"It’s a question of how one tries to encourage the listener’s attention: there’s an entire orchestra within a single cello sound."

This year, hcmf celebrates the work of British composer and musician Richard Barrett in two concerts. As he reaches his 50th birthday, the festival features both the world premiere of his new work, Mesopotamia, and the first complete UK performance of his cycle Opening of the Mouth.

Encompassing a range of chamber, vocal, electronic and multimedia elements, Barrett’s work is ambitious, complex, abrasive and often harrowing. It demands both precision from its performers and active engagement from its audiences. Many of his pieces exist both as freestanding works and as part of larger series linked by overarching concepts: DARK MATTER, negatives, Opening of the Mouth and resistance & vision.

“Music is my way of exploring and questioning what it means, if anything, to be alive, in this time and place and situation, and attempting to bring something back from that contemplation which might resonate with others,” he explains when asked what drew him to the path of the composer.

Born in Swansea in 1959, Barrett studied with Peter Wiegold, and later attended summer courses at Darmstadt, eagerly exposing himself to as many aspects of composition as he could. “The most important ideas were serial thinking; randomness and statistical composition; improvisation; the possibilities of electronic music; questioning the nature of how music reflects or responds to its social conditions; and the impetus to learn from ‘non-Western’ musical traditions,” he says. “My reaction was to try and find a point where all these ideas become aspects of the same one.”

He also holds a degree in genetics and microbiology from UCL, an area of study he sees as complementary to his creative work. “My continuing interest in science as well as my obviously much deeper devotion to music spring from the same source. You could imagine the constellation of concepts in my previous answer to occupy mutually very distant positions in the musical universe, having little in common apart from all of them having arisen during the last century in Western music as innovations, or at least being taken into radically new areas which redefined their nature.”

“My perception of an overarching unity, in addition to or somehow within the diversity, is something which both music and fundamental science have the possibility to say something profound about, in different and complementary ways.” He adds, “The most beautiful results in science, I think, are those which are revelatory about that relation, as in Einstein’s work for example. And the same could be said about music.”

Opening of the Mouth is one of several works resulting from Barrett’s long relationship with ELISION, the Australia-founded, internationally peopled contemporary music ensemble. ELISION’s artistic director Daryl Buckley recalls how their collaboration started:

“I first become aware of Richard’s music in the late 80s, through a composer who had just returned from study at Darmstadt and who brought with him cassettes of works by a number of composers who had ether been at Darmstadt or who had been featured there,” Buckley says. “He handed me this cassette and said, ‘Look, have a listen to this. It’s a really interesting group of young composers, but the music’s totally unplayable. It’ll never be played in Australia; the musicians won’t like it and neither will audiences.’”

“So I had a listen, and the Barrett work on that was Coïgitum, performed by Ensemble Exposé. That just absolutely blew me away. It was one of those classic listening experiences where you hear something in your brain that’s a big ‘yes’ ringing out, saying, ‘I want to get involved with this music; let’s do something.’”

Barrett’s first commission for ELISION was 1990’s Another Heavenly Day in which gestures exchanged between a trio of clarinet, double bass and electric guitar degrade and collapse. “One of the very beautiful things about it was that it was really clear that it was a music that required commitment. That was clear not just to the players, but to the audience, who were really excited,” Buckley says.

The composer reflects upon his continuing relationship with ELISION. “I suppose that both Daryl and I have always been interested in pushing at the limits of what a group of collaborating musicians can achieve both individually and collectively, and our ideas mesh with one another in a way which has now been productive for many years and shows no sign of slowing down or becoming routine.”
 

Says Buckley, “When Richard writes for ELISION, he writes for the people. So it’s not a generic, depersonalized instrument. So the challenge then for the composer is to actually write for the capabilities of the people involved and in Richard’s case, that’s a beautiful challenge, because of his sense of how people can engage with instruments. ELISION commissioned an amazing work for contrabass clarinet called interference, written for Carl Rosman. And Richard, in writing for Carl, took into account his vocal abilities and just totally transformed what you might expect a contrabass clarinet solo to be.”

Barrett notes, “I think the sound-world of Opening of the Mouth is at least as rich and many-dimensional as anything I could do with an orchestra, even though it involves only a dozen or so performers. It’s a question of how one tries to encourage the listener’s attention: there’s an entire orchestra within a single cello sound if you’re listening into it in that way.”

Opening of the Mouth was first performed as part of 1997’s Festival of Perth in a disused railway workshop building, set among an installation by Richard Crow that featured discarded clothes, human hair, curdling milk and the smell of dead fish. The hcmf venue of Bates Mill is a little more welcoming, but the musical impact of the work remains. Drawing its title from the ancient Egyptian ceremony that aimed to ensure the soul in the afterlife could eat, drink and speak, the cycle was inspired by poet Paul Celan’s attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust.

“It’s a stunningly lyrical piece,” Buckley says. “It has an almost classic beauty which is in some ways terrifying, and I believe that comes from how Richard has handled the twin influences that shape his compositional thoughts on the piece.”

As the work progresses, instrumental solos change from overlapping each other to a more fragmented relationship, drawing parallels with Celan’s stark, fractured version of the German language. “Celan’s use of language was forged in atrocity”, Barrett says, “from a necessity to reinvent a language twisted and debased by fascism, and to give a voice to those who were silenced by it.”

“Obviously we aren’t now living under fascism, or within its shadow to the extent that Celan was; but we are in a situation where language and culture are indeed twisted and debased, in a more insidious way. ‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,’ in Orwell’s words, formulated in response to mid-20th-century totalitarianism but if anything even more relevant to the propaganda of fear and the unquestioned primacy of profit at the centre of our so-called democracy. And every day, across the world, more mouths are being closed.”

The second hcmf concert featuring Barrett highlights another of his long-running collaborations. In 1986 he formed the electronic duo FURT with Paul Obermayer. In 2005, the pair expanded to create fORCH, adding a line-up of vocalists and live instruments that includes Phil Minton (vocals), John Butcher (saxophones) and Rhodri Davies (harp) for the hcmf concert. The group perform a mixture of free improvisation and music based around frameworks composed by Barrett, reflecting his belief that the division between composition and improvisation is a false one.

“Energy and uncertainty aren’t really the exclusive preserve of improvised music – in fact I’ve heard plenty of improvised music which is neither energetic nor unpredictable – and the issue is one of what’s the most intelligent and imaginative way one can think of to work with particular ideas and particular musicians,” he says.

“In the fORCH octet, for example, what I try to do with the compositional frameworks that we use is to provide something which enhances the freedom of improvisation, rather than enclosing and restricting it. I think that one of the most fascinating musical directions one can explore at present is that of the larger improvising ensemble, by which I mean involving more than five or six people. Although such groups have of course been around for several decades, this for me is the area with most untapped potential in contemporary music.”

The Saturday 28 November concert also includes the world premiere of Mesopotamia, performed by London Sinfonietta. Forming the fifth part of Barrett’s resistance & vision series, the piece draws musical parallels with the archeological practice of working down through layers to discover lost civilisations and revealing how the centres of power shifted over time. Composed at the time of the Iraq war, the title also references the modern-day country’s former position as a jewel of the ancient world.

As a composer whose works so often draw upon specific political ideas, does he feel it to be necessary for listeners to be aware of those same ideas when faced with his work, or can something similar be communicated through the form and delivery of the music itself?

“Any artistic statement which assumes and encourages intelligence and critical engagement on the part of its audience is a manifestation of resistance against the inherent drive towards stultification which is part of the ‘system’ we live under,” he answers. “Every musical experience exists within a network of personal, cultural and political associations and connections, memories and expectations and often assumptions.”

“On the other hand, I do believe in music as a way of going beyond any dichotomy between sensual and intellectual involvement, and for me the sensual element should have more in common with mutual attraction than with seduction, somehow encouraging a questioning of those expectations and assumptions. There ought to be many possible ways to engage with the music, some of which explicitly address the ‘ideas’ we’ve been discussing while others enter into a relationship with it in another way.”

And does he still believe that contemporary music can change minds and confront its audience, or does its traditional delivery as an event defined by certain expectations act to contain it? “It confronted me and changed my mind, quite fundamentally, so I would have to say yes, it certainly can.”

“It’s all too easy to snipe at contemporary music as elitist and irrelevant, but in doing so one is giving a weirdly exaggerated importance to such aspects as whether and where and how the audience is seated, which to my mind are a distraction from more general and pervasive political-social phenomena like those of economic class and education. Music of the kind I’m involved in may be a tiny and insignificant feature on the musical landscape, but it’s actually a portal through which an infinitely larger and richer landscape can be explored.”

Click here to buy tickets for Richard Barrett/ELISION on Friday 20 November

Click here to buy tickets for London Sinfonietta/fORCH on Saturday 28 November

The Saturday 28 November concert will be broadcast live by BBC Radio 3 as part of ‘Hear and Now’, 10.30pm to midnight.

Richard Barrett will also be in conversation with hcmf’s Graham McKenzie on Saturday 28 November at 11am. Click here for details.

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