5)

Héloïse Werner soprano

Oliver Pashley clarinet (doubling bass clarinet in track 3)

Anne Denholm harp

Marianne Schofield double bass

Red Note Ensemble

Ruth Morley flute (tracks 7, 17–23; doubling piccolo & alto flute in Oneiroi )

Timothy Lines clarinet (tracks 7–9, 13–23; doubling bass clarinet in Oneiroi )

Simon Smith piano (tracks 6, 8–14, 16–23; doubling finger cymbals & crotales in Oneiroi )

Tom Hunter percussion (tracks 17–23)

Jacqueline Shave violin (tracks 6, 8–11, 13–23)

Christian Elliott cello (tracks 8–9, 11, 13–23; doubling crotales in Oneiroi )

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Recorded on 4-6 September 2023 at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter

Piano: Steinway model D, serial no 600443 (2016)

Piano technician: Norman Motion

Cover image: United States Geological Society / Unsplash Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com

Design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

6 Cerulean Orbits (2016) [7:50] for violin and piano 7 Helix Reflection (2013) [4:43] for flute and B flat clarinet Suite (2014, rev. 2023) for B flat clarinet, violin, cello and piano

I. Density

II. Clarity

III. Drifting, cascading [violin & piano only] [2:06]

IIIa. Interlude [violin, cello, piano] [0:43]

IV. Ostinato Study [piano solo] [0:49] 13 V. Mechanical Birds [1:18]

VI. Floating, weightless [2:30]

VII. Restless, antagonistic [clarinet, violin, cello] [0:41] 16 VIII. Effervescent, soothing [2:54] Oneiroi (2023)

dreamingly [3:03]

gold [4:39]

trembling [2:53]

,;:.:;, [1:42]

enter no silence [8:02]

timelessly [2:50]

lifting [1:42]

playing time [70:28] All except track 7 are premiere recordings

This premiere portrait album features a selection of pieces for different chamber combinations which I composed between 2013 and 2023. Certain stylistic traits weave through these pieces, including an audible preoccupation with gesture (musical ideas which convey evocative feelings of energetic directed motion), intricately ornamented melodic patterning, and intertwining woven textures.

Analogies with other artforms have long been a fertile impetus for me – for example, imagery of weaving, knitting, layering, and collaging. I have no doubt that a contributing factor to this fascination were my mother’s crafting hobbies, which included knitting, sewing, making clothes, embroidering and fabric dyeing. Her daytime employment, too, in a Sydney textile wholesaler, selling silk fabric to Australian fashion designers and opera companies, provided me with a tantalising window into the world of haute couture and theatrical stage and costume design. Consequently, from early in my student days right through to the present, I have endeavoured to nurture a compositional working method that prizes texture, decoration and colour.

My music bears the influence and impact of numerous composers, some of whom I studied with at the University of Sydney (Peter Sculthorpe, Anne Boyd, Ross Edwards) or later

as a visiting fellow at Harvard (Bernard Rands), some whom I learned about in the course of my training (Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Elena Kats-Chernin, Luciano Berio), and some of whom I have been fortunate to get to know as peers.

A critical juncture in my artistic development was the summer of 2008, when I was a Composition Fellow at Tanglewood Music Center. It was during this time that Michael Gandolfi (composer and coordinator of composition at Tanglewood) set me on a path of a detailed study of post-tonal harmony, taking in the music of Elliott Carter, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Oliver Knussen, among others. This fuelled an evolution in my approach to harmony, liberating me from much of my prior fixation on harmonic stasis (though I confess I still like the occasional harmonic drone!).

But whilst I was immersing myself in rigorous theoretical harmonic frameworks, I also recall being enticed by the accounts of peers and teachers who described their techniques as being led primarily by instinct and intuition. It took some years for me to thoroughly digest and integrate all of this learning into my own personalised technique and aesthetic. To this day I continue to strive to balance elements of freedom, rigour and flow, as well as harnessing the role of my imagination as a key part of my creative process.

Behind the modest, even self-deprecating title of its opening work is hidden the beginning of a story of attention and connection which runs right through this first album dedicated to the music of Jane Stanley. The Indifferent takes its name from the text it sets, by the Australian poet Judith Bishop; but in its attention to that text, in the instruments’ attention to one another and to the voice which they surround and support, and in the composer’s attention to her destined performers, indifference is the last claim one could make for the resulting piece. On the broader scale of the five works presented here, Stanley reveals herself as a composer of differentiated attention – a creator of continuities and contrasts which combine to form a many-faceted portrait of meaningful coexistence.

Consciously designed as an opportunity both to showcase some of her most successful existing works and at the same time to develop two major new pieces, the album features two ensembles: the purely instrumental Red Note Ensemble, appearing in the form of two duos, a quartet, and a mixed sextet with wind and percussion doublings; and, in that opening piece, the more fixed yet idiosyncratic instrumentation of The Hermes Experiment. Both ensembles are regular Delphian recording artists, and it was in listening to The Hermes Experiment’s two full Delphian albums – released in 2020

and 2021 respectively – that Stanley began to conceive the sound-world of The Indifferent Her original idea was for a cycle of five contrasted songs, and she approached Bishop with a request for five separate poems that might suit such a project. What Bishop in fact proposed in response was to divide an existing text – a prose poem from her 2007 collection Event – into five sections, which she further annotated by means of what she called an ‘Emotional and Linguistic Score’. In setting this five-part text, Stanley cleaved to the idea of maximum contrast; each section or movement (Stanley still tends to refer to them as ‘songs’) has its own clearly defined identity, and is characterised by the vivid gestural invention which has long been one of her main compositional preoccupations. The Indifferent’s broadly tonal harmonic language and melodic nakedness, by contrast, are new departures for Stanley, even if these too arise from an imperative she has long obeyed –that of conceiving music to suit its intended performers. In this case, the preponderance of tonal but non-functional harmony was influenced by qualities Stanley observed in The Hermes Experiment’s existing repertoire.

Creating a work for an ensemble with such a unique line-up – whose repertoire necessarily consists almost entirely of pieces commissioned by or arranged for the ensemble – is even more than usual

an act of attentiveness (to collaborators, to potential performance contexts …), and the work’s exceptionality in the overall context of Stanley’s output, or even of the five works collected here, is revealing of some of the conceptual subtexts hiding not too far below the linguistic surface of our ideas of indifference and attention, difference and sameness. The work’s internal expressive landscape, too, observes a principle of differentiation – balancing contrasts and continuities in its response to the text’s own music, whether in its broad emotional ebb and flow or in details such as the bee ‘grinding out of tune’ in section four and the ‘double bass’ of the breaking waves at the start of section five.

But the most abiding impression comes from the way instruments and voice attend to one another: the clarinet weaving heterophonically around the voice in section one, echoing or anticipating each phrase in the same register; the sharing of pitches and whole gestures between voice, clarinet and harp in the spikier second song. In the third section, a long-breathed vocal line is shadowed two octaves below by bass clarinet, then (briefly) by double bass as the clarinettist switches back to his B flat instrument to reprise the soprano’s opening melody with decorations and flourishes. The disjointed, hocket-like treatment of both voice and instruments in song four is not without its own internal echoes and points of contact, however

attenuated, while the concluding song feels like a study in consolidation and synthesis – a vocal line made out of the stepwise motion and oscillating wider intervals familiar from earlier sections, the clarinet again sharing its register and many of its notes and the double bass now rising up into its most lyrical register to join them. The repeated B natural–C sharp figure with which the clarinet opened this fifth song returns at the close, seeming to point forward into a space beyond the piece.

The relationship between and interdependence of instrumental lines, figured through the metaphors of ‘orbit’ and ‘helix’, is the central concern of two duos which predate The Indifferent by seven and ten years respectively. In Cerulean Orbits, piano and violin circle each other constantly, differentiated by their intrinsic natures and modes of sound production – what the composer Elliott Carter memorably referred to as ‘striking’ and ‘stroking’ – yet brought together by deliberate choices in the realm of harmony and gesture. The piece opens with both instruments orbiting around a treble B, and they gradually unfold independent melodic lines drawing upon the same pool of pitches – ‘at once blending with and antagonising each other’, as the composer suggests. This difference-in-sameness is heightened by the wide variety of idiomatic playing techniques explored by each instrument: the violin’s trills, glissandi and diversity of bow techniques; the piano’s rapid shifts between repeated

single notes, delicate arpeggiated patterns and more insistent attacks. Gradually the piano’s material becomes more chordal in nature, until a torrential descent provokes the violin, too, into emphatic double stops. The chords spin back out into single lines, the violin floating a high, sustained melody over complex counterpoint between the piano’s two hands. The repeated notes of the opening return, urgent at first, eventually broadening into lyrical melody.

The duo partners in Helix Reflection are two much more similar instruments, whose close interweaving evokes the image of a double helix – an image, Stanley observes, which ‘has many associations […] ranging from the structure of DNA to influences on contemporary architecture’. Particularly at the outset, the music unfolds within a notably constrained registral ambit, and reduced vibrato helps disguise the differences in timbre between flute and clarinet. Within this strange sonic landscape, tension is created by blending notes that are almost but not quite in tune with one another. ‘In this way,’ writes Stanley, ‘I aimed to create composite effects where the boundaries between the sonic identities of each individual instrument are blurred.’ Still, the overall trajectory is towards a kind of independence. The composer again:

The piece opens with the two instruments playing sustained notes separated by a small interval. Their sonorities are coloured with microtonal inflections, glissandi and variations in vibrato. During passages where there is relatively little melodic movement, other parameters such as dynamic intensity, rhythm and timbre are mobilised. Over time this harmonic stasis gives way to greater melodic freedom, exploration of wider intervals and expanded range.

The two remaining pieces return to questions of continuity and contrast on a larger scale. Suite – composed in 2014, with the final movement extended for the present recording – was a conscious attempt on Stanley’s part to place her gestures within smaller frames, but also to build up a whole from small parts. The borders between its eight short movements are at times porous, sites of continuity as well as contrast: as when the clarinet line from the end of the busily contrapuntal first movement retains its high register, loud dynamics and even some of its specific pitches but now takes them as the casting-off point for a wideintervalled unison line in clarinet and piano which subtly frays as the second movement proceeds; or when the third-movement violinand-piano duo transitions via a brief piano trio passage into the solo piano of movement five.

Oneiroi, by contrast, and despite being the longest piece on the album, tends towards disguising of sectionality across its 25-minute unfolding – which is notably fluid in other respects, too. The notated materials for this

piece take the form of individual parts for each player. There is no overall score, and no conductor; rather, a succession of cues are used to guide players from one section to the next. Much of the notated music consists of ‘cells’, which in some passages may be mixed in free order and elsewhere are indicated to be played in the order written. ‘At all times,’ Stanley writes in a preface to the players’ parts, ‘decisions regarding pacing (and, in some places, ordering) of material should be informed by listening.’ There is a stepping back from control on the part of the composer here, but one that brings with it a concomitant increase in the players’ attention to one another – the emphasis has shifted from the preordained interaction of musical lines to the guided contingency of human performers interacting in a defined expressive space.

The piece is in fact a wholesale reworking of a now withdrawn piece for mezzo-soprano, piano and percussion called D-re-A-mi-N-gl-Y, composed in 2015 as a site-specific work for the Królikarnia Museum, Warsaw and revised in 2018 for performance in a different venue, the University of Glasgow’s Memorial Chapel. D-re-A-mi-N-gl-Y was a setting of three poems by E.E. Cummings, which in Oneiroi survive in the form of single words, phrases or in one

case a Cummings-esque series of punctuation marks used as titles for the seven sections.

A trace of the overall former title remains, too: óneiros is the ancient Greek word for ‘dream’, and in Greek mythology dreams were sometimes personified as the Oneiroi – the sons of Nyx (Night) and brothers of Hypnos (Sleep). Thus the work pursues its transformations of concept and material under the sign of a nocturnal fantasy which is both rooted deep in cultural memory and resonates with our modern ideas about dreams and their relation to waking life. In its relinquishment of conscious control by the composer, its shuffling of elements of her previous work into new and unexpected configurations – perhaps also in the way it reflects back new meaning and new possibilities upon its ‘daylight’ counterparts – Oneiroi brings the story of Jane Stanley’s unfolding oeuvre to a temporary close with a declaration of faith in preparing and then letting the imagination fly.

© 2024 John Fallas

John Fallas is Publications Officer for Delphian Records, and a freelance writer and editor specialising in the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

So many times your feet are lifted and grounded, at this distance from the water, equidistant from the dunes. Unscrolling an invisible path, a ‘middle ground’, making this time, perhaps, your mind’s passage out of love.

Lightly, lightly, gone, your message-bearers without message, only moving, only moving, by a sea that cleans incessantly its lower palimpsest of sands; the higher, all gull bones and cuttlefish blades, dropped each hour in the battlefield of rips –

where here and now the squid’s pulse, for which expulsion is the groundswell of direction, here and there whose surge is in and out and hardly up but onward, honed to horizontal shifts, now allows the final vertical, invisible path.

A bee gets dragged into the sea, an element too cold not sweet, your feet are grounded and are lifted on the middle palimpsest. Bees crawl among the gull bones on the higher palimpsest, their wings emitting keen timbres consonant with solar heat, the bee in brine grinding out of tune will halt as if to hear,

5. the double bass of rollers breaking in a music only movement, only movement, in the groundswell of direction, into which you walked: belovèd …

Judith Bishop (b. 1972)

The division of the poem into five sections corresponding to the musical divisions of Jane Stanley’s setting is proposed by the poet, and reflected in the ‘Emotional and Linguistic Score’ printed opposite.

The opening passage represents the weariness that comes with repetition – trying to connect with an absent lover ‘so many times’ – and the desire for this to be the last time (‘your mind’s passage out of love’). The poetic voice speaks to itself, trying to understand its situation.

Here is a hope that is dashed. Message-bearing feet move over the sands ‘without message’, there being nothing left to say to the lover. The sea moves in its own, indifferent way, while gulls – which once ran between the higher and lower sands on the beach, with their own incessant movement – become bones tossed about by the waves.

The phrases rise wave-like; tension builds and then releases abruptly on ‘path’. The shifting sonic echoes of the words create a textural surface, mimicking the always-changing-yet-similar, to-and-fro motion of the waves. The repeated sounds in the final phrase are the verbal and sonic equivalents of hammer blows.

‘A bee gets dragged into the sea’, and like the squid and gulls, is broken by the indifference of the endlessly moving waves (as time, too, is endlessly moving, and emotions, even love, move on). The speaker keeps walking – ‘your feet are grounded and are lifted’. There are bees higher up on the beach, moving among the gull bones and ‘emitting keen timbres consonant with solar heat’, but the bee drowning in the water is ‘grinding out of tune’ and ‘will halt’. The speaker walking between them is indecisive still, unscrolling a path through the ‘middle ground’.

There is, finally, ‘only movement’, with its indifference to emotion, despite the ‘groundswell of direction’ the speaker felt when first falling in love – an emergent movement, neither ‘here’ or ‘there’ or ‘up’ or ‘down’, and whose future remains to be seen. The end returns to the beginning of the relationship, when the lover first appeared, and the poem speaks directly for the first time to the lover, remembering the scene ‘into which you walked’. The poem ends on an enigmatic note of hope, since even the memory of hope brings back a shadow of the original feeling.

Biographies

Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2021 and the Royal OverSeas League Mixed Ensemble Competition 2019, The Hermes Experiment is one of the UK’s leading young contemporary music ensembles. Capitalising on its deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments (harp, clarinet, voice and double bass), the ensemble regularly commissions new works, as well as creating its own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation. It has commissioned over sixty composers at various stages of their careers, and has released two albums on Delphian – HERE WE ARE (DCD34244) and SONG (DCD34274) – both to critical acclaim.

Recent highlights include performances at Barbican Centre, Wigmore Hall, the Southbank Centre, Aldeburgh Festival, Oxford International Song Festival, Leeds Lieder Festival, De Doelen (Rotterdam), Tallinn Music Week, Spitalfields Festival and the RPS Awards.

The ensemble is also dedicated to the value of contemporary music in education and community contexts. It was ensemble in residence for the Young Music Makers of Dyfed 2018–19, has run composition workshops in state schools in and around London, and in 2021 ran a Virtual Composition Project, supported by Arts Council England.

The Hermes Experiment is hugely grateful to the Marchus Trust for its generous support throughout 2023–26.

Since its formation Red Note Ensemble has taken up a leadership position as Scotland’s contemporary music ensemble, performing and developing an extensive, highly varied and critically acclaimed programme of new music to the highest standards, and taking new music out to audiences across Scotland and internationally.

Red Note performs the established classics of contemporary music, commissions new music, develops the work of new and emerging composers and performers from Scotland and around the world, and finds new spaces and new ways of performing contemporary music to attract new audiences. Within Scotland the ensemble has performed from the Outer Hebrides to the Borders in concert halls,

bothies, pubs, clubs and aircraft hangars, amongst other unusual settings. Outside the UK it has a growing international reputation, performing to great acclaim at festivals in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Australia in recent years.

The ensemble undertakes an extensive programme of Access, Engagement and Participation (AEP) work, focusing particularly upon working with younger and older people, people with multiple disabilities, people living in areas of multiple deprivation, and also working to address inequalities of access and representation due to race/ethnicity and gender imbalances.

Red Note also undertake an extensive performer and composer development programme within schools, universities and conservatoires nationally and internationally.

Also available on Delphian

HERE WE ARE

The Hermes Experiment DCD34244

With over sixty commissions to its credit after just six years of existence, The Hermes Experiment has already proved itself a force to be reckoned with in the creation and advocacy of new music. Now, ten of those commissions are brought together on the ensemble’s debut album release, showcasing its idiosyncratic line-up of harp, clarinet, soprano and double bass in a compelling survey of styles and individual voices.

‘A most enticing calling card, advertising the skills of individual musicians and the liveliness and variety of Britain’s composing scene … [Track 1] immediately shows off the ensemble’s frontline asset: the vivacious soprano voice of Heloise Werner … The other musicians are equally crucial in the album’s tapestry of sounds’

— The Times, August 2020

SONG

The Hermes Experiment DCD34274

Hot on the heels of their acclaimed debut HERE WE ARE, The Hermes Experiment’s second Delphian album is an equally bold statement. Songs commissioned specially for the ensemble – by Philip Venables, Ayanna WitterJohnson and others – are interleaved with new arrangements (of composers including Barbara Strozzi, Clara Schumann and Lili Boulanger) for the group’s distinctive line-up of voice, clarinet, harp and double bass. Moving and original, SONG reinvents a genre: here every instrument is a voice in its own right, and all four performers carry the drama.

‘Britain’s music scene offers numerous dynamic small-sized groups, but The Hermes Experiment, so spellbinding, so imaginative, continue to stand alone’

— The Times, October 2021

Songs and Lullabies: new works for solo cello

Robert Irvine

DCD34173

Inspired by the plight of disadvantaged and mistreated children around the world, Delphian artist Robert Irvine has commissioned eighteen new pieces for solo cello. As a musician who works at the heart of the English and Scottish scenes, he is able to draw on an impressive roster of friends and colleagues that includes some of the UK’s leading composers. From James MacMillan and Mark-Anthony Turnage to Sally Beamish and Australian-born Jane Stanley, each of them has contributed a short solo piece, drawing out the cello’s most lyrical aspects, while Irvine’s own startling alertness to the finest expressive nuance further enhances this unique recording project.

‘Irvine responds to each piece with the same sincerity, imagination andtechnical assurance; lovely playing, captured in warm, natural sound’

— Gramophone, November 2016

Oliver Iredale Searle: Pilgrim of Curiosity

RSNO Wind Ensemble; Carla Rees Baroque ﬂute

DCD34270

Oliver Iredale Searle is revealed in this first album devoted to his work as a poet of place and of sensation. Three works for wind ensembles vividly evoke journeys and their destinations, in a panoply of sights and sounds stretching from Chicago to Italy, the Balkans and East Asia – and forging unexpected connections between them. The wind principals of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide performances of exceptional calibre, while Carla Rees’s passionate commitment to building a contemporary repertoire for Baroque flute shines through in a solo piece that she commissioned and premiered.

‘Snowbirds has an almost Janáček-like spontaneity and energy … the trajectory of Searle’s music charts a satisfying progression from initial agitation to ultimate calm’

— Gramophone, December 2021

GJames Dillon: Tanz/haus & EMBLEMATA: Carnival

Red Note Ensemble / Geoffrey Paterson

DCD34299 & DCD34309

Coming almost a decade and a half after the last CDs devoted to James Dillon’s music, this twinned pair of digital releases from Delphian Records and Red Note Ensemble presents two major recent works by the composer.

Written for and premiered by Red Note Ensemble, Tanz/haus: triptych 2017 (DCD34299) is one of Dillon’s richest conceptions, a 45-minute meditation on dance as a form of ‘trembling’ featuring electric guitar and – as in so much of Dillon’s recent music – a prerecorded electronic track of immense mystery and power. The work secured for Dillon his fifth Royal Philharmonic Society award: an astonishing tally, unequalled by any living composer.

Released in parallel, EMBLEMATA: Carnival (DCD34309) is the first in a projected series of ‘emblem books’. Paying double homage to Schumann and to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the work is a compellingly sustained whole built up from a series of character pieces tailored to the imaginative as well as technical capacities of the Red Note musicians.

‘music that rewards repeated listens … All gratitude to Red Note Ensemble, who, in high-definition audio, perform the commissioned works with razor precision’

— Gramophone, May 2023