passers-by: Guitar And Voice Version

Pieces About Art was commissioned in 2014 by EXAUDI vocal ensemble supported by Britten-Pears Foundation and is dedicated to James Weeks, EXAUDI's director, and to all the singers in the ensemble. The work consists of two movements of roughly equal duration, which in this recording are performed without a break.

In my previous music for voice I had always written or compiled the texts myself but for this work I decided that I wanted to set words that had been written by someone else. A friend drew my attention to a text by a famous American artist, written in 1968; the artist had engraved the words directly onto a steel sculpture. I liked the repetitive and minimal nature of this text and I also liked the fact that the words had been written specially for use on a sculpture. I thought that the text would work well in my piece, so in July 2014 I set about trying to get permission from the artist to use the text. After several false starts, I ended up contacting the Artists Rights Society in New York, who handle these matters for the artist. Eventually I received an email refusing me permission to use the words. I then decided to write a text loosely based on the email received from the Artists Rights Society; this is what I set in Artist Refuses Request, the first movement of Pieces About Art.

Later that month I had lunch with the writer Michael Bracewell, a friend of many years. He alluded to some of the problems of writing about art. I asked Michael if he would allow me to set a piece of his prose writing and he agreed. A substantial proportion of the words that I set in the second movement of Pieces About Art - which is titled Writing About Art - are taken from Michael's essay on the work of the British artist John Stezaker. Originally written for the catalogue of Stezaker's 2011 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the essay is also reproduced in Michael Bracewell's collection 'The Space Between', published by Ridinghouse.

Both movements of Pieces About Art have a narrative about some sort of struggle. In Artist Refuses Request it is about the quest to get permission to set a text. In Writing About Art, the words that I have written myself, and which I set alongside extracts from Michael Bracewell's essay on John Stezaker, hint at a loose narrative about the struggle to write effectively about art. 

This performance was one of four given over the course of two weekends in July 2017, in Hull and London, which comprised the 2017 New Music Biennial, presented by the PRS Foundation. 

EXAUDI, conducted by James Weeks
Hull
1 July 2017

passers-by: Guitar And Voice Version

Maya Caskie

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