Scheherazade (from Genesis)

Sibyl Tones is almost unmistakably the work of a string player, insofar as the precision with which each instrument is abused bespeaks a high level of intimacy with the feel of bow and fingers against the string.  It is as if each note were not sounded, but meticulously sounded around: the bow too close to the bridge or too far away, drawn too faintly or crushed into the string; the fingers pressed too lightly against the string or trilled furiously upon it or both at once.

More than any overdetermining system, Sibyl Tones is governed by the physicality of the instrument, and each short section is marked by the gradual introduction of different playing techniques: glassy harmonics, skittish string-crossings, snap pizzicato, and finally a climax of brutal sawing, before the piece resolves once more to an uneasy calm.

- Daniel Stephen Johnson

Sibyl Tones (String Quartet No.1)

Performed by the Arditti Quartet

"The program included the winner of the ensemble’s 2009 composition prize, the String Quartet No. 2, by Matthew Barnson (a former Saariaho student), heard in its U.S. premiere. Built almost entirely out of string harmonics and extended techniques, this is a strong and often fascinating work. Although Barnson’s approach recalls a number of composers — Xenakis in particular, who wrote entire quartets based largely on unconventional sound sources — his work is fresh and arises from a distinct personality. While its starting point is the instruments’ sonority, the piece also maintains great momentum through an alternating exchange and layering of instrumental gestures, as well as a deft use of surprising silences.
Congratulations are due to the Left Coast players for choosing a competition winner that isn’t simply a showoff piece, but instead is full of unusual technical and aesthetic challenges that were expertly addressed." - San Francisco Classical Voice, April 5, 2010

String Quartet No.2

Yale Philharmonia, Paolo Bartolameolli, conductor

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (2012), III. Passacaglia (excerpt)

Nicholas DiEugenio, violin
Jessica Xylina Osborne, piano

Violin Sonata No.1 (2008), second movement (excerpt)

String Quartet No.3 (2011), IV. Ricercar (after Sweelinck) (excerpt)

New Morse Code
Hannah Collins, cello
Mike Compitello, marimba

Vanitas (2019), III. Sarabande (excerpt)

Ritornelli (2016) (Live audio), excerpt

Commissioned by the Britten-Pears Young Artist Program for the Aldeburgh Festival

Composed in 2012 revised in 2013.

Halo Study I

9. Vera, Scene 6 - The truth... I carry her!

6. Vera, Scene 6 - Vera will leap from the shadows

2. Vera, Scene 2 - If you won't practice the stars

4. Vera, Scene 2 - We are lost without the stars

7. Vera, Scene 6 - There was a nurs'ry

10. Vera, Scene 7 - Alone, my God, alone..

In September 2006, Patrick Quigley and his Miami-based choral group, Seraphic Fire asked me to write a short choral work for a performance of Domenico Scarlatti’s sacred music. I was to write an Elevation motet – the motet sung during the ritual raising of the consecrated bread and wine used for the Eucharist – to replace Scarlatti’s own setting in his Missa Breve “La Stella.” Such a commission always presents me with a number of aesthetic, technical, and personal questions and challenges. 

Creating a new work that would be heard within an older larger, unified Mass setting was the first and most obvious challenge. As opposed to a concert performance, the liturgical celebration of the Mass is often a musical dialogue between centuries and styles, ranging from plainchant to the avant-garde; and though Scarlatti composed his own Elevation motet, Cibavit eos, it was common and appropriate to substitute settings of the feast-specific Proper within the more generic Ordinary of the Mass. In Scarlatti’s case, the Elevation motet served structurally as the contrasting center panel of a formal triptych framed by short, nearly identical settings of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei and any substitution would still need to solve this musicial problem. With that in mind, my thoughts turned to architecture. Renzo Piano’s recently completed entrance to the Morgan Library in Manhattan or I.M. Pei’s famous pyramid at the Louvre are bold, radical, contrasting works that refract their “subjects’” contexts in novel ways- the apposite visual correlatives to my own aural ambitions.

Anima Christi (2006)

A Gale in April End

Violin Concerto Third Mov Orchestra1strexcept

Violin Concerto Third Mov Orchestra2ndexcerptrealreal

Matthew Barnson Violin Concerto Third Mov Orchestra except 3- 1st Draft

Violin Sonata No. 1 (2008)

Ritornelli (2016)

Much of my recent music is organized around a single musical plane: a flickering, regularly pulsating line, usually on the note “e.” For me, this has been a useful formal conceit, a malleable symbol and dramaturgical device. I used it first in my short song, Snow to depict the suffocating dread of being buried by winter and then again in my Violin Sonata No.1 to create an atmosphere of obsessive grief – it panics a Morse code message. In other works, like my Wind Quintet or a forth-coming orchestral work, I abandon any direct poetic affect for the purely architectural. In these works I treat the line as an axis and center of gravity; gestures emerge and orbit but are inevitably drawn back to the core.

I continued to explore musical axis by considering Baroque ornamentation: trills, mordents, turns, port de voix, and appoggiaturas in all their national varieties. I began Shattered Lines/Points of Horizon as an abstract fantasy on French Baroque ornamentation but the work evolved into what a listener might hear as a series of six or seven large-scale, highly elaborated ornaments – super-mordents. I treat the various “e”s of the piano as seven highly ornamented planes: each “plane” is a series of notes pulsing regularly or irregularly depending on the individual range. The work begins at the highest “e,” descends and shortly grazes the lowest “e,” and settles at the “e” below middle “c.” The first planes unfold by gradually elaborated ornamentation, as the pianist descends ornamentation of the lower planes becomes gruff and brutal – the climax of the work is a kind of liquefaction to the simplest half-step trill. As the final planes unfold, ornamentation solidifies into structure: melody and harmony.

As the work proceeds, a chord progression diagonally ascends and intersects these horizontal planes. Unlike the pulsing of the horizontal planes, this chord progression slowly and irregularly accelerates its ascent, begins again, ascends and then hovers slowly at the top of the piano before it gradually descends to the pulverizing climax of the work. At the end, the chords appear anew, juxtaposed against one another, now fixed and static as the last planes and ornaments disintegrate.

I wrote this work for Dustin Gledhill, a hero of mine growing up who has since become a dear friend. The impetus for the work came out of several conversations about Couperin’s keyboard works – works Dustin approaches with a practiced evangelist’s zeal. Composing it was made possible by a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Shattered Lines/Points of Horizon

String Quartet No.3, IV

Sempre Dolce (2019)

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651)
A man is a bubble, (said the Greek proverb), which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion,restless and uneasy, and being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing that it was before.
-Jeremy Taylor

I reread Jeremy Taylor’s exquisite sentence, the opening of The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, throughout my compositional process but, in composing my work, I was not, beyond a general stormy affect in the middle section, musically illustrating Taylor’s imagery. Rather, Taylor’s rhetoric –veering between violent and delicate imagery, and structure, its pauses unable to halt a powerful trajectory, inspired me to compose this work as a type of memento mori. Giving abstract music expressive titles is rare for me, and in any case is a tricky process. But in the wake of recent losses, both personal and national, I was moved even moved by Taylor’s text –a potent emblem of the fragility and precariousness of life.

On a purely technical level, the work is a summation of my work for strings over the last decade, especially my three string quartets composed for the Arditti and JACK Quartets. More than any overdetermining system, my work is governed by the physicality of the instruments and is marked by the gradual introduction of different playing techniques: glassy harmonics, skittish string-crossings, snap pizzicato, or even brutal sawing, often resolving once more to an uneasy calm. I embrace aspects of high modernism - albeit critically, and attempt is create something viscerally expressive, dramatically structured, using pulsing rhythmic energy to veers between extremes of fragility and violence. 

While my work has used scrapping sounds for almost ten years, after watching a recent documentary on Gerhard Richter’s process, I was struck by the aural similarities created by his process which entails dragging a scrapper across the canvas over freshly-applied paint. Scrapping that yields texture and color is important in my work. The subtitle is a nod to Richter, a constant source of inspiration. 

That said, the initial juxtapositions that inspired this work are more personal. I was asked to compose a work to accompany Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings shortly after my grandfather’s passing. Its impossible for me think of either Strauss or my grandfather without thinking of Munich in the spring of 1945, the time when Strauss was finishing (and a bit too ambiguously dedicating) Metamorphosen.  Only a few miles a way, American soldiers liberated Dachau and my grandfather was among the soldiers that aided the victims and then escorted them south through Strauss’ Garmisch, to Salzburg and on to the Hungarian border. It is dedicated to him, and to my grandmother, who passed away shortly before I finished this work, in memoriam.

Review here: http://tinyurl.com/n5ua5g7 and (as performance of the year) here: http://tinyurl.com/l7ayod8

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (2012)

Matthew Barnson is the composer of numerous works for orchestras, choirs, string quartets, voices, chamber ensembles, dancers, and computers. 
An associate professor  of composition at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he has received fellowships, commissions, and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 
His work has been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Wigmore Hall, Aspen, the San Francisco War Memorial and other venues throughout the United States and Europe. His debut album, Sibyl Tones, was released on Tzadik in 2014 and his second album, Vanitas, was released on Innova in 2019. He lives in New York.

MatthewBarnson

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