‘Gorgeous Nothings’ (2019), a song cycle for soprano, clarinet, viola, cello, and piano, is a work setting and inspired by Emily Dickinson’s envelope manuscripts. These are scraps of poetry, the kind of ‘small fabric’ Dickinson writes in the corner of one such envelope — set in the first song of this cycle: 

“Excuse | Emily and | her Atoms | The North | Star is | of small | fabric but it | implies | much | presides | yet.” 

As such, the envelope texts set in this cycle are fragments, not in the sense that they are torn from an absent whole, but as miniatures: brief, enigmatic movements creating the ‘small fabric’ that amounts to the cycle. Points of musical contact between individual songs create meaning through recollection, and allow the cycle to move between states of unity and separation just as the voice and ensemble do. As such, memory plays an important role, as traditional linear relationships take a backseat. The final song, ‘Look back on Time’, is then a culmination of the entire cycle — rotating back through every song in reverse order using scraps of ‘small fabric’ from each one.

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This recording is taken from the piece's premiere in 2020 at Murray Edwards College Cambridge as part of the Purcell 360 concert series. The soprano was Susannah Hill.


© 2021 Lara Weaver

GORGEOUS NOTHINGS - song cycle

Programme note:

The phenomenon of the echo is one of the most direct conflations of sound and space, both as a mode of spatial orientation, but also as a communicate interaction between vibrating bodies, and between self and environment. This work looks at the communicative ambiguity in auditory knowledge, where mishearing is central to mutual reconstruction of place through sound. The concept of the echo forms both the genesis and development of the trio.

Echolocation calls use two types of frequency structure: frequency modulated (FM) sweeps, and constant frequency (CM) tones. The former is a broadband signal, consisting of a downward sweep through a range of frequencies that comprise a harmonic series; the latter is a narrowband signal with one constant frequency. Through the ‘Clutter rejection strategy’ (Simmons and Stein, 1980), we know the use of harmonics enhance the localisation properties of the echolocation call. I explore this phenomenon through using the natural harmonic series, where intonations related to the fundamental tone (in this work, C) are tuned according to their partial.The first composed segment takes the harmonic of a high register C, and develops so that everything thenceforth is an ‘echo’ of it in some form.

Like ripples in a pool of water, this is explored first through minute changes — through different fingerings of the same harmonic and enunciations of the same note by different timbres — before then gradually diverging. Intervals are drip-fed — first the octave, then the fifth, the major third, and so forth. Strings are plucked within the piano with the pedal dampened to achieve a softer, more percussive echo of the string harmonics. A beating effect is achieved by flickering between natural harmonics and open strings. Surging moments of climax are tossed into the air and dissolve into fragile harmonics.

The echoes then spread further with the introduction of aleatoricism in the violin, playing improvised melodies on high harmonics between the 6th and 16th partial, and echoed in turn by the piano with a loose canon of the direction of the line. The imprecision of the echo dissolves yet further, taken over by the fractal-like cascade of notes in the piano that gradually blurs with the strings into a single sustained G.

© Lara Weaver 2021

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Picture taken by Lara Weaver in Yangshuo, China

'Echo(Location)' - for piano trio

VI: THIS PLACE

V: THIS TIME

IV: THIS LIGHT

III: THIS DARK

II: THIS AIR

I: THIS STONE

OPENING

Commissioned as part of the Polar Sounds project: a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). https://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds/

PROGRAMME NOTE:

This Blue Distance is composed using hydrophone recordings from the Antarctic seas and my own vocal improvisations. Taken at the PALAOA observatory, the recording features the vocalisations of Weddell seals, the ‘thumping’ of Antarctic minke whales, and distant calls of leopard seals. 

I approached the recording in the style of a call and response from afar. Improvisations echo and interject with the chirping of the seals; the use of breath evokes polar winds, blurring into the hiss of the hydrophones; humming attunes to the low frequency thumps; pitch bends and fragments of melody emerge out of the descending trilling figures from the seals above. By recording the vocal improvisations in a chapel with marked reverberation, this grants the voice a feeling of breadth and reach. The space and materiality of the architecture amplifies, reflects, echoes and cradles the single voice, just as the medium of the ocean allows sound to transmit across great distances. 

Spectral manipulation highlights different bands of frequencies in the recording: shifting from mid-range to high and then to low boosted ranges in three overarching sweeping gestures of the piece. As the piece unfolds, low frequency oscillators with varying determinacy modulate the peak of boosted frequencies to produce a surging, swelling, wave-like effect. The addition of accentuated delay on the recording later in the piece enhances the sense of distance and the ripple effect of small changes. This highlights the exciting vitality of the antarctic sounds across different registers, whilst also recognising the imprint of human-driven changes on the sound world as the recording becomes progressively distorted.

At the climax, the wave of sound breaks upon the shore and dissolves into spray, softening into a gentler surge. Beneath it, the voice emerges once more, echoing the ebb and flow of the recording with layered textures of the motif from the beginning, blooming and dispersing. The sounds of the antarctic gradually fade into the distance over the waves, leaving only the voice behind.

The title references Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘The Blue of Distance’, from A Field Guide for Getting Lost, which speaks of desire and remoteness:

“Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”

As I listen to the worlds of polar seascapes, I think of the power of communication from afar, the sensitivity of hearing impact across distance, and the striving towards global coexistence that sits at the core of the climate change crises: a coexistence that may be found in a continual, attentive response to the calls that we hear. 

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The Weddell seal lives in fast ice areas, close to the Antarctic ice shelf edge. At PALAOA we can hear its vocalizations almost year-round. Weddell seals have a large vocal repertoire, of which 14 call types were recorded at PALAOA. Their repertoire is known to differ between breeding populations. Some of these sounds are thought to be produced by males to defend underwater territories. The most typical calls are the 'Falling chirp sequence' (well visible in the snippet) and the trill. The sound examples also contain distant calls of leopard seals.

PALAOA observatory  71°S 008°W (-70.516667 8.216667) (PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean is AWI’s listening station north of the German Antarctic Neumayer station)

Credit of field recording:  CC-BY 4.0 Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research 2022.

Lara Weaver

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