“I was the shadow of the waxing slain
By the false azure in the window pane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”


Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire was begun in Ithaca in the late 1950s. The house it was begun in (and the real-life counterpart of the window-pane in the opening passage) is very close to where I currently live. It is a curious puzzle of a novel, which presents itself as a poem by a fictional American poet called John Shade (who strongly resembles Robert Frost both in style and physical appearance) with an extensive, eccentric, and in places quite manic commentary by a second, possibly unreliable narrator. The poem is a poignant reflection on death, the afterlife, loss and the nature of art which is gradually interrupted, hijacked, and reimagined by the second narrator, who adds increasingly far-fetched details about a fictional kingdom called Zembla.

My own piece is a response to the imagery in the book - primarily of the opening passage, with the other themes in the book in the background - frozen time, dreams and hallucinations, flight and escape, reflections, interruptions and transformations. Nabokov had been one of the first people to translate Lewis Carroll into Russian, and as some readers might know, the image of “through the looking glass” haunts this book, as Nabokov’s imagery haunts this music. The opening passage goes on to describe a world inverted - furniture all sitting out on the lawn, and the sky is inside, through the power of the reflective surface. This disorientation and strangeness played a significant part in how I thought about transforming and developing the music. Though there is no direct plot allusion in the music, there are parallel processes like the gradual usurping of narrative control from the Cello and Piano by the electronics. Those not familiar with book need not then worry that they might miss a level of detail in this music - it is always my hope that the listener will feel free to form their own images and ideas.

I WAS THE SHADOW OF THE WAXWING SLAIN is dedicated with gratitude and admiration to Christopher Stark - an inspiring composer, mentor and friend.


I Was The Shadow Of The Waxwing Slain

VISIBLE WORLD
Fantasy after Samuel Van Hoogstraten
13-14’
2015

I wrote Visible World as the penultimate in a cycle of several pieces taking visual inspirations as their starting points.

Samuel Van Hoogstraten was a highly influential painter and theorist of the Dutch Golden Age (the late 17th Century) whose works include paintings, poetry, and his treatise on art Introduction to the Academy of Painting or the Visible World, from which I took my title. His treatment of perspective as a technical tool in the artist’s arsenal was central to his notion that the visual art should be considered a science; a means of investigating the natural world. Amongst his most famous works are “perspective boxes” - usually a small wooden case with one side panel missing (to allow light in) and all the remaining interior sides painted. At each end, a small hole allows the viewer to see a very realistically depicted domestic interior, a testament to the power of his perspective and illusive skills. However, when viewed from a point other than one of the two peepholes, the illusion is broken and the scene becomes dazzlingly distorted and bizarre. 

My work does not depict any particular figurative detail of these extraordinary pieces, but rather I took the ideas of perspective, “in/out of focus” and attention to minute detail and applied them to a musical world in various byzantine methods of my own devising. As the piece evolves, material “viewed” from the wrong angle becomes unraveled, and rewritten; the rather dense and rapidly changing opening two minutes is untangled somewhat in the following four minutes. I also imagined the form of the piece as being like a series of perspective boxes, each with their own particular mood and character, which could join on to each other in bizarre and unexpected ways. Doors that should lead outside instead lead back into a previous chamber, and later sections of the work might resemble earlier passages in rhythm, harmony or character, but not in other parameters. This being said, my aim is always to create a bewitching and surprising musical experience regardless of the listener’s familiarity with the source material.

The music is highly virtuosic and places a great emphasis on individual players in the ensemble, so my warmest thanks go to the instrumentalists of the Festival Chamber Orchestra and Christopher Kim for bringing my piece to life.


Visible World - Fantasy after Samuel Van Hoogstraten

MEMORY PALACE
For String Quartet
10-11’
2014-15

For several years I have been preoccupied with taking external sources as starting points for my pieces. Before Memory Palace, the sources were always non-musical, whether they were texts being set to music, (with or without voice as in A Gasp of Blue) paintings, photography, or ideas from novels.

In this piece, I took the first measure of Ravel’s Sonatine for piano, whose characteristic falling fourth has been linked to several other works by Ravel, and even suggested by Roger Nichols to be a tacit reference to his mother, as Jacques Février believed - substantiated by it’s appearance at the very end of L’Enfant et les sortilèges with the child singing “Maman!”. This extremely simply idea appears at first very fluid in length and sound - almost as if damaged or distorted. The way I approached some of the reappearances of this motif was not unlike the way in which an electronica artist might approach a “sample” - teasing out different characteristics of this very short excerpt. The opening section which plays with this repeating fragment through different lenses of string quartet sound leads through a fiery climax into a lengthy scherzo built around the minor third accompanying figuration. “Damage” or decay is evident here too, since many of the accompanimental figures in this part of the piece appear very frail, fleeting, and in some cases are barely audible. A second, more volcanic climax gives way to a state of almost total entropy. From here the music slowly begins to re-assemble itself into a second, briefer scherzo which shows glimpses of “repaired” versions of earlier material, before pushing on into a bright, ecstatic conclusion.

There are however many unrelated materials which arose unexpectedly out of the composition process - a fascination with rising chord sequences, a recurring pizzicato interruption, as well as detailed and scurrying pulsed music. The idea of “self-repair” as a trajectory in the work didn’t really occur to me until about half-way through its composition. This was a discovery which radically altered my plans for the remainder of the piece. Whatever one’s familiarity with Ravel and his music, I hope that any listener will find this work intriguing and surprising.

My warmest thanks to the Momenta Quartet for performing this work, and for their skill and wisdom during its preparation.

Memory Palace [for String Quartet]

I first encountered the atmospheric and haunting work of the Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam (1597-1665) through the marvellous documentaries of Jonathan Meades. Saenredam’s church interiors are self-consciously glacial, whitewashed, yet meticulously detailed and constructed with advanced techniques of perspective that became popular in this period of the Dutch Golden Age. As Meades phrases it with characteristic wit (and a touch of the enigmatic):

“Saenredam’s paintings are spellbinding in their stillness, lack of instant, lack of all but a few isolated individuals who are engaged in anything but worship. All Saenredam took from van der Weyden (let alone Bosch) was an obsession with meticulous detail. Otherwise he is cold, dispassionate, objective. He invented an art of self-proclaiming understatement. It appears worryingly bland, stubbornly mute. Nothing happens - in a most emphatic way, yet the very absences provoke foreboding and discomfiture; they persuade the spectator to wonder what is not being shown. They imply an unspoken mystery, a metaphysical mystery (not a transcendental mystery). He talks quietly and subtly about the sheer marvelousness of human life, human sensibility, human ingenuity. 
Saenredam’s achievement was peculiar, and it was for centuries unacknowledged. It was not until the 20th Century, until the advent of the machine age, that his austerity and blankness rang a bell. His detachedness became a Northern norm so widely emulated that there is effectively a continuous school of Saenredam; self-consciously glacial, non-committal, and as pregnant with possibility as those churches where something may or may not be about to happen, something terrible.”

- Jonathan Meades, Magnetic North, BBC (2008)

Almost as soon as I heard these words, and viewed some of Saenredam’s work, I had that familiar feeling that there was music in this world - music of a particularly special and intimate sort. When I had the honor of being commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society for a short violin piece, the potential drama of a single performer seemed to ideally suit the atmosphere I’d glimpsed in those paintings. 

Almost everything in White Space emerges from near silence - as in one of the main ideas - a sequence of double-stopped chords that is gradually adumbrated from strands of glistening high notes in the beginning. Distance, both physical and expressive are explored - and much of the narrative concerns itself with minute pieces of material, and few outwardly dramatic gestures. Images and ideas drift into one another freely as disparate sounds in a large reverberant space.
Throughout I hope that it’s never quite clear what’s going to happen next, and the richness of the tension inherent in an uncertain musical moment is similar, for me, to what Meades speaks of in the tension of Saenredam’s paintings. 

As much as I love using art and literature for what they offer me as a viewer and a reader respectively, what is of course most important is that the music be an intriguing experience for the listener - and so regardless of an audiences familiarity with the source material, I hope White Space allows you to conjure your own responses and images. 
My deepest thanks to the Royal Philharmonic Society, George Vass and the Presteigne Festival, and Fenella Humphreys for this opportunity.


White Space [for Solo Violin]

Eastern Point
2015 (rev. 2016)

Performed here by the American Composers' Orchestra, conducted by George Manahan

Eastern Point is a short orchestral study based on the late seascapes of Winslow Homer.

Though there were many of these twelve or so paintings which inspired this piece in some way, I focused specifically on two - one called West Point, Prout's Neck and the one which gave this piece it's title, Eastern Point.

The piece evokes both the somber mood of the latter, all the while on an inexorable trajectory towards an ecstatic burst of spray - suggested by the cycle of visual activity in the former painting - a central gulf into which the viewer feels "pulled", and then flung out in one of Homer's characteristic powerful crashing waves.


Eastern Point [for orchestra] - Excerpt - American Composers Orchestra

Clarinet: Carol McGonnell
Violin: Harumi Rhodes
Cello: Alexis Gerlach
Piano: Margaret Kampmeier

Premiere May 12th 2016

I'm becoming increasingly fascinated by forms which evolve more or less seamlessly. While I have also written pieces which are very disjunct and montage-like in character, I find that there is a discipline in following a single, unbroken narrative path, and this piece is a step in that direction. I'm also thinking a lot about textures and blocks of sound, superimpositions of lines. One technique I often use is that of "heterophony", where the same melody, or a series of similar melodies are piled on top of one another, creating a combination of movement and stasis. In the first section, several splintered melodies gradually coalesce underneath a very high, slow piano chorale. These disparate layers gradually pull together into a unison gesture which transitions suddenly into a new section. In an interview with George Benjamin, he speaks of thinking about compositional control like following a compass needle - he thinks about moments when a piece goes from being vertically focused (chordal) to being horizontally focused (perhaps melodic). I decided I would write my own version of this moment, and this resulted in the long clarinet melody which carries the piece into a wild, ecstatic climax. In the last few pieces I've written, I've pushed myself to write a seamless transition out of the highpoint (if there is one), into something radically new - something which develops logically and smoothly while nevertheless being carefully paced. In this piece, the coda combines aspects of the fast, melodic music and the shadowy, splintered melodies of the opening. When the piece was nearly finished, I happened on a wonderful poem by e.e. cummings whose images seem (in one reading, at least) to chart the music's shifting characters and moods, and so it seemed fitting to use it as a guide to the form of the work.

"the sky a silver
dissonance by the correct
fingers of April
resolved

              into a
clutter of trite jewels

now like a moth with stumbling

wings flutters and flops along the
grass collides with trees and
houses and finally,
butts into the river​"​

My deepest thanks to the Music from Copland House ensemble for their hard work on my piece.

"the sky a silver" [for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano] 2016

I - Chrysalis

II - Stone

III - Moths

Composed in 2017 and premiered by Ryan Reilly at Bowdoin on the 2nd of August 2018.

Étude: Shattered Hands [for solo piano]

Composed at Bowdoin for David Alexander, and premiered on the 28th of July in the Bowdoin College Music of Art.

Photo: Acadia Mezzofanti

Shadowplay - [for solo horn]

JALI 
For Oboe Quintet 
Excerpt from Part I
2017-18

Performed here by the Liverpool Oboe Quintet, with Jonathan Small, oboe

Jali was prompted by the work of the Afghan artist and woodcarver Nasser Mansouri. Among the stunningly crafted works Mansouri creates are geometrically patterned wood-lattice screens, called “jali” or “jaali”, which can be seen throughout the Middle East, the former Moorish areas of Spain, and India. In one exhibit, the artist suspended the screens with a spotlight, so that a constantly shifting, kaleidoscopic composite pattern would be cast in shadows on the wall. Sometimes these were the same pattern over itself, or contrasting patterns.

My piece, Jali, is made of aural versions of these patterns, sometimes canons of similar patterns, in different tempi, or superimposed elements which are starkly contrasted – very accented double stops, a long legato line, or a scurrying kind of music. 

The piece is in two equal parts. The first explores these patterns in a very rhythmically strict manner, with the vertical positions set in the score. The second presents them with greater flexibility, through the use of some uncoordinated playing. At one point, an argument breaks out between a faux-gigue and a courante, before sinking into a vastly stretched and slowed down version of the oboe’s opening line. 

-Michael Small

Jali - for Oboe Quintet - I [excerpt]

Michael Small is an English-born composer.

Michael’s new commission For Years Now for the London Sinfonietta was recently premiered and conducted by Geoff Paterson. You can watch the performance via his website. He received this commission as the result of winning the 2020 Royal Over Seas League Composition Award, of which he is the inaugural winner.

Michael is hugely enjoying his new post as Associate Conductor of the Wirral Symphony Orchestra, where he recently co-conducted their summer concert, Song and Dance. The repertoire included the Barber Adagio for Strings, Copland’s Hoe Down, Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, and the very successful and warmly received premiere of Dulce et Decorum Est by Isabelle Ryder. 

Recent composing projects include a short new solo oboe work called ritual for Olivier Stanckiewicz, a solo Fortepiano work for Michael Pecak, and is currently writing a set of three solo viola pieces collectively entitled Writers for Georgina Rossi to be premiered in 2023.

Michael has also been the recipient of commissions from the Royal Philharmonic Society, Ensemble 10/10, and his works are regularly performed by international caliber musicians such as Emmy and Grammy winner Gloria Cheng, and BBC Music Magazine laureate Fenella Humphreys. He was tutored at RNCM by David Horne, and at Cornell by Steven Stucky.

Michael Small (b.1988)

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