Mute

Description:

Mute is a series of twelve miniature ‘anti-concertos’. Each of the twelve players has a solo passage that is muted, muffled, distorted, or drowned out. Each of the four movements contains three solo passages.

The first movement deals with two types of ventriloquism found in the 1964 film My Fair Lady. First, elocution: I wanted to write something that appeared to force soloist and ensemble, like Eliza Doolittle, to speak in certain ways, hijacking and manipulating their voices as if from outside. Second, dubbing: Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice is not her own, but the voice of the so called ‘Diva of Dubbing’, Marni Nixon. Some of the music is inspired by an interview with Nixon, in which she describes her creative process as a dubbing artist, standing side by side with an actress and creating what she calls ‘a ghost image’ of her presence and voice.

The second movement recalls the voices of three fish/woman hybrids in sequence: siren song as heard through beeswax ear-plugs; the voice of Andersen’s suicidal mermaid as it is lost a second time, drowned out by a throng of ethereal voices; finally, after Adriana Cavarero’s critique, the drowning death-rattle of Magritte’s inverted mermaid, washed up on a beach with its gasping fish-head and exposed human legs and genitals.

The third movement is a tribute to the oldest known recording of a human voice, reconstructed from an 1860 phonoautograph reading (or phonoautogram). The recording is of five seconds of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’, sung into the phonoautograph by its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Lots of my music in this movement explores this five seconds of sound, both melodically and texturally. When the reconstruction was made in 2008, it was accidentally rendered at twice the speed (BBC news presenter Charlotte Green famously corpsed live on air upon hearing it for the first time). The second half of the movement is a set of variations on the
speeded up 2008 version.

The fourth movement is inspired by an interview with the electronic musician Burial from Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. Fisher describes the untethered, spectral voices that resound through Burial’s work as ‘fluttering, flickering abstractions, angels liberated from the heavy weight of personal history’. Burial’s voices have become such an important touchstone in British electronic music over the last two decades that I feel a bit sheepish referring to them here. But they are important to this movement, along with the revelation in Fisher’s interview that Burial’s vocal sampling is influenced by the ghost stories of MR James: ‘You go cold, just for those few lines when
you glimpse the ghost for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It’s like you’re not reading anymore. In that moment, it burns a memory into you that isn’t yours.’

Full scoring:

Flute db. Piccolo, Alto Flute (also plays Polystyrene Block in Mvmt. 3)
Oboe db. Cor Anglais
Clarinet in B flat db. Clarinet in E flat
Bassoon db. Contrabassoon
Trumpet in B flat (with plastic straight mute and harmon mute)
Trombone (with metal practice mute and harmon mute)
Harp (also plays Polystyrene Block in Mvmt. 3)
Accordion
Violin
Viola
Violoncello
Contrabass