Composition

The ‘naturalness’ of historical instruments’ sound interests me; gut strings, in particular, seem to be imbued with something of materiality and of their being ‘of nature’. In practical terms, the partials of gut strings are strongly audible. They resonate richly when bowed as an open string or at consonant subdivisions: halves, thirds, and quarters. There is also a warmth and ‘noise’ to the sound of gut strings, what Nordic Affect’s Baroque violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir calls ‘graininess’ (Tassie, 2020). Whereas the modern violin prioritises purity of pitch and tone, the Baroque violin prioritises affect. The harpsichord, too, is audibly material. It’s mechanism is an integral part of the instrument’s sound; Ligeti, for example, described the harpsichord as a ‘strange machine’ (Ligeti et al., 1983); John Cage, less flatteringly, as a ‘sewing machine’ (Austin, Cage and Hiller, 1968).  Further, on close listening the harpsichord is a beautifully resonant instrument, its quick decay followed by an after-shadow of glimmering partials.

            Thinking around material, resonance, and the natural overtone series suggested a harmony based on the open strings and natural harmonics of the Baroque violin, viola, and cello. This generated a harmony around G major, de-centred by the lowest C strings of the Baroque cello and viola, and coloured by the presence of the high C-sharp and G-sharp harmonics of the A and E strings. This ‘natural harmony’ not only responded to something inherent about the sound of the Baroque instruments’ materials, but situated those instruments, themselves historical, in broader, epochal timeframes. As Wayne Hu and Martin White have outlined, for example, consonant musical harmonies, derived from the overtone series, were imbedded in the universe’s origins. They write, in ‘the first moment of creation, the phases of all the sound waves were synchronised. The result was a sound spectrum with overtones much like a musical instrument’s’ (Hu and White, 2004). Elsewhere, Gerald Langner explores the innate musicality of matter, writing, ‘the whole solar system from Mercury to Pluto is subject to gravitational resonances and, as a consequence, to some extent obeys simple harmonic rules’ (Langner, 2015).

            Having established a harmonic area, compositional experimentation was then focussed on timbre. Material was stripped back in order that the ear might focus on the idiosyncratic and microscopic qualities of the historical instruments’ sound. Sustained notes exposed the ‘graininess’ of the gut strings, accentuated, in turn, by the curved Baroque bow with its prominent up-bow and down-bow articulation. Similarly, isolated, single notes on the harpsichord engendered a musical space in which the instrument’s decay and resonance could be heard.

            Structurally, the music moves, through this sparse material, from the lowest notes of the Baroque cello, viola, and violin (their open C and G strings) to the higher harmonics of the violin. In this way, the music recedes upwards. Partials and bow noise are more noticeable on the strings’ harmonics; the harpsichord’s tone is thinner in its higher register. As such, the piece moves from sounds that could be described as more ‘musical’ to those closer to ‘noise’; from abstracted pitches to the sounds of handled instruments.