SOUNDS OF NOW: QUARTET FOR HEART & BREATH

Richard Reed Parry is best known as a guitarist in the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire. Quartet for Heart and Breath is one of a series of pieces that Parry began work on during the band’s mammoth 2004-5 tour, that all have the same conceptual starting point: every note is played in sync with the heartbeat or breath of the musicians. While they are performing, the musicians wear stethoscopes under their clothes so they can clearly hear their own heartbeats, which in turn regulate their individual tempos. 

The idea for Parry’s concept came about through reaction. After listening to a tranche of electroacoustic music that didn’t he didn’t feel any profound connection to, Parry sought a way to make music intimately connected to musicians’ bodies. Rather than opting for repetitive rhythms or dance figures, he decided to go deeper, beyond the skill of trained musicians, and straight for corporeal intuition. He began conceiving music directly related to the involuntary aspects of bodily functions: the speed of breath, eyes blinking, hearts beating. 

When composing for others, Parry’s musical world brings together the minimal musical palettes of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and the musical systems of John Cage. Parry was interested in the latter through his pieces like I Ching, which use chance procedures to gradually relinquish the control the composer has over the realisation of the work. The result here is a naturally jumbled collection of tumbling rhythms, that manages to find a surprisingly soothing character amid the chaos. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

“I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else,” Virginia Woolf remarked of the poet Charlotte Mew. Born in 1869, Mew lived precariously in London; a life punctuated by tragic family circumstances, and with an aversion to any kind of publicity, she nevertheless possessed a selection of high-profile admirers from the city’s literary scene, including Thomas Hardy and Siegried Sassoon. Mew’s poem The Farmer’s Bride (1912) brought her wider acclaim. In that verse, a farmer takes a bride, and laments that she won’t reciprocate his desires. The folksy metre and bucolic imagery disguise what is a creepy, at times startling poem on a young woman’s objectification at the hands of an older man maddened by desire. 

In 2020, Whitley, a composer and founder of Peckham’s Multi-Story Orchestra, reworked two separate collections of Mew settings (for male and female voice) into a new six-movement work for soprano and quartet. (“I like how the gender of the speaker in Mew’s poems is often ambiguous, so it has seemed to make sense,” she wrote in 2020.) Sea Love reminisces on a lover through a folk dialect, accompanied by waves of solo violin arpeggios. The folk-tinged feeling continues in The Farmer’s Bride, with scuttling string figures giving this movement a darkly theatrical quality. The sea returns as a theme in Rooms; where in Sea Love, it’s “everlastin,’” by Rooms, the sea becomes a “maddening” sound, outside a room “with a seaweed smell.” (Some of Mew’s artistic preoccupations involve confinement, feeling trapped, and longing to explore, themes that crop up in the first three settings.) 

The fourth movement, I so liked Spring, works in a mirror form. For voice and solo violin once more, the two stanzas give reflections on a season before and after a lover. Where there’s a slight defiance to the previous text, Absence speaks to the intense anguish of the narrator’s loss; Whitley’s setting is sparse and spacious, with soprano accompanied mostly by gently plucked strings. There’s more pain in the final poem, Moorland Night, but it’s a pain that arrives through searching rather than inward reflection. Travelling through a harsh-weathered landscape, the narrator describes the search for “The Thing.” Mew’s narrator soon finds this Thing, yet, after such anguish, seems to find solace as she vows to return that Thing to the earth. Whitley’s animated setting is similarly journeying. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

“The World for string quartet and soprano solo should be performed at maximum intensity throughout. White hot, white cold – intensely loud, intensely soft – almost unbearable – that which is nowhere and everywhere – not human but divine – theanthropic.” These, the words of the piece’s composer, John Tavener. His ten-minute setting of the poet Kathleen Raine for soprano and quartet certainly lends itself to such extremities of thinking. 

Despite the serene timbres, The World works in a currency of simple gestures taken to their limits, but the extremes Tavener finds comes through austerity rather than exuberance. The piece is built around a few key ideas: beginning with striking plucked chords, the soprano introduces a coupletted stepping motion which is passed around the ensemble. The fiendish soprano part finishes this theme with a flourish—a long, quiet, sustained note, suspended above the ensemble. A squiggly chorale-like passage brings the strings back together in rhythmic unison around an anchoring mid-range drone, and the whole sequence repeats again. Through these kinds of creative austerity, Tavener achieves a steely focus. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

Meredith Monk’s string quartet Stringsongs was written in 2004, and premiered at the Barbican in 2005 by the Kronos Quartet. Her first creation for these forces represented yet another strand for an artist whose uninhibited creating has seen her touch disciplines as varied as singing, composing, dance, choreography, visual art and playwriting. 

In creating this extremely coherent yet slightly strange quartet, Monk got to know the players of the Kronos Quartet intimately. “The music came to life in surprising ways, colored by the distinctive ‘voice’ of each musician,” she wrote in a programme note. Perhaps the best example of this is Tendrils, the beautifully drawn-out, delicately crafted second movement which serves as the piece’s emotional core. Each player plays a wistful monologue, woven into an ensemble texture that spins forward for nine unbroken minutes. 

Tendrils follows Cliff Edge; Monk’s straightforward harmonic and melodic building blocks never quite move as you expect, creating dissonances that are unexpectedly raw, while further intensifying the austere double-stopped chords that become a theme of the movement. The third movement, Obsidian Chorale, is the most ostensibly vocal of the four movements—after the unbroken polyphony of Tendrils, the quartet moves through a sequence of dark, quiet chords in unison, for barely two minutes. Phantom Strings, a fast final movement based on a chugging, uneven ostinato, doesn’t so much conclude as stop, ending this enigmatic piece with more questions than answers. 

Hugh Morris 2024

Over the course of her career, Cassandra Miller, a Canadian composer currently living in London, has developed her own idiosyncratic way of composing that she calls “transformative mimicry.” Her music is usually rooted in other music that already exists; she listens to it, sings back a version of the parts, and then either sketches them using musical notation, or, in the case of Thanksong, creates an aural score out of her recordings. In a performance of Thanksong, each member of the ensemble listens to their own part on headphones, and plays by ear. 

For this piece, her source material was the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 Op. 132 in A minor, known as the Heiliger Dankgesang, after the thankful message Beethoven put at the heading of this movement. He had recently recovered from an intense intestinal illness, and described the third, a slow movement, as a “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity.” 

Miller’s piece is one to get lost in. It has few grand milestones, preferring instead a more intimate language of blurred, burbling lines, encoding the feeling of players feeling their way through the piece into the composition. It’s delicate, and personal. 

Hugh Morris 2024