NO

(resistance & vision part I)
for orchestra - 1999-2004

Programme note

Detailed work on this composition was begun more or less at the same time as US and British rulers ordered the invasion of Iraq, supposedly as the next phase in their so-called “war on terror”. “Terrorism”, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is defined by the US Army itself as “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature... through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear”, in other words what the US government and its allies have been perpetrating throughout the non-Western world for decades. “Terror”, in a slightly different sense, is what countless millions of people worldwide have been experiencing since, through the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq at the very latest, it became clear that the aforementioned perpetrators will stop at nothing in their drive for global domination and the wealth and “security” that comes with it. The world has therefore become considerably more dangerous, and in places previously considered relatively “safe”, as a result of their actions. The amount of fear in the world has increased. So much should surely be clear.

This essay originally formed part of a lecture given to graduate composition students at the University of California, San Diego. In it I take a look inside the score of Vanity (1990-94) for orchestra. Obviously with a work as complex as this, an in-depth analysis would have been far too time-consuming to contemplate, so I restrict myself to those aspects which I think might be immediately apparent on a first hearing.

It’s a truism to describe an orchestra as an “instrument”, although this is certainly one way of looking at it. At the opposite extreme, the orchestra of Vanity physically consists of 83 instruments; and the distance between these two extremes was something I was initially interested in bridging with some kind of formally-significant “scale”, a scale between soloistic and massed behaviours.

Blattwerk is a composition of approximately 25 minutes’ duration for cello and live electronics, which I conceived as a duo for the cellist Arne Deforce and myself and completed in the summer of 2002. The electronic part was realised at CRFMW in Liège, in collaboration with Patrick Delges who wrote the MaxMSP program used in performance. Blattwerk combines highly-precise musical specifications (both in the notation of the cello part and in the inclusion of prefabricated and fixed electronic passages) with free improvisation for both performers, as well as the aforementioned computer program which samples and plays back its materials “automatically” with variable degrees of randomness. The combination of precise notation with improvisation made previous appearances in my work in transmission for electric guitar and electronics (written for Daryl Buckley and completed in 1999) and in the large-scale ensemble works Opening of the Mouth (with the Elision ensemble, 1997) and DARK MATTER (for a combination of the Elision and Cikada ensembles, 2001-03). In all of these cases, the expansion of compositional horizons to include improvisation was a natural and logical development of an ongoing long-term collaboration, and so it is with Arne Deforce. I have always considered notation first and foremost as a means of communication between composer and performer(s), that is to say neither as a set of instructions or demands, nor as some kind of end in itself (although I take seriously the fact that any means of communication will have its ambiguities, imperfections, contradictions and so on, which constitute what might be called the “poetry” of notation). An important aspect of improvisation too is that of communication between participants. Blattwerk is, in a certain way, an attempt to make structural/dramatic “sense” out of the various modalities of communication which can exist between musicians, between musical materials, between musicians, instruments and sounds. It thus embodies a kind of relationship between composer and performer which has the potential to break with the “accepted” 20th-century model, which I think is an important thing to try and do, for reasons I shall return to at the end of this essay.

Interview between Daryl Buckley and Richard Barrett

DB: How would you characterise DARK MATTER? What kind of work is it and what is it about?

RB: This is bound to be the first question anyone asks, and at the same time it’s the hardest to answer. Firstly, with regard to genre, I think DARK MATTER is situated between many of the forms one expects music to have. This is because its form has evolved out of the musical (and visual) materials and concepts rather than the other way around. This problem of genre is possibly a peculiarly musical one: when we hear the word “installation”, for example, that word can cover a multitude of things but nobody seems to feel it necessary to be more specific, except perhaps to say what materials it consists of, while in the case of music there’s a pressure to say the work in question is “opera”, or “chamber music”, or whatever. Or one makes up a new genre-buzzword, which I would rather avoid. So one could say it’s in the nature of DARK MATTER that it is trying to break clear of categorisation - that’s the kind of work it is, that’s what it’s about so to speak.

Paul Celan: “La poésie ne s’impose pas, elle s’expose”.

The imposition is that of explicitness, of explanation. So much contemporary art still suffers from the “explanation disease”, art as (failed) explanation, in which works are smothered in “instructions”, both within themselves and without, in what often seems like a desperate attempt to lead their audience by the nose through an obstacle-course of the artists’s (or some bureaucrat’s) devising. Is this all we can do, to “programme” the emotional / intellectual response of (in this case) listeners as if they were so many automata? Surely if we have any respect for the dignity of the listener, this is the last thing we should be aiming at (consciously or otherwise).