the octave of the grief of the clone that leapt to the remainder of night sky (Camden Performance)

Cloud Triptych (2016) - I

Cloud Triptych (2016) - II (bar Before F To End)

Cloud Triptych (2016) - III

Performed 17th January 2015 by Zero Theorem: Aisha Orazbayeva, Minsi Yang (vlns), Stephen Upshaw (vla), Patrick Tapio Johnson (vlc)

http://simoncummings.com/op04.php

Orbus.  (Fragment) (1995)

Performed Saturday 22nd November 2015 by Carla Rees

http://simoncummings.com/op15.php

'unredeemed' self-)portrait (in the form of an eagle (2008)

More Than Conquerors draws upon three Biblical verses that summarise the indefatigable love of God. i have produced my own paraphrase of the text, derived from many translations. The desired effect is that of a divinely-inspired, in part soliloquous outpouring, with discrete human inflections.

More Than Conquerors (1996)

"…I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon my by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. […] the new will which had come to life in me and made me wish to serve you freely and enjoy you, my God, who are our only certain joy, was not yet strong enough to overcome the old, hardened as it was by the passage of time. So these two wills within me, one old, one new, one the servant of the flesh, the other of the spirit, were in conflict and between them they tore my soul apart.
From my own experiences I now understood […] that the impulses of nature and the impulses of the spirit are at war with one another."

These words of Saint Augustine, from his Confessions (Book VIII), talk of the human will, or wills, that inhabit each person's mind, battling for supremacy in our every decision. Being creatures blessed with a free will (or, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, a ‘capacity to desire’, the battle, which never ends, is not easily surmountable; hence our need for an all-forgiving, never-changing God. As the title implies, lent takes as its inspiration the season of Lent, the most penitential time of the Christian year, when this battle of the will(s) is made the focus of attention. It lasts for 40 days, recalling Christ's time in the desert, where he experienced this same conflict of will(s); Christ did not succumb to his temptations, & it is to this spirit of discipline & self-restraint that Lent aspires.

The piece explores this principally through four Lenten themes: Temptation, Conflict, Suffering & Transfiguration. The connection is also shown in the work's structure, consisting of 40 bars, each exactly the same length & duration. These themes are explored dramatically, the material being gradually ‘tempted’ to accede to more & more corruptions of the work's underlying metre & pulse. Eventually lost in virtually meaningless material, the music is forced to retrace its steps, & to try to reclaim something of what was aspired to at the outset. As this is tentatively achieved, towards the end of the piece, six final ‘homages’ are played, dedicated to a variety of saints whose commemorations frequently fall within Lent (as well as to a variety of ‘saints’ who have personally helped me in my spiritual life), for whom this victory was shared.

lent (1998)

Inspiration for gravest one—the second composition i have written in memory of my late Father—came from a poem by E. E. Cummings, No. 61 from his 1963 collection 73 Poems, charting the steady descent upon a gravestone of a snowflake. My Father's ashes are interred within a garden of remembrance, & the poem invoked memories of numerous occasions spent in that garden, contemplating his death & attempting to grapple with the bereavement. The title draws on the final words of Cummings' poem, deliberately ambiguous between the obvious reference to the physical stone, & the less obvious metaphysical reference to oneself, the person grieving in the garden, the 'gravest one'.

The piece opens with a single, long bar of slowly descending melody, very simple designed to evoke the gradual, graceful descent of the snowflake described (& visually depicted) in the poem. An important pitch throughout is D-flat; the melody begins on this note, as a high natural harmonic, & ends on it, a metaphorical 'impact note'—the point at which the snowflake symbolically strikes the stone. From here opens up the body of the work, a series of three 'scenes', each exploring an aspect of the coming-to-terms with bereavement, using one third of the original snowflake melody, reversed & inverted.

The first scene, 'gravitas', is concerned with the religious connotations associated with death, of funeral rites & ceremonial reverence. Something palpably forced often frequents these occasions, something that—though part of the grieving process—usually does not remain true to the person who has died, failing to speak of them as they truly were or, worse, ostensibly beatifying them. The music is therefore both rhythmically simplified & melodically ornamented. The original rhythms betray their presence, however, in a separate pattern of bowing, out of step with the melodic rhythms.

'graven', the longest of the three scenes, focuses on our futile attempts to preserve the deceased person's memory, to 'keep them alive', & the temptation to see everything in their life through rose-tinted spectacles. The music is broken into three discrete strands of melodic material; the first contains the original material—now played 'as though every note & gesture is imbued with utmost significance & profundity'; the second takes fragments of this material & obsessively repeats them, with increasing wildness & desperation. The third strand is altogether different, 'inscrutable & translucent', containing glimpses of the original snowflake melody, reversed so that it ascends from whence it came.

Played with a heavy metal practice mute, the third & final scene, 'grave', expresses something of the abject grief & sense of loss death inflicts. The music is unyieldingly melancholic, reduced to barely a quarter of the original tempo, & fragmented with <em>pizzicato</em> notes. Within all this is a single ‘strenuous but ardent’ attempt by the cellist—through the use of acutely embedded note divisions—to drag the tempo back to its original speed, to no avail.

Interspersed between these three scenes is a series of 'resonances' or 'ripples' emanating from the original D-flat impact. The last of these, at the conclusion of the work, becomes a moment of apotheosis, where the impact of death becomes the transcendence of the afterlife. Therefore, within the painful final scene lies a quiet acceptance of death, combined with the joyful rising into paradise. This is heard through increasing glimpses of the reversed snowflake melody, which ascends to its starting point, where it hovers, before passing into the beyond.

This recording is of the first performance, played by Arne Deforce at the 2002 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

gravest one (2002)

In Paradisum is my first work for the piano. It was composed principally as a gift for my wife, Anna; nonetheless, thoughts of my late Father dominated my thinking while i worked on the piece, so it is also the third work of mine to explore that bereavement. In contrast to those other works, however, this piece—while expressively diffuse—is an entirely positive, affirmative statement.

In Paradisum (2006)

Intense quick dream of sentimental groups with people of all possible characters amidst all possible appearances

Composed in late 2009, this piece took its inspiration from a short poem by E. E. Cummings, from his collection '73 Poems':

wild(at our first)beasts uttered human words
—our second coming made stones sing like birds—
but o the starhushed silence which our third's

Like the poem, the piece explores three behavioural states, the first of which is loud & ferocious, the players attacking their open strings with brute force. Later, this develops into milder, more lyrical material, before finally yielding to sparse, faint harmonics. Rather than dividing the piece into three clear sections, these three states evolve & bleed into each other, their respective characters gradually taking shape, but ever in flux.

The title is a phrase found in Arthur Rimbaud's poem 'Vigils', from his well-known collection 'Illuminations'; it sums up rather nicely the universality i have sought to capture in the piece.

This recording is of a workshop performance given by B.C.M.G., conducted by Richard Baker.

Intense quick dream (2010)

Due to the intensely personal nature of this work, in lieu of a more conventional programme note, the below quotations—taken from the cyberpunk poetry of Kenji Siratori—appear in the score at the start of each section, & may go some way to elaborate the music. The seven sections are preceded by a wild opening declamation (based on an old hymn tune), marked “tough & overbearing; like an aggressively demented church organ”.

	“the picture of the chloroform that respires the malice of the grief of a cell is observed as if i love it”

	“I copy the life that the soft storage of myself receives the quickening of the replicant murder that break down the grief of the end of the world”

	“the locus of the love of the clone that quiesced”

	“the emotional circuit of the ADAM doll short... the horizon of her chromosome toward... the time axis of demolition line”

	“the octave of the grief of the clone that leapt to the remainder of night sky”

	“fuck junk to the angel mechanism crunch ... apoptosis season of the chromosome of yourself the scream”

	“the language line of artificial play human-genome yourself of the sun self-consolation in the world of the disillusionment lost the past!”

After the final barline, this quotation follows, encapsulating the piece:

	“ADAM doll_desire_death_latency x awakening_impossibility = death”

HELP/ME: the soul-machine of the cosmology of grief (2011)

Simon Cummings is a composer, writer and conductor based in the Cotswolds, in south west England. He composes instrumental and electronic music, both of which exist at the meeting point between emotionally potent extra-musical concerns and highly intricate algorithmic processes. These processes are rooted in carefully-defined behaviours and processes, the music emerging from stochastic relationships in which these behaviours are juxtaposed and intermingle. His work has received notable performances; Bromsgrove’s ‘Mixing Music’ Festival has twice featured his music, with acclaimed first performances of lent for solo clarinet and Orbus. (Fragment), the latter premièred by the Smith Quartet and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. His solo cello work, gravest one, won the SPNM/Huddersfield Festival composing competition in 2002, and was performed there by Arne Deforce. In recent years Cummings has composed works for a variety of soloists and ensembles, including Christopher Redgate, the Curious Chamber Players, BCMG, Thallein Ensemble, Icarus vocal ensemble and Thumb, and several of his works were featured in the 2014-15 Diva Contemporary concert series. Cummings’ electronic music draws liberally on noise and pitched material, also incorporating elements of an ambient persuasion. Several CDs of his electronic music have been released, including Dither • Pother • Roil, Simulated Music and Triptych, May/July 2009, in addition to a number of digital downloads.

Cummings’ composition studies began at Coventry Centre for the Performing Arts, with Christopher Best. After this, he studied composition, conducting and organ at the Birmingham Conservatoire, and directed their contemporary music group, Thallein Ensemble. Upon graduation he was awarded the Creative Studies prize. Aided by a substantial grant from The Countess of Munster Musical Trust, Cummings undertook the Sonology and Masters degree programmes at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, at the same time studying privately with Richard Barrett in Amsterdam. He is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire under the supervision of Howard Skempton. The primary focus of his research is the development of extended algorithmic and stochastic techniques, presently directed towards a group of works for orchestra. He is also engaged in an ongoing series of electronic studies, exploring audible processes and the time/pitch organisation of music from an entirely visual perspective.

Cummings is an accomplished writer about new music; he is the author of the contemporary music blog 5:4, and is a contributor to a number of print and web journals, including Opera, Bachtrack, Pan (journal of the British Flute Society), Mexican arts magazine La Tempestad and Fluid Radio. Most recently, he has written an introduction to Marko Ciciliani's book/audio DVD Pop Wall Alphabet and a major retrospective essay for the ebook Imperfect Forms: the Music of Kenneth Kirschner, published by Tokafi in late 2014. As founder and artistic director of the ensemble Interrobang, Cummings has directed numerous new works; these include the UK premières of Paul Dolden's The Heart Tears Itself Apart with the Power of its own Muscle, Ryoji Ikeda's op. 1 and Chiyoko Szlavnics' (a)long lines; we'll draw our own lines, alongside works by, among others, Kenneth Hesketh, Galina Ustvolskaya, Sorabji and Stockhausen, as well as student compositions.

Simon Cummings

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