Alex Paxton: Happy Music for Orchestra

HAPPY MUSIC for ORCHESTRA ALEX PAXTON

Dreammusics Orchestra & Ensemble

Alex Paxton conductor & improvised solo trombone

Beibei Wang improvised solo water percussion

Patrick Terry solo countertenor

Matthew Herd alto saxophone (improvised solo track 3)

David Ingamells drum kit (improvised solo track 3)

Recorded on 21 April & 6 October 2018, 19 May 2019, 8 March, 5 & 29 August 2021

Recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

Design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: Henry Howard

Cover image: Alex Paxton

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

www.delphianrecords.com

1 Love Kittens [3:40]

Dreammusics Orchestra, Alex Paxton conductor

2 Od Ody Pink’d [9:49]

Dreammusics Orchestra, Alex Paxton conductor & trombone

3 Strawberry [11:28]

Dreammusics Ensemble, Patrick Terry countertenor, Matthew Herd alto saxophone, David Ingamells drum kit

4 Water Music [7:26]

Dreammusics Orchestra, Beibei Wang water percussion; Alex Paxton conductor

5 Sweet Wishes [3:44]

Dreammusics Orchestra, Alex Paxton conductor & trombone

6 Bye [10:15]

Dreammusics Ensemble, Alex Paxton trombone

Total playing time [46:28]

All tracks are premiere recordings

@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

@ delphianrecords

‘In every moment of the piece, I’m asking myself what is the most sonically sensual thing that can happen here, and here, and here,’ Alex Paxton tells me over video call, his backdrop a blanket of brightly coloured knitted squares. While other composers might focus on a well-proportioned structure or a consistency of voice, Paxton’s music – while it still has these things, in its unique way – essentially frees itself from their constraints in pursuit of heightened sensuality and ad hoc joy.

That joy is something the composer found alongside his early studies. While completing his master’s in composition at the Royal College of Music he worked as a primary school music teacher, an experience he describes as a ‘youthful antidote’ and the ‘ultimate complement’ to his academic training. Communicating a musical idea to a class of reception-age children requires what he calls a ‘desperate urgency’ that is rarely required of a composer of new music, and fosters a respect for (and great facility in) the skills of emotional immediacy. One of the happiest aspects of his job was writing music for these children to play: short, funny songs in the classroom or larger pieces for choirs and orchestras of children who may only have been playing an instrument for a matter of weeks. The first trick, he tells me, is to embrace the massed noisegeneration machine that is thirty poorly tuned beginner violins: other composers might have to blacken the page to get the sorts of sounds

his school bands could create out of simple crotchets and quavers. Lean into it, and you soon stop noticing what isn’t there and start to notice what is.

The second trick is to ensure that the children are always enjoying themselves: that joy will come out despite (or, more likely, because of) any imprecision or imperfection in the musical realisation. This lesson has fed into his own music: joy comes from stripping away as much fat as possible from the central emotional communication. Everything must add to that intensity. The search for joy, immediacy and sensuality at all points grants permission to load every moment with as much of those things as it can bear. Joy, his music says, is not found in clarity, balance, perfection or good taste, but in mess, friction, imprecision and excess.

Take the short Love Kittens. The four-bar trombone riff with which it opens is already a bouncy bit of fun; the addition of flatulent, croaking brass only makes it more so. But when a beam of celeste, crotales and high strings is added – orchestration so shimmering it almost blinds – it becomes clear that the music’s focus is raw sensation, rather than just crude humour. The spirit of the trombone’s riff is still there, in some altered form, but now scattered across increasingly extravagant instrumentation that culminates in glossy brass stabs that themselves trip up and land in

a Scott Bradleyesque, Tom and Jerry tumble. When the brass are replaced by dense, Ligetilike strings, the switch only intensifies, rather than negates, what came before.

Paxton’s compositional process often begins with melody. Tunes like the one around which Love Kittens is constructed are products of private improvisations, recorded into an audio diary. The best of them he transcribes, first into short score and then into full orchestration. It’s quite a traditional working method – even if its outcomes are not – and owes something to the time Paxton spent working as a commercial orchestrator. He admires the creative focus that his colleagues put into the narrow field that is orchestration and seeks that same intensity in every layer of his work.

The tune that begins Od Ody Pink’d for orchestra and trombonist could have been lifted from a light-hearted Tony Curtis film; it frames (if barely contains) a wildly improvising soloist. The spirit is anarchic, farcical; full – like the last act of that Curtis film – of pratfalls, one-liners and mistaken identities. But the apparent goofiness conceals a lyrical, even melancholy aspect that is shared with the work’s true inspiration, the paintings of the Turkish-French-Israeli artist Ody Saban. Born in Istanbul in 1953, Saban was the victim of a horrific traffic accident aged 25; operated on without anaesthetic (shards of glass still

in her body), she began painting in a fluid, hallucinogenic style of vivid colours and morphing body shapes that mediate her experience of slipping painfully in and out of consciousness. Like Paxton she creates her work organically and improvisatorially, without a fixed idea of its final form but filling her canvas gradually and ornately from simple starting points. The slower, aria-like central section of Paxton’s concerto is surely a nod to Saban’s tender-violent depictions of the erotic body.

Paxton is drawn to outsider artists like Saban. Another is Madge Gill, inspiration for Paxton’s Sweet Wishes. Born illegitimate in London’s East End in 1882, Gill was committed to an orphanage by her embarrassed mother and then at fourteen transported to Canada as part of a child-labour scheme. When she returned to London a few years later, she embraced the Victorian obsession with Spiritualism. Possessed by a spirit-guide, Myrninerest, she began drawing, writing, knitting and weaving fanatically. Her dense pen drawings – made meticulously over many unbroken hours – are idiosyncratic portraits of ladies in fine hats, set against backgrounds of intricate, cross-hatched geometries. The overflowing of figure into ornament, representation into decoration, anticipates Paxton’s own approach, in which melodies are generated from sonic doodling before becoming encrusted with layers of surface decoration and distortion.

In Strawberry – which the composer describes as ‘a gay-love song inspired by the tapestries of Grayson Perry’ – these distortions of timbre and rhythm are the source of the work’s heightened sensuality. One of the UK art world’s most celebrated figures, Perry is no outsider artist; but like the paintings of Saban and the drawings of Gill, Perry’s tapestries are crammed with figurative and abstract detail. There is an anti-conformist, anti-classicist feeling to Perry’s work, a sense of materials being used as it were ‘incorrectly’ or in awkward but productive juxtapositions that is echoed in Paxton’s approach to sound. Beginning with his choice of a countertenor voice, he applies distortions of one kind or another to almost every note: the brass use practice mutes, the saxophones kazoos; the vocalist shouts through a megaphone; a synthesizer uses abrasive ‘sawtooth’ wave sounds, or plays sine tones close together to produce buzzing acoustic beating; every instrument uses trills, vibrato, glissandi and other effects extensively. The distortions aren’t applied only to timbre: grace notes, crossrhythms and unmetered playing (such as the drums’ background improvisation at around 4:30) have a similar effect on the music’s pulse. And of course, the melody – which under its garish outfit hints at a delicate lyricism – is shrouded in layers of persiflage and adornment. The noise machine of the shouting, singing, uncoordinated, untuned classroom band has been refined, but without losing its essential

ecstatic messiness. And the joy that comes from rubbing things together is the source of the music’s drive and sensuality.

Water Music is unique on this album for focusing not on a trombone, but a percussion soloist: the Chinese-born, London-based percussionist Beibei Wang. It is based on an ensemble piece, Spudspangle (premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2022), but with the addition of a solo part and around three minutes more music. Wang’s part is written for ‘water percussion’ – waterphones, bowls of water, water bottles, wine glasses, a colander, bath toys and more: a torrent of mostly improvised gurgling, bubbling and splashing. (Apart from the means of producing sound, Wang’s part is outlined only in general, with just occasional moments of rhythmic coordination with the ensemble indicated.) Paxton is interested in our bodies’ relationship to water, and at times he has Wang flick water droplets, gargle and even scream face first into a bowl of water. Two inspirations are particularly important. The first is the ‘water drumming’ (liquindi) of the Baka people of central West Africa – music played by groups of women standing waist deep in a river, using their hands and arms to create a polyphony of bass thuds and treble splashes. The second is the ASMR music of artists such as Neo Hülcker: ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) refers to the tingling sensation that begins in the scalp and runs down the spine,

triggered by certain stimuli – particularly soft, textured sounds like whispering, crinkling paper or tapping fingernails. While Water Music does not focus on any particular ASMR triggers, the close relation ASMR highlights between sound and pleasurable bodily sensation is certainly a feature, most notably in the work’s conclusion, based around Wang blowing bubbles through a straw.

A different emotion is conveyed in Bye, for low wind, two trombones (one improvising) and Wurlitzer. Compared to the other works on this recording, the opening texture is relatively simple: a four-voice hymn on a nostalgic melody. In its continuous unfolding, however, the music never seems quite able to say farewell. The longer it resists, the more anguished it becomes. A characteristic twist on the sound at the start – an expressively airy tone and a combination of pixie and plunger mutes for the trombones – provides an opening for the second trombone’s soloistic improvisation and the unique colours of the Wurlitzer organ. The peculiarly mid-century, northern English blend of brass band and seaside ballroom adds to the music’s nostalgic feel, but as the trombone’s wayward mutations spread into the rest of the ensemble, something more raw and rather less cosy –both glittering and painful – is revealed.

Paxton’s sympathies with artists like Gill, Saban and, to an extent, Perry, come from his own view of himself as something of an outsider.

‘In my music I’m trying to create the version of me that the context of this world won’t allow me to be,’ he tells me. And it is relevant, I think, that for all the surface ecstasy of his music, it is the product of a meticulous, conscious process to maximise its emotional impact at every moment: a tension between conformity and free expression that it shares with the primary school orchestra. It is music that decides, in the face of everything, to express itself as joyfully as possible. So, ‘Happy Music for Orchestra’ – yes. And music to inspire happiness – certainly. But it is not necessarily, or not exclusively, music made from happiness. Rather, it is music that makes happiness out of very much more difficult things. ‘Bye is like when you say goodbye,’ writes the composer. ‘Sometimes for just a bit, sometimes forever.’

© 2023 Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a music journalist, critic and blogger. He is author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press) and The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird), and co-author of Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).

Credits

1 Love Kittens

Composed by Alex Paxton

Dreammusics Orchestra

Taylor MacLennan flute, piccolo

Lavinia Redman oboes

Alex Roberts clarinets

Izabela Musial bassoons

Lucy Smith horns

Alex Paxton trumpets, trombones, tuba

Beibei Wang percussion

Elizabeth Bass harp

Joy Boole piano

Lasma Taimina violins I

Kalliopi Mitropoulou violins II

Victoria Bernath violas

Mike Newman cellos

Gwen Reed double basses

Conducted, recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

2 Od Ody Pink’d

Composed by Alex Paxton

Alex Paxton improvised solo trombone

Dreammusics Orchestra

Taylor MacLennan flutes, piccolo

Lavinia Redman oboes, cor anglais

Alex Roberts clarinets in B%, bass clarinet

Izabela Musial bassoon, contrabassoon

Gwyn Owen trumpets

Alex Paxton horns, tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba

Beibei Wang percussion

Vicky Powell harp

Lasma Taimina violins I & II

Clifton Harrison violas

Cecilia Wyld cellos

Gwen Reed double basses

Conducted, recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

© Courtesy of G. RICORDI & CO., Bühnen- und Musikverlag GmbH, Berlin

– a division of Universal Music Publishing Classics & Screen.

3 Strawberry

Composed by Alex Paxton

Lyrics by Alex Paxton

Let’s paint the town red, let’s paint the town blue, let’s paint the town orange too, ’cos I say so, let’s sing a song now! Ah, singing low, lullaby, lets make the town here! Smell the air and here is the rain! Feel all at once ah. Yes! do the rounds now. Get the loud sounds. Yes! Let me please do it to you, ah blue! Or orange. O you! Ah my favourite! Rainbow brown. I was promised rainbow brown. Mmm. This is all so long ago. This is all so long ago. This is all so very very very long ago. This is all so very very very very very long ago. Let me name you. Let me paint you. With my own home grown, rainbow brown. A rainbow! ’Cos I say so. All over your face and pallid bod. Dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob dob. Making, tasting, yeah. I Like it. Mmmm.

Patrick Terry countertenor

Matthew Herd improvised solo alto saxophone

David Ingamells improvised solo drum kit

Dreammusics Ensemble

Matthew Herd alto saxophone

David Zucchi soprano & alto saxophones, kazoos

Alex Paxton trombones, kazoos

Lloyd Coleman Wurlitzer, melodica

Joy Boole sine-wave synthesizer

Elischa Kaminer saw-wave synthesizer

David Ingamells drum kit

Kalliopi Mitropoulou violin

Mike Newman cello

Recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

Credits

4 Water Music

Composed by Alex Paxton

Beibei Wang improvised solo water

percussion

Dreammusics Orchestra

Taylor MacLennan flute

Zacharias Wolfe oboe, cor anglais

Joy Boole clarinet in E%

Alex Roberts clarinet in B%, bass clarinet

Izabela Musial bassoon, contrabassoon

Rike Huy trumpet

Alex Paxton horn, trombone

Beibei Wang water percussion

Vicky Powell harp

Elischa Kaminer piano

Kalliopi Mitropoulou violins I & II

Emma Purslow viola

Cecilia Wyld cello

Gwen Reed double bass

Conducted, recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

© Courtesy of G. RICORDI & CO., Bühnen- und Musikverlag GmbH, Berlin

– a division of Universal Music Publishing Classics & Screen.

5 Sweet Wishes

Composed by Alex Paxton

Alex Paxton improvised solo trombone

Dreammusics Orchestra

Taylor MacLennan flute, piccolo

Lavinia Redman oboe, cor anglais

Alex Roberts clarinet

Izabela Musial bassoon

Alex Paxton horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba

Beibei Wang percussion

Lloyd Coleman piano

Kalliopi Mitropoulou violins I & II

Emma Purslow violas

Cecilia Wyld cellos

Lawrence Ungless double bass

Conducted, recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

6 Bye

Composed by Alex Paxton

Alex Paxton improvised solo trombone

Dreammusics Ensemble

Taylor MacLennan alto flute

Lloyd Coleman clarinet in B%, bass clarinet

David Zucchi alto & tenor saxophones

Alex Paxton trombones I & II

Joy Boole Wurlitzer

Recorded & mixed by Alex Paxton

Love Kittens

recorded on 6 October 2018 at Residence Studios, Willesden Green

Od Ody Pink’d recorded on 19 May 2019 at St Stephen’s Primary School, Shepherd’s Bush

Strawberry recorded on 21 April 2018 at Residence Studios, Willesden Green

Water music recorded on 8 March 2021 at St Peter’s Primary School, Hammersmith

Sweet Wishes

recorded on 29 August 2021 at St Stephen’s Primary School, Shepherd’s Bush

Bye recorded on 5 August 2021 at 59b Riffle Road, Willesden Green

Hannah

Driscoll/Ricordi

Alex Paxton is a composer and improvising trombonist based in the UK, whose music was described by The Wire as ‘A riotous overabundance of love and rage … an extraordinary experience’. He is a recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Composer’s Prize 2023, Ivor Novello Award, RPS Composition Prize, Dankworth Jazz Prize, Leverhume Art Prize and Harriet Cohen Award, as well as being elected to the 9th International Composition Seminar and represented in the orchestral section of the ISCM and Gaudeamus Award 2022. He is a commissioned contributor to John Zorn’s Arcana X (2021). His portrait albums MUSIC for BOSCH PEOPLE (2021) and ILOLLI-POP (2022) have been released to

critical acclaim, with his recordings published by labels including Birmingham Record Company, NMC, Delphian, Non-classical, Listen Pony and Everest records. He has performed his music as a soloist with leading orchestras such as Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal National Scottish Orchestra and ensemble

x.y. Further works include pieces for London Symphony Orchestra, Klangforum Wien, Asko Schönberg, Ensemble Klang, Riot Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, Wigmore Hall, Explore Ensemble, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Kammer Klang, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Psappha, BBC Proms, National Youth Orchestra and National Youth Jazz Orchestra. Alex’s music is published by Ricordi (Berlin). The New York Times called it ‘The most joyous sound I’ve heard in ages.’

‘Nothing if not flamboyant’ (The Times), Beibei Wang is a uniquely vibrant percussion artist. With a background in both Classical and traditional Chinese percussion, she brings characteristic flair, dynamism and ‘high-energy virtuosity’ (Wall Street Journal) to her performances and defies genre, presenting repertoire as diverse as contemporary classical to free improvisation with equal parts power and elegance. BBC Music Magazine called her playing ‘Dynamite throughout!’

Countertenor Patrick Terry is a Samling Artist, winner of the Loveday Song Prize at the 2017 Kathleen Ferrier Awards and Second Prize at the 2019 Handel Singing Competition. He was born and raised in Wisconsin and won a place on the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at The Royal Opera House, appearing in the title role of Orfeo ed Euridice, and singing Arsace Berenice and Artemis in Henze’s Phaedra as well as appearing in ‘Le Promesse’ (New National Theatre Tokyo). Other operatic engagements have included Serafino The Intelligence Park (Music Theatre Wales & The Royal Opera House), The Boy / Angel 1 Written On Skin (Melos Sinfonia), Oberon A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chicago Summer Opera), Rosencrantz in Brett Dean’s Hamlet (Glyndebourne, Oper Köln and Bayerische Staatsoper), Ruggiero Alcina and the title role in Teseo (La Nuova Musica), Eustazio Rinaldo (Glyndebourne Festival Opera), the title role in Rinaldo (Minnesota Opera), and An Evolution Cantata with the CBSO and the NDR Elbphilharmonie.

Huazhen Hu

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