Across Borders

Institut Français, Edinburgh - 21/11/24

 Écoute: Ensemble de Musique Contemporaine

This well-received appearance of the ground-breaking Ensemble Écoute at the French Institute of Scotland, based in Edinburgh, was part of a short Scottish tour also taking in small venues in Glasgow, Ullapool and Aberdeen. It featured no fewer than three world premieres from Emma Jane Lloyd (Scotland), Matthew Whiteside (Ireland) and Sofia Avramidou (Greece and France).

Contemporary electro-acoustic music which weaves diverse sound sources into a polytonal or atonal blend of traditional and newer (mostly digital) forms of instrumentation is still something of a niche art-music tradition. The accusation is often made that specialist composers and performers are writing and playing mainly for themselves, their friends, patrons and academic colleagues. While this can have an element of truth to it, it is an unfair and unhelpful stereotype, as this performance illustrated.

The pieces in tonight’s programme, one of several which varied throughout the tour, were derived from a French-Irish-UK new music commissioning project called Across Borders / Entre Les Horizons. Starting with an artistic residency at the Collège Franco-Brittanique in Paris, its aim has been to cross different cultural, musical and generational boundaries and to build relationships both among musicians and with a wider audience.

We began with Emma Lloyd’s mesmerising Oribites, commissioned by Ensemble Écoute, for solo violin, flute, clarinet, piano, percussion and electronics. Its throbbing and singing exchanges grew in intensity before the violin came into clearer focus, combining purity of sound with haunting elisions. Think of a soundtrack for an imaginary film comprising flickering modes and transitions.

Rebecca Saunders’ ‘the underside of green’ then pared the aural resources down to clarinet, violin and piano, creating an overlapping but varied set of textures and allusions – like colours differently illuminated through subtle changes in light. Gorgeous and haunting all at once.

David Hennessey’s ‘The room is the resonator’ featured cello and live electronics. The strings were soothed, urged, plucked and tapped on their sound journey, accompanied by vocal harmonising, heightened and lowered dynamics, and found sounds with both specific and broader blending edges.

Right at the end of this piece a tiny, repeated pinging from an audience member’s mobile phone cut in. On this occasion the accidental intervention worked with, rather than against the music, making it a unique experience for this particular audience. 

John Hails’ ‘More Geese Too’ was an addition to the advertised programme from a composer who had forged a relationship with the Ensemble on their travels, showing the project to be an expanding and developing feast. This featured ringing resonances, bursts of banging and vocalising, a piano which at times was (almost) classical in tone, and contrasts between cacophony and more evident musical narratives.

After the interval, in which the musicians engaged directly with the audience, we were treated to Matthew Whiteside’s Points Decay for clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion and electronics. Similar resources to those used earlier by Lloyd, but with a quite different effect. Listening to this thoughtful piece, I imagined ‘angry ambient’ as an intriguing new genre. This piece featured dissipated rhythm, snatches of melody, drone, and curious layers of sound. If you like your dissonances full of surprising consonances, this is your work.

Sofia Avramidou’s Absurd Reasonings, another Ensemble Écoute commission and premiere (like Whiteside’s and Lloyd’s pieces), drew on flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Again, the use of a chamber group who could also have been performing late Romantic music (and did indeed feature Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc in Ullapool) emphasised the way in which the sound-worlds of these instruments can be stretched into fresh, imaginative spaces. With Avramidou this included a strong rhythmic underlay, staccato snaps on piano using a card, frantic violin, surging flute and scraping cello.

Last but not least was an established work by one of the grandparents of electro-acoustic and post-tonal music. Pierre Boulez died in 2016, but has left an indelible mark, not least through the pioneering work of IRCAM. Dérive 1 was composed in 1984 and features flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and vibraphone (the ‘Pierrot ensemble’, named after Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire). It is so called because it draws upon two other works, Répons (1981) and Messagesquisse (1977). Lasting just eight minutes it has all the intensity you expect from Boulez, with its central feature being a slow pulse decorated with percussive, rapid arpeggios shared across the ensemble.

Overall, a fascinating and worthwhile evening. Listening to this kind of music does involve retuning your ear towards surprise, texture, tone, voicing, different harmonic combinations, and the eliding and colliding of musical fragments, as well as thematic architectures which may not be obvious at first. Like all art, it repays careful attention, and delivers something that expands our viewpoint and listening experience.

* More on Ensemble Écoute and projects involving them: https://ensembleecoute.com