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1-3 Sound Carvings from the Water’s Edge

3.33 | 3.42 | 2.56

4-5 Truth or Consequences

8.13 | 7.55

6-10 Sound Carvings from the Ice Wall

3.19 | 1.53 | 5.02 | 1.43 | 5.03

11 Memorial Cairns

7.32

12-14 Sound Carvings from Rano Raraku

5.53 | 8.19 | 4.20

Total running time 69.35

piers hellawell Psappha | BT Scottish Ensemble

‘The music of Piers Hellawell conjures a

landscape of frozen forms’

MET CD 1029 Mastered and Manufactured

in the United Kingdom

(g) 1998 Metronome Recordings Ltd

© 1998 Metronome Recordings Ltd | DDD |

Psappha

Tim Williams Artistic Director

Truth or Consequences Dov Goldberg Clarinet

Jennifer Langridge 'Cello

Richard Casey Piano

Sound Carvings from Claire O’Neill Flute

Rano Raraku Michael Escreet Double Bass

Richard Casey Piano | Tim Williams Percussion

Sound Carvings from the Claire O’Neill Flute | Dov Goldberg Clarinet

Ice Wall Heather Wallington Viola | Jennifer Langridge ‘Cello

Michael Escreet Double Bass | Richard Casey Piano

Tim Williams Percussion | Paul MacAlindin Conductor

sound carvings . piers hellawell

Memorial Cairns

Sound Carvings from the

Water’s Edge

BT Scottish Ensemble

Clio Gould Artistic Director

Violins Clio Gould | Edmund Coxon

Cheryl Crockett | Steve Morris

Roderick Long | Loma Leitch

Violas Gillianne Haddow | Rebecca Low

‘Cellos Alasdair Tait | Rebecca Gilliver

Bass Diane Clark

Conductor Piers Hellawell METRONOME

Executive Producer: Tim Smithies

Recording Producer

Jamie Dunn for Modus Music

Engineer. Andrew Hallifax for Modus Music

Photography: Piers Hellawell

Note: Stephen Johnson

Recorded at Potton Hall, Suffolk

28 October - I November 1997

Metronome gratefully acknowledges the

generous financial support of the

Douglas Harrison Bequest of The Queen’s

University of Belfast towards the production of

this recording and the enthusiastic support of

all the musicians and staff of Psappha,

BT Scottish Ensemble, Modus Music,

Giles Easterbrook of Maecenas Music

Publishing and the composer which made its

release possible.

I - 3 Sound Carvings from the Water’s Edge 10.11

4-5 Truth or Consequences 16.08

6 -10 Sound Carvings from the Ice Wall 17.00

MET CD 1029 I I Memorial Cairns 7.32

(p) Metronome Recordings Ltd 1998 12-14 Sound Carvings from Rano Raraku 18.32

© Metronome Recordings Ltd 1998

The music of Piers Hellawell is published

by Maecenas Music

Total running time 69.35

Piers Hellawell (b 1956)

Over the last two decades the face of contemporary classical music has

changed almost beyond recognition. In the 1960s and 70s the key figures

were the post-war avant-gardists: Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen,

Luciano Berio, Witold Lutoslawski... Serialism, the rigorous system of

constructing musical works from compact, pre-determined cells of pitches or

rhythms dominated the scene - not quite exclusively: radical experimentalists

such as John Cage, or his British admirer Cornelius Cardew, offered an

alternative kind of progressive thinking. But in general, it was Schoenberg,

inventor of the so-called ‘twelve-tone-technique’, who was the musical god,

the law-giver. Composers who defied that law, clinging to tonality, to the

hope of communicating with larger, non-musically-educated audiences (most

strikingly Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten), were - in Boulez’s

description - ‘irrelevant’.

Gradually, but inexorably, things began to change. American minimalism

made bluesy tonal harmonies respectable again. The completely unpredicted

rise in popularity of a new kind of ascetic, ritualized religious music - soon

nicknamed ‘Holy Simplicity’ - brought such figures as Arvo Part, Henryck

Gorecki and John Tavener into the spotlight. As they came forward, the old

avant-garde was increasingly sidelined. The change went far beyond matters of

musical technique: Boulez had equated populism with fascism; now

‘accessibility’ was the key word - the motto, popularize or die.

All of this presents few problems for the kind of composer who is happy

to work within the safe perimeters of fashionable musical style. But for the

artist who yearns to find his or her own way it can only add to the confusion.

Despite having got off to a promising musical start - including an appointment

as Composer-in-Residence at Queen's University, Belfast, at the age of 24 -

Piers Hellawell entered the 1980s with a sense that he was facing a musical

crisis. Schoenberg's intellectual legacy was, for him, creatively stifling, while the

prevailing agonized expression of post-Schoenbergian total-chromaticism felt

increasingly alien. But Western European traditionalism offered no viable

Sound Carvings

from Rano Raraku

1988

alternative. Hellawell realized that, in much of the music of his

contemporaries, one need only strip away the stylistic surface to reveal

something like the old Beethovenian, or Sibelian ‘evolutionary’ thinking - the

continuous developmental narrative of the old symphony or symphonic

poem. However much he may have admired Beethoven and Sibelius, writing

that kind of music was a philosophical and temperamental impossibility.

The liberating influence came, not from Minimalism or any of its Holy

offshoots, but from two possibly surprising sources: Irish traditional music and

Balinese Gamelan - this was some time before the term ‘World Music’ had

been coined. The English composer Constant Lambert had complained that

‘all you can do with a folk-tune is play it again - louder!' But the kind of

repetition employed in Irish folk music - often with richly expressive

ornamentation - was a revelation for Hellawell, an invigorating contrast to the

mechanically literal repetition of much minimalist music. Gamelan, on the

other hand, showed him how the use and re-use of a basic ‘matrix’ could

involve subtle transformations - a basic idea seems to be in a constant state

of change while actually remaining essentially the same. ‘I realized’, says

Hellawell, ‘that the Schoenbergian serial tradition was just a miniscule part of

the world’s music’. From now on, nothing in that great world store of musical

possibility was forbidden. What had been an anxious quest for an authentic

musical style had been transformed into invigorating adventure.

Sound Carvings from Rano Raraku (1988) is one of the earliest

manifestations of Hellawell’s new-found confidence. It is the first of a series of

‘Sound Carvings’- a genre-title which vividly illustrates the music’s basic

process. Hellawell was thinking of the awesome and puzzling statues of Easter

Island, and of the quarry, Rano Raraku, from whose rocks they were carved.

In this first set of Sound Carvings, the raw material - the ’quarry’ - is a number

series derived from a Balinese melody. From this Hellawell fashions a

sequence of contrasted sections, each with its own rhythmic and modal

permutations, which succeed each other in what he aptly calls a ‘frozen

parade' - the music moves, as a visitor to Easter Island might move from one

statue to the next; but there is little, if any, sense of thematic development, as

Sound Carvings

from the Ice Wall

1994

Sound Carvings

from the Water’s Edge

1996

there would be in a typical Western art exhibition. In a different way, the

scoring adds to the ‘sculptural’ effect. Flute, percussion, double-bass and piano

are virtually incapable of blending into a soft, harmonious ensemble. The

opening gesture immediately establishes the kind of sound world we are

entering: the texture is hard-edged and cross-grained - flute and glockenspiel

glissandos, double-bass snap pizzicato, piano strings brushed with metal. The

imposing spectacle and gritty touch of those Easter Island carved heads

springs readily to mind.

Despite his successes in Sound Carvings from Rano Raraku, Hellawell felt

that his escape from his musical past was far from complete. The String

Quartet The Still Dancers (1992) represented a further break with ‘symphonic

continuity’ in that its three movements can be performed separately, in

different orders, or even inserted into different works. But when Hellawell

came to write Sound Carvings from the Ice Wall (1994), he became - as he put

it at the time - ‘again aware of a cage to be rattled'. A new kind of harmony

needed to be defined. Hellawell wanted to be free of both the

Schoenbergian anti-tonal language and of the traditional Western harmonic

thinking, in which harmony is understood exclusively in terms of function

(ie where is it heading?). Again, folk music pointed to a solution - in this case

Bulgarian music, in which harmony emerges as colour in its own right,

enhanced by hypnotic repetitions and rich ornamentation. This left its mark

on the sound-world too. The six-player ensemble lends itself more readily to

blended textures and warmer colours than in Sound Carvings from Rano

Raraku. So why ice? This time, says Hellawell, the title is more personal. Sound

Carvings from the Ice Wall was a particularly difficult piece to write - the

experience not unlike ‘trying to lick one’s way through a wall of ice’.

Sound Carvings from the Water's Edge (1996) is one of several pieces to be

inspired by the Scottish island of Harris, which to Hellawell has been a

spiritual home since his student days. It uses the largest, and most

homogenous ensemble in the Sound Carvings series: eleven strings, plus an

instrument called a ‘silver machine', which creates the sound of rustling ice by

stirring milk-bottle tops around in a can or bucket. This is the only obvious

J

piece of pictorialism in Sound Carvings from the Water’s Edge, though the

listener may well hear wave patterns in the second of the three movements.

Hellawell’s intention was not to ‘portray’ waves, as a romantic composer

might have done, rather to make music out of the patterns created by waves

in a body of water - patterns which may seem to be random but which are

now known to follow intricate numerical laws. Although Hellawell’s

determination to avoid symphonic argument remained as strong as ever, the

three movements of Sound Carvings from the Water's Edge are now related

through what Hellawell calls ‘the dynamic of contrast’. The wave-forms of the

central movement are contrasted with the fanfare-like elements in the first,

and the suggestions of instrumental aria in the third - so, if not symphonic

thinking, at least a hint of the baroque suite.

In 1992, Hellawell’s Violin Concerto Quadruple Elegy had its first

performance at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. On the whole it was well

received, but one critic took strong exception to Hellawell's references, in the

titles of the four movements, to tragic contemporary political events.

Hellawell had no compunction about adding his musical voice to others’

words of protest against the political horrors of our time; but he felt that, in

future, it might be more effective to avoid specific, emotive events, and

concentrate on more archetypal imagery. That same year, a powerful image -

exactly the kind he needed - presented itself. While walking on Harris with his

father, Hellawell came across the island’s burial cairns - staging posts along the

paths of ancient funeral processions. Almost miraculously these combined two

of Hellawell’s central preoccupations: the need to express feelings of sorrow

at the renewed explosion of suffering in the early stages of the ‘caring

nineties’, and the fascination with sculpted rock formations (in this case natural

sculpture) arranged in non-developing sequence.

Hellawell was also struck by the beautiful lichen patterns which formed

organically on the grey rock background (his own photographs of these

illustrate this booklet). These too offered a non-developing pattern, only now

the elements were actually alive; they changed for reasons which had nothing

to do with human aesthetics. Hellawell realized that for all his striving after

Memorial Cairns

1992

Truth or Consequences

1991

new systems, ways of intellectually organizing sounds, it was always a special

moment for him when the material took on a life of its own, like the lichen, in

defiance of his best-laid plans.

Something like this happened in the resulting work, Memorial Cairns (1992).

Hellawell had begun to evolve a device not unlike the so-called Infinity Series

developed by the Danish composer Per Norgard. This would allow limitless

permutations of one basic pattern of notes - again, movement without change -

though the number of pitches used is itself restricted (Hellawell found himself

thinking of an old piano on which half the notes are stuck down). But this too

took on a life of its own. The result is a short piece for string chamber

orchestra in two neatly dovetailed sections, the first ‘Vigorous’, the second

‘Slower, and without undue expression’. The elegiac character emerges strongly

in the chant-like lines of the second section. But at the same time there is a

feeling of release, as though the music has emerged from a landscape of

teeming events and detail into high stillness and clear, unobstructed vision.

Truth or Consequences is another two-part piece, which this time opposes

music which does admit a kind of development (the second part) with music

which conveys simple block opposition. Hellawell was delighted to discover that

there was a town in New Mexico called Truth or Consequences. This set him

thinking on all manner of musico-philosophical lines: how within the idea of

Truth’ there is no negotation, no compromise, while in the game of

‘Consequences’, unrelated words or pictures are compelled to relate to one

another, with bizarre results. Just as the wind was filling his sails, Hellawell made

the somewhat deflating discovery that the town had taken its name from an

American TV game show as part of a publicity stunt (large sums of money

inevitably changing hands). But it was the element of absurdity which finally set

Hellawell’s musical imagination working. The two movements can be heard as

portrayals, respectively, of unyielding Truth, and the surreal transformations of

Consequences - provided the idea is not taken too seriously.

Stephen Johnson

photo

© J

ill J

enn

ing

s

Piers Hellawell

Piers Hellawell studied with James Wood and Nicholas Maw. When only 24

he was appointed Composer in Residence at the Queen’s University of

Belfast, where he continues to teach. His works have been commissioned,

broadcast and performed all over the world, including at the 1989 and 1993

ISCM World Music Days, the 1992 Lapland Festival, 1993 Antwerpen

European City of Culture and the 1997 Helsinki Biennale.

Recent commissions in the U.K. include those from the BBC, the Hilliard

Ensemble, the Holst Foundation and the London Symphony Orchestra, with

recent performances at the Cheltenham, Highland, St Magnus, Chester and

Norwich festivals. Volume I of The Hilliard Songbook is performed around the

world by the Hilliard Ensemble, and was released on the award-winning CD

of that name on the ECM label last year. Other recent collaborators have

included Philip Mead, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Evelyn Glennie,

Cambridge New Music Players and the Nossek String Quartet, who, in

February 1998, premiered a multi-media version of The Still Dancers, featuring

computer controlled slides of the paintings of Jean Duncan. The Building of

Curves was premiered at London’s Spitalfields Festival by the Schubert

Ensemble in June 1998.

Spring 1997 saw the premiere of Do Not Disturb, commissioned for the

London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Colin Davis at the Barbican, while in

June of 1997 Hellawell's Memorial Cairns toured Australia with the Australian

Chamber Orchestra. Drum of the Najd, a concerto for Michala Petri, Evelyn

Glennie and the Northern Sinfonia, was premiered in November 1997; future

projects include works for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts and for

the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Psappha

Psappha is the leading professional contemporary music and music-theatre

ensemble in the North of England. It was formed in 1991 by its Artistic

Director, Tim Williams, and since its foundation, the ensemble has built up a

repertoire of over 70 works and a reputation for outstanding technical and

interpretational ability. Psappha gave the first performance of Piers Hellawell's

Sound Carvings from the Ice Wall in 1995.

BT Scottish Ensemble

The BT Scottish Ensemble is a dynamic group of eleven string players,

directed from the violin by its Artistic Director, Clio Gould. The Ensemble's

repertoire spans from the baroque era to the present day, with an active

involvement in commissioning new works. The Ensemble maintains a busy

schedule of concerts throughout the UK, extending from frequent

performances in London to many of the most remote islands of Scotland. In

addition to its concert work, the BT Scottish Ensemble also undertakes a

variety of broadcasting work, including radio, television and films.

Hailed as ‘flamboyantly brilliant’ by the Sunday Times, Clio Gould, the

Artistic Director of the BT Scottish Ensemble and principal violin of the

London Sinfonietta, takes an active role in the whole musical spectrum, as

soloist, chamber musician and leader throughout Britain and Europe. Clio

plays the 'Rutson' Stradivarius of 1694, which has been generously lent to her

by the Royal Academy of Music.

David Matthews

Adrian Williams

Metronome Recordings endeavours to support the work of the

composers of our time. To date the following titles devoted to a sole

composer have appeared:

The Flaying of Marsyas and other chamber works

The Brindisi String Quartet and Nicholas Daniel MET CD 1005

Works for 'Cello Raphael Wallfisch MET CD 1028

For information on how you can support this activity and a complete Metronome catalogue,

please write to Metronome Recordings Ltd, Carrick Business Centre, Commercial Road,

Penryn, Cornwall TRIO 8AR U.K.

www.metronome.co.uk

piers hellawell sound carvings

See booklet for track details

Made in England N—

Digital Recording

0 1998 Metronome Recordings Ltd © 1998 Metronome Recordings Ltd MET CD 1029