Chamber/Ensemble

While composing this piece I was giving a lot of thought to the space of a piece of music; how within a piece of music we can become aware of foregrounds, backgrounds and numerous planes in between. I also have an enduring fascination with the interaction that takes place between the physical space of a performance and the interior/mental space within each of us, where vibrations of air are perceived and held in the memory. The more that I make music, the more richly mysterious I find this process to be.
The movement of sounds and ideas around the space of an ensemble of string players was integral to my thinking about this piece. The twelve musicians create together a layered musical space through which interlocking patterns of sound emerge, accumulate and disperse. The music is replete with overlapping lines that rise and fall, moving from hushed white-noise to wide, full-bodied sound and back again in wavelike motions.
The title comes from an anonymous medieval definition of God as ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. The beautiful intangibility of this image captured my imagination when I first read it and made note of it years ago in an old notebook. It came back to me early on while thinking about this piece and somehow guided my decisions about how to shape the music.
© Edmund Finnis

In these five short trios the fabric of the music is made of flowing iterative patterns, delicate pulsations, closely interwoven colours, lines tracing arcs, unfolding and revolving at different speeds, sustained resonances that hover and dissipate in the air like mist, and undulating piano figures that the bowed strings glide through and above.

© Edmund Finnis

This quartet is in five movements. While composing the piece I had in my mind: the shape of a valley; the image of clouds forming and dissipating; lines becoming interwoven and energy being passed around between four individuals; a sense of sounds breathing.
The fourth movement is a reflection on the hymn ‘Christe, qui lux es et dies’ by William Byrd.
String Quartet No.1 – ‘Aloysius’ was co-commissioned by Alois Lageder and Aldeburgh Festival, and is dedicated to the Lageder family.
© Edmund Finnis

Parallel Colour

This piece is in seven short movements. The ensemble of fifteen musicians is divided into two symmetrical groups, with a double bass in the centre. The arrangement of the musicians in the space informs the way the music is designed. Clear and direct patterns of sound are made to move across the ensemble-space, variously heard in canon, in parallel motion, overlapping or closely interwoven. Near-replica harmonies and melodic shapes are voiced alongside one another, exchanged between the instruments, or heard unfolding together at different speeds and in different registers. The piece is replete with tilted reflections and echoes, as if the music is mirrored back on itself.

While writing this piece I held in my mind an indelible memory of a late afternoon spent looking out at the Baltic Sea. On that cold and radiantly clear day the incredible stillness of the water’s surface made a near-perfect mirror of the sea, with the horizon as a sharply drawn line dividing subtly divergent colours.

© Edmund Finnis

Shades Lengthen

I have a tendency to begin new pieces by imagining music in quite visual terms. Not in any pictorial or illustrative sense, but in a more abstract way, thinking about foregrounds, backgrounds and planes in between, and considering how different elements within a piece might be made to interact, overlap and sit alongside one another.

While working on this piece I was thinking explicitly about line and shadow. The solo violin is almost always heard distinctly in the foreground, voicing clearly articulated arcing lines of sound. Parts of these lines are often picked up by instruments in the ensemble, ‘shadowed’ and heard again in canon or in stretched elongated forms. The ensemble also creates varied kinds of sound surfaces upon which the solo line and its shadows are cast. Throughout the four movements of the piece there is an overriding obsession with lines in simple rising and falling motions, heard from the violin and threaded through the ensemble at different registers and at varied speeds.

As well as referring to the relationship between soloist and ensemble, I also wanted the title of the piece to evoke a particular quality and mood of evening light, closing of day, when the colours of sky can intensify before draining away. While writing the ending of the piece I was thinking about the subtle sense of acceleration that can be felt while observing the last seconds before sun dips below horizon.

© Edmund Finnis

Clear and direct linear patterns of sounds are variously heard in sequence, superimposed and threaded through the ensemble; subtle pulsations and sustained resonances act like grids and flat planes of sound that these patterns flow across, overlap and intersect with; the instruments make lines that intertwine, dovetail and shadow one another.

The title of this piece is lifted from a Siri Hustvedt novel. While composing I was thinking about parallels between listening and seeing, reflecting particularly on experiences of looking at the line-based drawings and paintings of the artists Nasreen Mohamedi and Agnes Martin. I had in mind the kind of friction that exists between the calm, iterative clarity of their work and the complex act of perception itself, which elicits memory, shifts focus and is perpetually in flux.

© Edmund Finnis

in situ
I. (after Perotin)
II. (after Locke)
III. (after Josquin des Prez)
IV. (after Brumel)
V. (afterRameau)

in situ is inspired in part by the mirror sculptures of the late American artist, John McCracken. These reflective pillars alter our perception of the landscapes they inhabit in fascinating ways, each one simultaneously merging into its surrounding while mirroring it back on itself, creating angular incisions of spaces and uncanny perspectives on otherwise familiar scenes.

Each of the five parts of in situ takes a pre-existing piece of music and treats it as a kind of landscape into which analogous distorting mirrors are placed. Fragments of the original pieces are spliced, freely reassembled, recomposed, dwelt upon, as if being folded into new shapes or reflected back on themselves. The attitude towards the source material is never one of irony or subversion, but instead comes out of a deep fondness, a desire to live and move around for a while in these musical spaces.

© Edmund Finnis

There is parity between the two instruments in these short duets. I wanted to treat the clarinet and piano as equals, avoiding the hierarchy of a soloist-plus-accompaniment scenario.

The first duet takes the opening melodic idea of Josquin des Prez’s motet Memor esto verbi tui and unravels it, prolonging its rise-and-fall motion.

The second makes patterns out of the interplay between varied speeds (like individual parts of a mobile spinning autonomously), ending with a coda of soft imitative pulsing.

The third is a single unfolding melodic line, the piano shadowing and fusing with the clarinet.

The fourth, like the first, is made of canons.

© Edmund Finnis

This piece is influenced in part by looking at Bridget Riley’s vibrant paintings from the late 1980s, and reading Josef Albers’ book, Interaction of Colour.

The ensemble is divided into two trios, underpinned by a double bass. By detuning the strings in one of the trios, a kind of asymmetry occurs: the resonant qualities of the trios become slightly divergent, making the twin instrumental groups speak with subtly different voices.

Musical material is passed around the ensemble, and the trios variously merge, imitate, blur, and pull apart from each other; similar iterative patterns are set against one another in canonic interplay; the surface of the music fluctuates between situations of friction and fusion.

While composing, I had in mind the ways in which adjacent colours seem to vibrate against one another in Riley’s paintings, and Albers’ deft demonstrations of how colours are perceived in relation to one another, rather than as physical absolutes.

© Edmund Finnis

I could point to three non-musical influences that were on my mind while composing this piece: the shimmering grid paintings of Agnes Martin, the near-weightless and transparent architecture of Junya Ishigami, and Italo Calvino’s 1985 lecture on ‘Lightness’ in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

In their respective mediums, both Martin and Ishigami seem to me to be reaching for something akin to the ideal of ‘thoughtful lightness’ that Calvino describes. This is not lightness in the sense of frivolity or superficiality, but rather the ‘subtraction of weight’ that can bring about clarity, flexibility, precision… a letting-in of light. They create work whose subtle, elegant forms invite the perception of fine detail.

Thinking about the connections between these influences led me to compose a piece characterised by delicate reiterative musical patterns (sometimes heard in sequence, sometimes superimposed) and an absence of bass or loud sounds. I aimed to make music with a quiet intensity, and to find a balance between senses of agility and poise.

© Edmund Finnis

This piece is partly inspired by the experience of seeing Junya Ishigami’s designs of near-weightless architecture. The clarity of his structures – their transparency – was frequently on my mind while composing.

The music is made of a number of clearly differentiated musical materials that reappear in various combinations throughout the piece. Hard, stone-like notes ricocheting on prepared piano; iterative patterns of chords on high strings; a rising and falling duet of clarinet and muted trumpet; sustained brass chords whose tunings drift like warped vinyl; various kinds of steady-state metallic percussion backgrounds…

The piece ends with the majority of its constituent musical elements superimposed and interweaved, heard simultaneously. Here another analogy, aside from Ishigami’s work, could be of a clockwork orrery whose individually rotating parts eventually become aligned.

© Edmund Finnis

This piece, composed in 2010 for members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and postgraduate students of the Guildhall School, plays with different types of musical momentum. Sound surfaces defined by their high speed are juxtaposed with points of volatile stasis; there is an underlying obsession with basic upward and downward motions; recurring harmonic patterns variously expand and contract; polyphonies alternate with moments of unified direction; related harmonies surge into one another; the music begins over and over, each time being pulled in different directions, the texture eventually coming apart before regaining momentum.

© Edmund Finnis