James Dillon: Emblemata - Carnival

RED NOTE ENSEMBLE JAMES DILLON

EMBLEMATA Carnival

JAMES DILLON (b. 1950)

EMBLEMATA: Carnival

RED NOTE ENSEMBLE

Ruth Morley flute a

William White clarinet b , bass clarinet c

Tom Hunter percussion d

Simon Smith piano e , electronic keyboard f

Jacqueline Shave violin g

Robert Irvine cello h

Geoffrey Paterson conductor *

EMBLEMATA: Carnival was commissioned by Red Note Ensemble

Tanz/haus: triptych 2017 (released in parallel on Delphian DCD34299) was commissioned by Red Note Ensemble, hcmf//, Sound Scotland, Transit Festival and November Music

EMBLEMATA: Carnival (2020–21)

15 character pieces for 6 players

1 rope dance b [1:45]

2 shadow play aeh [2:24]

3 nature morte beh [2:28]

4 snow alley afgh* [2:15]

5 waiting for spring abegh* [1:49]

6 turning tricks d [3:40]

7 stage décor a [3:09]

8 “merry go raum” dgh [5:37]

premiere recording

9 three-ring circus abdg* [3:26]

10 nymphe h [4:38]

11 raven e [2:05]

12 sky lanterns ab [2:16]

13 larch dg [2:04]

14 a dawn elegy abdegh* [1:48]

15 phosphorus acdfgh* [3:10]

Total playing time [42:43]

Recorded on 22-24 September 2021 in Perth Concert Hall

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter

Piano: Steinway model D, serial no 568384 (2004)

Piano technician: Norman Motion

Red Note Ensemble is supported by Creative Scotland and PRS Foundation.

Design: John Christ

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

www.delphianrecords.co.uk

@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

@ delphianrecords

Coming almost a decade and a half after the last albums devoted to James Dillon’s music (a 2008 survey of chamber works, and the 2009 recording of his ‘music/théâtre’ Philomela ), this twinned pair of digital releases from Delphian Records and Red Note Ensemble – presenting two major works written for and premiered by the ensemble, in 2017 and 2021 respectively – puts on vivid display a number of tendencies which, while present in embryo in his earlier work, take on new dimensions and importance in his recent output. In particular, these paired releases represent the first commercially available recordings of any of his music with electronics – a category that fifteen years ago might have seemed exceptional in his worklist. And in presenting two works lasting upward of 40 minutes each, they bear witness to a new ampleness both in his construction of large-scale works and in his approach to their sectional content.

The interest in working on a large scale is visible in Dillon’s output as early as the 1980s, when he first began to conceive of writing series of works which could be performed either individually or as an evening-filling sequence. Most notable are the Nine Rivers cycle for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal lineups, begun in 1982, and the ‘German triptych’ (1986–96, comprising an ensemble piece, an orchestral work and a sort of flute concerto).

The motivation for designing the content of an entire concert in this way was, as Dillon told an interviewer in 2008, ‘the notion that you don’t break the enchantment, that going to a concert is like stepping into the magic circle’. Yet as he acknowledged at that time, practical realisation of his vision had often proved elusive. Although Nine Rivers ’ closing instalment, uniting all the performing forces used in the previous eight pieces of the cycle, was premiered at the BBC Proms in 1996, the cycle’s central panel – La coupure, an hourlong wonder of a piece for solo percussionist with live electronics – was not completed until 2000, and the whole cycle was not heard as a unity until November 2010, at the composer’s 60th-birthday celebrations in Glasgow. In the intervening decade, Dillon’s most substantial works were all relatively conventional in genre and instrumentation: the orchestral works Via Sacra (1999) and Physis I & II (2007) and piano concerto Andromeda (2006), each lasting around 35 to 40 minutes; the extended piano cycle The Book of Elements (1997–2002, in five ‘books’ which may also be performed separately); and the quasi-opera Philomela (2002–4).

The Glasgow premiere of the complete Nine Rivers in 2010 was followed by performances in New York in 2011 and at the Holland Festival in 2013, and perhaps the belated vindication opened a floodgate. Since the aforementioned

CD release of Philomela in 2009, the magic circle has been entered repeatedly, and what was previously nascent in Dillon’s music is now fully realised. Not only has Nine Rivers received three complete performances, but almost every calendar year has seen the composition of a new work lasting at least half an hour and in many cases well upward of that, many of them highly original in their approach to instrumentation and genre as well as to scale and structure: The Leuven Triptych (2009), Oslo/Triptych (2011) and New York Triptych (2012), for various instrumental ensembles; Stabat mater dolorosa (2014) for 12-voice choir, ensemble (with obbligato trumpet) and electronics; The Gates (2016) for string quartet and orchestra; ‘echo the angelus’ (2016) for solo piano; The Louth Work (2017, subtitled ‘Orphic Fragments’) for voice, five instruments and electronics; The Freiburg Diptych (2019) for solo violin with prerecorded materials and live electronics; Pharmakeia (2017–20) for 16 players; as well as the two works featured on the present recordings. Of these, Tanz/haus: triptych 2017 – like the Leuven, Oslo and New York triptychs, and unlike the 1980s ‘German triptych’ – can only be played complete, not as its constituent parts. Increasingly, the circle is unbroken.

Within this new norm of extended length and enhanced mystery, electronics are an increasing presence. Until 2009 Dillon had used electronics – or, more generally, sounds

produced other than by the performers on stage – only in parts 5 to 9 of the Nine Rivers cycle and in two scenes of Philomela (though the composer has talked of the influence of electronic processes such as attenuation or intermodulation, and of post-electronic conceptions of time, on the musical material of purely acoustic works such as the Violin Concerto (2000)). In the sixth, seventh and concluding ninth parts of Nine Rivers the electronics are simply a question of live transformation and spatialisation of the sounds made on stage. The eighth part of the cycle, Introitus (1989–90), by contrast, involves both live electronics and a tape part composed (on the computers of the IRCAM institute in Paris) using both synthetic and sampled sounds; the real-time electronics and the fixed-media layer interact with the live instrumental material (scored for 12 solo strings) in what Dillon describes as ‘a palimpsest of three superposed layers … a tidal delirium opened up by the employment of computer technology’.

Prerecorded sounds, Dillon has suggested, ‘fall for me into two fundamental categories –symbolic and/or sonic. The sounds are chosen either for their referential charge or for their mnemonic potential.’ (‘Mnemonic’ seems here to refer to form-building capacities rather than to have its more general sense of an aide memoire.) The tape material in Introitus tends towards the latter function, being

made up largely from processed samples of string sounds and synthetically generated (harmonic and inharmonic) spectra, but it also incorporates ‘sound objects’ drawn from nature, whose role is determined both by their sonic potential and by their symbolic value (the ‘earth/heavens’ binary of a sample of a Mediterranean cicada song providing the sound content for a series of durations drawn from the periodicity rates of pulsars; other sounds representing the four elements of earth, air, fire and water). Nine Rivers ’ imposing fifth part – the percussion solo La coupure, mentioned above – followed ten years after Introitus , and its electronic part is more heterogeneous, both technically and conceptually. Most remarkable is its inclusion of human speech – we hear the composer discussing the making of the work with a studio assistant (a nod to Stockhausen’s Hymnen?) – the ultimate ‘symbolic’, or referential, element, and one which is increasingly present in Dillon’s subsequent work, including Tanz/haus: triptych 2017.

After La coupure, Dillon first revisited the question of spoken text in the trio of triptychs he composed between 2009 and 2012 (each named after the home city of its commissioning ensemble). The Leuven Triptych ‘folds’ readings of several fifteenthcentury texts into its homage to the painter Rogier van der Weyden; the texts may

either be played back from recordings during a performance, or spoken live by the musicians. In Oslo/Triptych, the texts – this time comprising quotations from Virgil, Coleridge and Apollinaire – are read by the players through voice transformers, while four players also operate shortwave radio receivers. New York Triptych similarly includes both shortwave radio and fixedmedia playback material. Radio is also a presence in the recent The Freiburg Diptych (2019), which like Introitus employs both live electronics and a fixed-media component. Its first panel, ‘… drone …’, transforms and spatialises the sounds of the solo violinist and of a prerecorded violin, which the second, ‘… ghost stations …’, places the soloist in a mysterious lo-fi environment populated with traces of speech from so-called ‘numbers stations’ – shortwave transmissions of encrypted messages in the form of groups of numbers or letters.

The apparent association for Dillon between the triptych/diptych concept and the presence of spoken text is particularly suggestive. It is as if, in proposing links across mediums and art-forms (music, painting, literature, radio …), Dillon has alighted on his most original and provocative manner yet, in works that span geographical and temporal distance to represent what he has called ‘the verticalness of history’.

Tanz/haus again takes up the triptych form, and is again a work of exploration: of language, of the history of ideas, of conceptualisation and of what escapes conceptualisation. (Dillon has pointed out that our idea of ‘the musical’ itself is often of that which resists verbal conceptualisation.) In ‘the collision between magic and so-called rationality’, the composer has suggested, we find a more complete picture of human thought.

Dillon likes words that contain opposites, hidden within their everyday or familiar meanings. ‘River’, in the title of Nine Rivers , is intended to evoke a flow or stream but also (as in the title of that central percussion solo, La coupure ) a cut – that which rives (‘rive’ meaning to tear apart or to separate by striking). The title Tanz/haus is composed of two apparently simple German words whose meanings are both primal and, by that same token, complexly layered. Tanz, meaning ‘dance’, is thought to be ultimately derived from an Old Frisian word, dintje, meaning ‘to tremble’ or ‘to quiver’. Haus (‘house’) can be traced back to Old High German huˉs and its Old English cognate hus, ‘dwelling’, which perhaps share the same original IndoEuropean root as the verb ‘to hide, to conceal’. The diagonal stroke in the title is another agent of ambivalence: like ‘river’, it both separates and joins. (It is embodied musically, Dillon suggests, in the piece’s frequent

use of sudden fermatas , during which the players are instructed to remain absolutely, theatrically still.)

Inspired by Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (‘On Puppet Theatre’), the work is not so much a mechanical ballet as an extended meditation on stasis, movement, and the ‘trembling’ or ‘quivering’ that for Dillon is present in the etymology – what we might call the historical memory –of the word Tanz. In addition to exploring the idea of automata and their ambiguous relation to movement, Dillon is concerned with, as he has put it, ‘a simultaneously physical and conceptual idea of trembling, of the tremor, of vibrato’. The material of Tanz/haus , he has said,

is organised around two ideas: polarity – here I imagine a continuity along an axis between stasis and movement – and the way in which one quality can be transformed into another, with the stasis being animated by a trembling and the moving textures capable of being static, like the spokes of a rotating wheel. I imagine a continuum that is dense throughout, variegated, full of ripples, of breaks.

In a key moment at the centre of the work, a moment balanced between stasis and movement, ‘all the activity emanates from the quivering of the guitar strings, an idiomatic trembling resulting from the feedback between the electric guitar’s magnetic sensors’.

The electronics provide their own form of quiver, and perform a dialogue both with the materials of the work and with the world outside it. The symbolic function (‘sounds chosen for their referential charge’) is fulfilled by bell-like and guitar-like sounds but also, as we have come to expect, by fragments of distorted speech – most prominently an extract from a recording of a lecture by Martin Heidegger. (It is, in an ironically humorous touch, a lecture on the dangers of technology.)

emblemata : Carnival was conceived as a series of fifteen ‘character pieces’ for different permutations of the six players (the first five pieces may also be performed as an independent sequence). Dillon’s intention was both to find unexpected and inventive ways of working with what has become an overfamiliar instrumentation (the ‘Pierrot plus percussion’ ensemble), and also to build a larger unity from small component sections.

The title refers to Schumann’s piano sequence Carnaval (and thence to the Romantic origin of the idea of character pieces) and also to the ‘emblem books’ –books of (usually allegorical) illustrations with accompanying text, typically morals or poems – that were popular in Europe around the sixteenth century. (The work is the first in a series of emblemata , emblem books, that Dillon plans to compose.) The titles of the individual pieces, meanwhile, are phrases drawn from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake ; the placement of ‘phosphorus’ as the fifteenth piece additionally alludes to the atomic number of that element. The vast range of cultural references embedded in the work is, as so often with Dillon, poetic but also playfully elusive. Indeed, he has commented that at one level, all titles function ‘like carnival masks – in other words, hovering between what they conceal and what they reveal’.

Carnival may be performed with or without electronics (though the sixth piece, ‘turning tricks’, involves the use of a condenser microphone and a small guitar amplifier with spring reverb even in an otherwise purely acoustic performance). Dillon composed the instrumental components first, and then added a fixedmedia layer running through the work for the first complete concert performance, at the 2021 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (where Tanz/haus: triptych 2017 had premiered four years earlier). Less prominent than the prerecorded elements of Tanz/haus , it nonetheless underlines the fundamental continuity of the fifteen pieces, and adds a different temporal dimension to proceedings. The present recording features a sparser version of that electronic material, but the sense remains of a work that exists in two dimensions, on two coexisting timescales – and as in

so much of this composer’s output, of an enchanted whole that is truly more than its parts.

© 2023 John Fallas

John Fallas is a freelance writer and editor specialising in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Biographies

Since its formation in 2008,

Red

Note Ensemble has established itself as Scotland’s leading 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. Outwith 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 also undertakes an extensive programme of access, engagement and participation 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. Alongside this, Red Note undertakes an extensive performer and composer development programme within schools, universities and conservatoires nationally and internationally.

Red Note is Associate Contemporary Ensemble at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow and Associate Ensemble of the Sound Festival, Aberdeen. Its acclaimed recording partnership with Delphian Records has led to acclaimed album releases of music by Eddie McGuire, John McLeod, David Wilde and Lyell Cresswell. Red Note is a PRS Foundation Talent Development Partner and a Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries host.

British conductor Geoffrey Paterson is admired for his impressive grasp of detail, responsiveness to musicians, and his ability to shape and make music from the most complex scores with natural authority. Paterson is praised for his ‘winning combination of assuredness, agility and enthusiasm’ (Daily Telegraph ), as well as his ‘instinct for pace’ (The Spectator ) in repertoire ranging from Bach to Birtwistle and beyond.

Highlights of Paterson’s 2022/23 season include a return appearance at the BBC Proms, his Japanese debut conducting the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra, and appearances at the Royal Danish Ballet, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the Lammermuir Festival, and with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Musikkollegium Winterthur and London Mozart Players. In the field of contemporary music he conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s Ensemble 10/10, Red Note Ensemble, and continues his ongoing collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, including an all-Xenakis centenary programme at the Southbank Centre.

In the operatic world, Paterson made an acclaimed debut last season with the Frankfurt Opera conducting Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He has previously conducted at English National Opera (a highly praised production of Philip Glass’s Orphée ), Dutch

National Opera (Willem Jeths’ Ritratto ), Bayerische Staatsoper (Menotti The Consul, ballets by Max Richter and Kaija Saariaho), Royal Danish Opera (Prokofiev Cinderella , Die Fledermaus , Porgy and Bess ), Opera North (La bohème ) and Glyndebourne on Tour (Die Entführung aus dem Serail ). With Music Theatre Wales he conducted Pascal Dusapin’s Passion at the Southbank Centre and Péter Eötvös’s The Golden Dragon on tour, and with the London Sinfonietta he led the world premieres of Harrison Birtwistle’s chamber opera double-bill The Corridor / The Cure (Aldeburgh Festival, Holland Festival) and of Tansy Davies’s Cave He has recorded Massenet’s Le Portrait de Manon for Opera Rara

Paterson studied at Cambridge University (including composition lessons with Alexander Goehr) and at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Having won both First Prize and the Audience Prize at the 2009 Leeds Conductors Competition, he went on to participate in the Lucerne Festival conducting masterclasses with Pierre Boulez. As a Jette Parker Young Artist at The Royal Opera, Covent Garden he assisted conductors including Antonio Pappano, Mark Elder, Andris Nelsons and Daniele Gatti on an extensive repertoire, and for two seasons he worked in Bayreuth as musical assistant to Kirill Petrenko on Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Also available on Delphian

John McLeod: Moments in Time Red Note Ensemble

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Increasingly acclaimed at home and abroad, Aberdeen-born John McLeod’s music bears all the hallmarks of exuberant colour and precisely imagined fantasy that his early associations with Lennox Berkeley and Witold Lutosławski would lead one to expect. Recorded during the composer’s eightieth-birthday year, this landmark collection brings together McLeod’s four mythological ‘songs’ – powerful dramatic scenes in which instruments are elevated to voice-like expression – and a further work which crystallises the theme of a single moment with a long expressive ‘shadow’.

‘Five arresting and resourceful works … This music, in turns dramatic, serene and – in The Song of Phryne – thoroughly erotic, is brilliantly performed’ — Sunday Times, May 2015

Eddie McGuire: Entangled Fortunes Red Note Ensemble

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Eddie McGuire is one of Scotland’s greatest living composers. A renaissance man, his compositional voice is informed by a broad wealth of cultural experience and by an unlimited melodic creativity. In this intensely beautiful and unpretentious music, folk-like tunes appear naturally, taking their place in a world of invention large enough to contain minimalist gestures, intense romanticism, meditative silence and sudden drama. In the second of two discs programmed to initiate their new recording partnership with Delphian, Red Note Ensemble bring passion and care to this music – a token of the regard in which McGuire is held by Scottish musicians of all generations.

‘Red Note is the ideal ensemble to champion McGuire’s folk-rich music: the players shift between silvery laments, robust dances and angular squalls in a blink’ — The Guardian, July 2015

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‘Communicates with the immediacy and authenticity of direct, lived experience … the results are truly memorable’

— Gramophone, January 2017

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Two ends of the world are bridged in this compelling survey of string chamber music by Lyell Cresswell, whose unique body of work has been a vital presence in his adopted home of Scotland for four decades now while retaining qualities of light, space and openness that evoke his native New Zealand. The imposing String Quartet plays host to a wealth of detail which enriches but never obscures the ‘long, strong tune’ that threads through the work. Capricci is a set of vividly individual dances, Ricercari a sequence of variations inspired by Cresswell’s favourite living painter. Instrumental virtuosity comes to the fore in Kotetetete, whose title puns on ‘quartet’ and on the Maori word for ‘chattering’.

‘The arched intensity of this performance is breathtaking’

— The Scotsman, April 2018