​Composed in 2018 for wind quintet, Angela Slater’s The Sun Catcher  takes inspiration from the folklore-laden popular garden showpiece. Creating a spectrum of colours, textures and brightness, sun catchers are known for their stories of capturing pieces of the sun and bring the lightness down to earth, leaving only darkness above. A truly intriguing theme for a piece which sees Slater take two novel approaches to The Sun Catcher. In her programme notes she mentions that:
 
“Sun Catcher explores two different musical ideas happening simultaneously in parts of the piece. The first is serene and expressive exploring shimmering light and colour. The second is fast, underlying and increasingly agitated music. This gradually infiltrates each instrument’s line and captures the serene music from before, holding it hostage on a manic rampage and race to the end of the piece.”
 
As part of Iluminate Women’s Music’s 2020 concert season, The Sun Catcher will be performed at the Royal College of Music. I caught up with the Founder and Artistic Director, Angela Slater, to find out more about this intriguing work…

Where did the inspiration come from for this work?In my works I like to take inspiration from extra-musical materials and most often from the natural world. My piece Sun Catcher draws on both the imagery of a metal Sun Catcher and folklore around the sun catcher myths. A Sun Catcher is a metal object that spins in the wind capturing the sunlight and creating colourful patterns. There are also many myths and folklore tales about how the sun was once captured, and either fixed in its proper sphere or else made to stand still in the sky. 
        Other tales explore the idea of capturing the sun and bringing it down so darkness could prevail. So in my piece Sun Catcher I explore both themes, therefore essentially having two competing musical ideas occurring simultaneously in parts of the piece. 
       The first is serene and expressive exploring shimmering light and colour. The second is a fast, undulating and increasingly agitated music as though the music itself is trying to capture the sun and drag it from the sky. This agitated music gradually infiltrates each instrument’s line and captures the serene music from before, holding it hostage on a manic rampage and race to the end of the piece.
Why use a wind quintet for this particular work?
This work was originally commissioned by York Late music concert series back in 2018 and the commission was to write for the Atea wind quintet, so the instrumentation came before the idea of the piece. I thought about the potential of colour, range, texture such an ensemble can create and this led me onto the idea of Sun Catcher.

How have you managed to make the colours from the sun catcher translate into music? Were there any particular techniques that helped with this?In this piece I am not trying to evoke any particular colour but trying to express varying shades of colour and the shimmering of light you would see visually on a sun catcher. These subtleties in fluctuations of shades and colour are created through techniques such as same note tremolos in the horn part, and timbral trills at various points for the flute, clarinet and oboe.
I also make use of practice mutes for the horn, giving the horn this fantastically beautiful subtle colour. Also the clarinet’s undulating material at first evokes this shimmering light of the sun catcher before it becomes increasingly agitated as this material is passed around the ensemble gradually shifting as though trying to capture the sun and drag it from the sky.

Can you tell me a bit about the festival that this work will be performed at?Each year Royal College of Music put on a Chamber music festival to showcase the talent of its students and past students. Putting on concerts contributed the variety of music taught and programmed at the college. Last year I was delighted for the first time to be invited to curate an Illuminate concert for RCM. 
The concert was a great success and the students at the college took a deep interest in the repertoire. Some of the ensembles took the repertoire into their regular concert repertoire. I was particularly proud to see this happening as it is only if young performers take on the music by women from the past and present that it will get heard by audiences. I was so delighted to be invited back and to hear how popular the concert has been amongst students. I am certainly looking forward to 15th February to hear how the students have got on with the repertoire I selected. 

Can we look forward to hearing some new music from you soon?Yes indeed! I have a busy year ahead regarding composing and performances. I am currently working on a new work for saxophone and piano which will be featured in Illuminate’s next season touring around the UK over the next few months. I am also writing a piece for string quartet and piano with percussion which will be performed at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in May. 
        In the summer I will be off to the US music festival Tanglewood as a composition fellow. I will be having my work Shades of Rain performed whilst I am there and will be working on a number of new works with musicians while I am there also. I am also writing a piano concerto for pianist Laura Farré Rozada which will be performed in December this year in Birmingham.

Ⓒ Alex Burns 2020

Angela’s Website
Royal College of Music Chamber Music Festival
 

Born in Helsinki in 1952, Kaija Saariaho has become one of Finland’s most progressive and pioneering composers. Studying at the prestigious Sibelius Academy, Darmstadt Academy and at the IRCAM research institute in Paris, Saariaho has had some incredible musical training. 
 
Saariaho’s work within the development of computer-assisted compositions has proven to be one of her most valuable assets. Her knowledge of working with live electronics and tapes is considered one of her trademarks. Her work in this sector has shaped her attitudes and approaches to orchestral composition. Her use of dense sounds and collaboration with live tapes has made works such as Verblendungen some of her most popular compositions. 
 
Saairaho has composed music for all sorts of genres, from opera to electronic, her talents are truly endless. Many of her works have been recorded, with some even being programmed in commercial concert halls. Works such as Laterna Magica have been performed at the BBC Proms. An award-winning composer in her own right, Saariaho’s music is unique to her ever-progressing stylet.

​Composed in 1997, Mirrorsis scored for flute and cello. As the title suggests, Mirrors is based on symmetry and mirror images of music. Saariaho states in her score notes for this work that there should always be a mirror between the musicians in one or more of the following musical dimensions: rhythm, pitch, instrumental gesture or timbre. These symmetrical nuances can either be vertical or horizontal on the score.
 
Mirrors was composed in the height of the CD-Rom era, and its purpose was to engage the user so that they could create their own mirrors too. Saariaho supplied the fragments of music on the CD, which are built to be able to change into different forms dependent on the construction. 
 
In live performance, the flautist and cellist have room to make artistic decisions in which mirrors they want to create and how they will go about making those effects. The original score sees Saariaho’s own mirror images, which she showcases through rhythms, pitch and gestures. As long as artists take her ideas of creating mirror images, the piece should work and be a really exciting listen for the audience, as well as an artistic endeavour for the performers. 

Ⓒ Alex Burns 2020
 
Website: www.classicalexburns.com
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Support our upcoming 2020 concerts:

Illuminate composer Angela Elizabeth Slater discusses her new work 'Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'  for soprano and string quartet  whilst at our Snape Maltings in August (2019). To hear this piece live please join us for our upcoming concerts:

4th November at St Michael's Near Northgate Oxford at 1.00pm
7th November at University Huddersfield at 1.00pm
8th November at University College Oxford at 7.30pm
9th November at Emmanuel College Cambridge at 7.30pm

For the past few years, I’ve felt an increasing uneasiness around how any kind of true feminism can fit within the ‘traditional’ model of composing. The existence of Illuminate, and other similar initiatives for the programming of music exclusively written by women, only serves to add further urgency to these questions; how can genuine feminist practice exist within a world which, generally speaking, relies on patriarchal (and capitalist) hierarchies? A traditional model of ‘composing’ — writing music, giving it to performers, having it played, with the attached notion of the ‘genius’, isolation and intellect of the composer — remains largely unchallenged within the academy today. (And, significantly, the legitimacy of composers is often verified by the academy, in the conferring of postgraduate degrees or faculty positions. I can’t think of many conventionally ‘successful’ composers in this country who have not gone through university or conservatoire education, many to PhD level.) Thinking outside of this traditional model is challenging — and has led me to deeper questions about what I’m writing, and why. 

These traditional ideas about what composing is are built on patriarchal Western philosophies of creativity and of gender, so much so that it is difficult to even recognise: it is just the normal mode of thinking. Moreover, within traditional pedagogical models for composing, it is difficult to escape from the studying of ‘master works’ which exemplify different ways to intellectually construct a composition, largely within the parameters of a conventional score, or if not, at least a score which exists within a straightforward semiotic system which conveys the composer’s precise intentions to a performer. The locus of ‘creativity’, the generation of ideas, lies with the composer. Moreover, the way we think about composing suggests that the generation of ideas — thinking, logic, reasoning — is central to composition, and that ties it into very fundamental ideas about gender in the West. I summarised this in the opening paragraph of my undergraduate dissertation: 

 “Ever since the birth of the concept of ‘the composer’ in the Renaissance Christian Church, Western constructions of gender have had an impact on who has been allowed to compose. Genevieve Lloyd suggests that “from the beginnings of philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason left behind.” The concepts of reason and objectivity are gendered male: masculinity produces culture, whilst femininity is bound to nature. The Cartesian mind-body dualism of the seventeenth century further constructed mental capacity as a masculine trait, and femininity is therefore attached, in oppositional definition, to the body, and ‘feeling’. Western composition also, at this time, moved away from the home and into the public sphere, which reinforced ideological oppositions to women’s participation.” 
 Researching barriers to women being composers for this dissertation led me to much more profound questioning of my own compositional practice than I had expected. There are many societal factors which prevent women from accessing composing as a career; obvious and ubiquitous factors such as childcare, or the socialisation of women to be less confident or ‘pushy’, as well as deeper ideas about what being creative means and who can be creative.
 
However, the most challenging, nuanced and profound avenue of research was around the very definition of ‘composing’, and the radical change many thinkers have suggested is necessary to allow anyone (not just educated white men) to find a place in the world of‘composing’. One example of such thinking can be found in Sally Macarthur’s book Towards a 21st Century Feminist Politics of Music, which examines composing using an intellectual framework provided by Deleuze, a French poststructuralist. The irony of the esotericism inherent in her framework for exploring how to democratise composing is not lost on me. However, the actual practical ideas — focussing on collaboration, improvisation, pedagogical reform, removing the focal point of compositional practice from the academy, challenging conventional value judgements about structure and time in music, considering radical new contexts of reception for new musics — ultimately, how to compose in a genuinely ‘experimental’ way — seem tangible, achievable, and straightforwardly aligned with more broad feminist (as well as decolonial, and anti-capitalist) epistemologies. These ideas have helped form my compositional ideology, rooted in a self-definition as ‘experimental’. This label is not interested in genre definitions, focussing on a conceptual and methodological framework to define my practice, rather than an aesthetic end result, or any retrospectively analysable, intellectual ‘merit’. Thinking about composing in this way has become integral to how I understand my identity as a composer. 

Other influential ways of thinking about musical contexts along similar lines include Pauline Oliveros’ notion of ‘deep listening’, re-imagining notions of directionality and structure which are so valued by conventional definitions of ‘composition’, as well as Suzanne Cusick’s pioneering thinking around queering conceptions of music, moving away from a patriarchal, gendered understanding of power in music, into a world where there is no force of pre-conceived ‘normality’. This kind of thinking relates all the way back to Sally Macarthur’s Deleuzian framework, in which it is reassuring to remember that a key idea in poststructuralist feminism is that we cannot know or control how the future will look. 

During my studies I have also engaged with postcolonial writers, which definitely has come to influence how I feel about my own compositional practice, and the urgency and unavodability which I feel around constantly questioning and renewing my approach to creativity. Audre Lorde’s powerful, iconic essay The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle The Master’s House is ever-present in my mind, serving as a reminder that resistance to systems of oppression (i.e. patriarchy, and coloniality) cannot be achieved using those systems’ language. In the context of composing, this clearly aligns with the above suggestion that traditional aesthetics and processes cannot be used in a project of radical democratisation. This kind of thinking also allows my practice across being a creative musician — a performer, improviser, composer, and writer — to flow freely, allowing cross-pollination of ideas and breaking down boundaries about what I ‘should’ do for certain commissions or in specific situations. 

Being a performer as well as a composer is integral to my artistic practice. Performing as well as composing, and seeing the two as a fluid overall creative practice, helps redefine ‘composition’ away from an intellectualised exercise with defined, score-based parameters of doing and of results. Performing using my voice also carries special feminist meaning to me. The fundamentally embodied nature of the voice, especially when harnessed towards experimental performance (which can often be visceral and unpredictable), helps counteract the intellectualisation of music which places composition in the masculine domain of the ‘mind’. Ultimately, the embodied nature of vocal performance links my practice to contemporary discourses rooted in the body, such as Judith Butler’s transformative ideas about performativity, and Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological explorations of the idea of ‘orientations’ — engaging my work with queering the definitions of ‘composition’ and ‘performance’.

I often look to other female composer-performers for a significant source of inspiration. Much as I obviously love and am interested in lots of the music made by non-female composers and peers too, I firmly believe that it’s really important be able to see yourself in those who inspire you. (One of the many reasons Illuminate is such an important project — demonstrably platforming female composers for the next generation of young women to see.) Women who have significantly shaped my current practice include Jennifer Walshe, Meredith Monk, Errollyn Wallen, Anna Meredith, and Claudia Molitor. These women all practice in different ways, making ideologically experimental music within a variety of aesthetics. I love to engage with the work of these composers primarily through performing and improvising with their work, and imagining my own methods and contexts to perform it, such as interactive performances, self-accompaniment, and layering and fragmenting their pieces.

Another important strand of influence for me is popular music. Popular music has provided radical contexts for creativity, political engagement, and expression for women; it is also standard practice for women to perform their own music, as classical music’s hierarchical divide between creator and performer does not exist. Popular music’s short-form nature, as well as its existence within the cultural mainstream, also means that it is heard by a wide audience, providing potential for everyday political engagement. These strands of the fabric of popular music are clearly really engaging, and influential, especially when trying to create a practice which moves away from the esotericism and gender-, race- and class-based exclusions which operate in the ‘classical music’ world. And lastly, I have already mentioned Pauline Oliveros and Meredith Monk; it is clear that the fundamental anti-teleological ideology of minimal music is an interesting thread with the creation of a new anti-conventional compositional practice. Beyond (or within?) the aesthetics of minimal music, I’ve been fascinated by reading explorations of how minimal music can be understood as anti-patriarchal, circular, and self-renewing, in a way which links to Cusick’s notions of queering power in music.

​
My piece for this Illuminate project, GRADIENT, draws on lots of these ideas. I have thought about breaking down structure and directionality, creating materials which are short, repetitive, cyclical, and can be re-ordered as the performers see fit. I have also used a small fragment of text over and over again, invoking the seemingly simple aesthetics of popular musics which belie a more nuanced conceptual basis, and removing the possibility of surface-level analysis of or links between text and music and instead making space for a flexible relationship between all of the performers. The score features faded, simple pastel-ish colours; this is heavily influenced by the work of Claudia Molitor. Her beautiful graphic scores are rich in colour, often in a ‘visually consonant’ way, and I have become fascinated by the potential of including colour in my own scores, whilst still using some conventional notation. Colour is not a conventional element of a traditional score, and not something which can be interpreted in any specific or direct way; the hope is that including colour adds a sense of playfulness and subjectivity, welcoming the performers to have a more fluid and interpretive relationship with the score. The voice is considered in the same way I do as a performer (as something which is textural and embodied), and tried to translate that into a score by using some non-conventional notations to encourage the singer to make the piece something which they can feel comfortable and empowered experimenting with. Ultimately, the piece is delicate, reflective, and small, constantly looping back on itself; I’m looking forward to hearing how the performance shifts and changes throughout the upcoming concerts, as the performers’ relationship with the score and each other shifts and changes too. ​


Sources, and possibly interesting ideas for further reading: 
 
Ahmed, Sara. Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. 2006.
 
Barthes, Roland. Image-music-text. Macmillan. 1977.
 
Bikini Kill: The Riot Grrrl Manifesto, 1991. (https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/riotgrrrlmanifesto.html)
 
Cusick, Suzanne. “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,” in Biddle, Ian D. Music and Identity Politics. Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
 
Dell'Antonio, Andrew. Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley; London: U of California, 2004.
 
Fink, Robert. Repeating ourselves: American minimal music as cultural practice.Univ of California Press, 2005.
 
Green, Lucy. Music, gender, education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
 
Hanoch-Roe, Galia. “Musical Space and Architectural Time: Open Scoring versus Linear Processes.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 34, no. 2 (2003): 145-160. 
 
Lim, Liza. Luck, Grief, Hospitality – re-routing power relationships in music. Keynote for ‘Women in the Creative Arts’ conference, ANU, 11th August, 2017. (https://lizalimcomposer.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/1-final_lim_rerouting-power-anu-keynote.pdf)
 
Lloyd, Genevieve.The Man of Reason: 'male' and 'female' in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen, 1986.
 
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press Feminist Series. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.
 
Macarthur, Sally. "The woman composer, new music and neoliberalism." Musicology Australia 36, no. 1, (2014): 36-52.
__________. Towards a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 
 
Scharff, Christina. Gender, subjectivity, and cultural work: The classical music profession. Routledge, 2017. 
__________. “Blowing your own Trumpet: Exploring the Gendered Dynamics of Self-Promotion in the Classical Music Profession.” The Sociological Review, 63 (2015): 97-112.

Among the composers featured in Illuminate’s second concert series in 2019 will be Ailsa Dixon (1932-2017), whose Variations on Love Divine for string quartet will be played in Oxford on 8th November.  
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The performance history of Ailsa Dixon’s work offers a striking example of how women composers sidelined in musical history are now being rediscovered. A handful of performances during her most fertile period of composition in the 1980s and ’90s (notably by Ian Partridge, Lynne Dawson, and the Brindisi Quartet), were followed by several decades of almost complete neglect. Then in 2017 a work written thirty years earlier was chosen for premiere as part of the London Oriana Choir’s Five15 project highlighting the work of women composers. These things shall be received its first performance in the spectacular glass-roofed concert hall surrounding the keel of the Cutty Sark, just five weeks before she died.  

​With further performances at memorial events and in festivals and concerts around the UK, it is now showing signs of entering the choral repertoire. With its vision of a future when ‘New arts shall bloom’, it seems especially apt that this work came to light in the context of the enterprise to give due prominence to the work of women composers, and has stimulated a revival of interest in her music.  

Ailsa Dixon’s compositions include an opera, chamber and instrumental music, a sonata for piano duet and many vocal works, but the string quartet was central to her writing from the outset. Her first serious work, completed while reading music at University in Durham in the 1950s, was a single movement for string quartet (now lost).  When she returned to composition in the 1980s, embarking on her opera Letter to Philemon (performed in 1984), a string quartet was at the core of the instrumentation.  In the years that followed, she wrote several further works for quartet.
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Two years after Letter to Philemon, Dixon’s Nocturnal Scherzo was premiered in 1986 at the Little Missenden Festival by the Brindisi Quartet.

It was paired in performance with Shining Cold, a haunting vocalise exploring the different sonorities of the high soprano voice, strings (viola and cello) and the ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument, best known for its role in Messiaen’s Turangalila symphony).  

A note accompanying the two scores in her archive sheds light on her compositional method: 

'It seems to me that no music is truly abstract. Pieces which have no words or ‘programme’ must be a condensation either of past experience or of processes going on in the psyche. When I write music which intends to be abstract, an exposition of the main themes materialises before I feel any need to question what I am writing. Then I find it difficult to continue until I have asked myself what the themes seem to signify. Dream-like images emerge in my mind, and from that part of the process develop the ideas of how to use the themes.'

The note goes on to explain the dream sequence underlying the Nocturnal Scherzo and its symbolic significance, representing the contest and reconciliation of two halves of the psyche:

‘From a ‘sleep’ theme a slow rising motif suddenly erupts into action. Out of a jack-in-the-box bursts Pierrot, with his white face, his funny gait and his sad little song.  He is swept off stage by the macho man whose theme in the cello verges on the bombastic.  Pierrot climbs the stage curtains and swings up there, mocking the macho man. Eventually he responds to the macho’s angry call, not to assume unfair advantage, but to come down. They try on each other’s themes, like hats. Scarcely has a harmonious contrapuntal synthesis of their themes developed before the ‘sleep’ theme calls and the lid of the box slowly and gently closes down on them.’

This vignette, combining an apparently trivial piece of commedia dell’arte with a deeper psychological meaning, gives an insight into the emotional significance she attached to the contrapuntal interplay and resolution of musical themes.

The Nocturnal Scherzo was performed again in 1992 by the all-female De Beauvoir Quartet, alongside the premiere of Dixon’s next work for quartet, Sohrab and Rustum, written in 1987-8. This was a more ambitious undertaking: a substantial through-composed single movement, inspired by Matthew Arnold’s poem about the tragic encounter between an estranged father and son on opposite sides of a battle between the Tartar and Persian armies. The music is a vivid response to the poem’s human drama and atmosphere. Listeners will not easily forget the opening sequence evoking the river Oxus rising in the starlit mountains. A long, searing high E in the first violin over a deep chord from the lower strings gives way to an eerie chromatic oscillating motif between the two violins, like the scintillation of light on water.  Through a gradual crescendo it turns into a fast falling motif as the river gathers momentum, tumbling towards the plain where the drama will take place. A leaping phrase ending with a trill, marked ‘brillante’ and passed between the players, brings the action to life, and gradually the story unfolds as the warriors come face to face. At the close of the piece, its human tragedy played out, the armies light their evening fires and the river pours out into a calm sea under the stars.

Ailsa Dixon’s final work for string quartet, the Variations on Love Divine written in 1991-2, represents an unusual foray into religious chamber music. A possible source of inspiration may have been Haydn’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, suggested in the penultimate variation’s echo of the final tremolando earthquake. In a thought-provoking essay on the use of hymn tunes in classical music, Simon Brackenborough placed the Variations in a long tradition of composers’ engagement with hymns, and likened the work to Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on the Old 104th Psalm Tune, albeit on a smaller instrumental scale.  
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Woven around Stainer’s familiar melody, the Variations offer a musical exploration of the meanings of divine love in a series of scenes from the incarnation to the ascension and a culminating vision of heavenly joy. The work has yet to be performed in concert, but a recording was made by the Rasumovsky Quartet in the mid-1990s.  

On the recording, the titles or short texts which precede each variation are spoken (by the viola player Christopher Wellington), allowing the meaning to be followed by the listener in a kind of musical meditation. This spiritual journey takes us through a sound-world that is by turns mysterious, lyrical, dramatic, poignant, and finally exultant in ‘The Song of Praise and the Dance of Joy’.  

Simon Brackenborough comments on the paradox of the work’s scope, at once conceptually expansive and minutely concentrated on a single melody:

'There is something quietly thought-provoking about Dixon’s insistence on using this modest, contented-sounding tune to cover such large theological ground… [suggesting] that a whole world of religious meaning can be revealed through even the smallest means.'

He observes the change in her treatment of the theme at the incarnation, when the hymn tune, hitherto buried or splintered into hesitant half-phrases, is heard distinctly for the first time. Elsewhere it is subject to fragmentation, dissonance, and various techniques in the string writing, from pizzicato for the trotting donkey on the journey to Bethlehem, jabbing and martelé attack for the hammering of the nails at the crucifixion, and knocking on the wood for the disciples’ house-to-house calling.  Harmonic effects lend much to the work’s emotional impact: the sagging and distorted chords pulling the melody out of tune evoke the wrenching sadness of the disciples watching as Jesus is led away. Reflecting the strong impulse towards redemption underlying the work’s theological scheme, there is elsewhere a yearning for tonal resolution that draws the music from dissonance into a harmonic sweetness at significant moments, such as the centurion’s revelation that ‘truly this was the son of God’.  
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Much of Ailsa Dixon’s music went unheard in her lifetime. Research in her archive has uncovered new works for performance, including a sonata for piano duet, Airs of the Seasons, premiered posthumously in 2018. A set of three songs for soprano and string quartet, The Spirit of Love, dating from 1987-88, will be premiered on 20th February 2020 at St George’s Bristol, by Lucinda Cox and the Villiers Quartet.

Most of her scores remain in manuscript, but are now being digitised as part of a project in Finland to rescue the works of neglected women composers. Plans are underway for a recording of her complete works for string quartet by the Villiers Quartet. Meanwhile, the original performances made available on her YouTube channel offer a fascinating insight into her compositional language, hailed in a recent review as ‘most definitely’ that of ‘a British composer with an original musical vision’.   
 
To subscribe to The Friends of Ailsa Dixon for occasional newsletters featuring recent and upcoming performances and news on the availability of scores, please click here
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Illuminate composer Sarah Westwood discusses her new work 'Things you don't yet know you feel' for string quartet and soprano whilst at our Snape Maltings in August (2019). To hear this piece live please join us for our upcoming concerts:

4th November at St Michael's Near Northgate Oxford at 1.00pm
7th November at University Huddersfield at 1.00pm
8th November at University College Oxford at 7.30pm
9th November at Emmanuel College Cambridge at 7.30pm

Blog written by Kendra Preston Leonard 
 
Vivian Fine (1913-2000) was a child piano prodigy who turned to composition as she entered her teens, studying with Djane Lavoie-Herz and Ruth Crawford. As a performer, Fine premiered numerous works by her colleagues, including those of Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, and Dane Rudhyar; as a composer, she wrote for both established genres, including string quartet, voice and piano, and orchestra, as well as more novel ones, such as percussion ensemble, cello quartet, and mixed ensembles. Many of her works combine voice and strings, including her Four Songs, written for soprano and string quartet when she was 19 and published in 1933. 
 
Rachel Lumsden has analyzed the Crawford’s influence on Fine, noting that Fine cited the older woman as “her first significant musical mentor.” Crawford not only helped Fine to understand that women could be equal to men in composition, but that women did not have to compose using the conservative musical language that had often been deemed appropriate for women composers in the decades before. Crawford encouraged Fine to find a compositional approach that mixed dissonance and consonance and that allowed Fine to express her emotions in such a way that resonated with musical cognoscenti and lay audiences. (Lumsden 2017)
 

As a composer and fine artist my musical writing is influenced by visual concepts and finding ways to express these ideas in music as well as creating artistic/musical works together. Recently my focus has centred around achieving this primarily through live painting with music and using my personal sense of synaesthesia to inform my practice.  In specific, “chromaesthesia,” the sense of simultaneously seeing and hearing sound.  This can be experienced as a physical sense in which one sees colour with their physical eyes, or in the mind’s eye.  For me, I “see” music in my minds eye as bursts of moving shapes and colour.  One of the best examples found in nature that compares to synaesthesia (as I personally experience it) is the Northern Lights, which resembles the overall sound of many stringed instruments playing together.  The chromaesthesiac moving image is dependant on much more than single notes but instrument type, intervals, timbre, dynamics and rhythm.  Many instruments playing together forms an extensive, moving image made up of smaller gestures.  This is impossible to capture entirely with live painting however I strive to create a representation of this experience for the audience.  Currently I am working towards live painting with my own compositions and also experimenting with “encoding” specific visual gestures within the music that will produce pre-planned results in the painting. Excerpts of live-painting with music can be seen here: :  https://www.carolinebordignon.com/livepaintingandmusic

In 2018 the premiere of my work, “Iridescent Flares,” for orchestra was performed at the Royal Northern College of Music featuring moving image and digital projection with the orchestra.  This work was based off of the idea of bursts of light on crystal and the iridescent colour world produced.  Above the orchestra still images of colourful brush strokes were projected in fast sequences with the performance to create a more immersive experience.  A video recording of the piece can be seen here:  ​

In future performances of this work I would like to experiment with painting live alongside the orchestra.  

Ultraviolet, for soprano and string quartet is a wordless piece written for season II of the Illuminate Women's Music concert series and was inspired by the concept of ultraviolet light.  Ultraviolet light is beyond the spectrum of light that can be perceived by the human eye, however many animals and insects see ultraviolet light and elements of the world most people do not perceive.  It is possible in very rare cases for females to have a gene mutation that allows for an extra, fourth cone to exist in the eye, resulting in the perception of ultraviolet light.  This condition is also known as “tetrachromacy”.  This can occur because of the presence of two X chromosomes found only in females that allows for a greater genetic diversity and the potential for such a mutation.  Research suggests that 12% of women have this condition.  I am interested in the ways in which hidden realities that exist yet are largely unperceived can be expressed through musical composition.  Through continued research and collaborative projects  I hope to expose these colourful worlds to a broader audience.

​In recent years, and growing alongside my enthralment with creating quarter-tonal soundworlds, I have been fascinated with psychology and with different ways of expressing and connecting to emotions using music. 
 
Most of my pieces now have a relatively complex story behind them of various characters with different traits, all reacting to one another, creating the structure (or journey) of the piece. At the same time as building these big characters and stories inside my head, the music representing them has gotten more and more minimal, focused, and more importantly – vulnerable. It’s like every single melodic fragment represents somebody’s whole world, their entire outlook on life. The pain they try to hide, now fully visible in musical form, encompassing what they have been through and who they are now.

In this time of seemingly perfect social media lives, with many of us rebelling by sharing honestly about our struggles with mental health and career setbacks, I want to believe that this type of vulnerability in music is necessary. To be able to admit our pain and connect deeply with our emotions rather than run away from them is what makes us stronger. To connect to it in music is cathartic. 
 
The first piece I wrote which represents this type of approach is Postlude, for viola and cello, written in 2014 at the Dartington advanced composition course. To express this emotional rawness using quarter-tones felt so liberating that I knew I had found my voice.
 

In contrast, Together, alone is about staying still while everyone around you finds their own voice, their own journey - making you feel more and more lonely, even when surrounded by people. It was written during a difficult time in my life when I was struggling with finding my own identity outside of music. 
 
I hope that the emotional vulnerability in this and my other pieces inspires others to be honest about their own emotions and struggles, so that we all feel a little less alone.  ​