We caught up with composer Christian Mason to talk about the influences and practices behind the creation of Songbooks, featuring on our latest release with the Ligeti Quartet.
How did your collaboration with the Ligeti Quartet begin?
Richard Jones (viola, Ligeti Quartet) and I were at York University together, and aside from hosting the memorable ‘Party for the End of Time’, we were both very involved with the new music ensemble Chimera. A few years later when the Ligeti Quartet formed and were planning a tour of China, they asked me to arrange ‘Sai Ma’ for an encore. I wasn’t on the tour, but I heard it went down well and the approach I’d taken with that piece led on quite naturally (a couple of years later) to the Songbooks.
Ligeti Quartet
How involved were the quartet in shaping the pieces with you?
Well for a start, I think the whole project was their idea, and there was a lot of exchanging recordings and links of pieces we liked before making the final selections of which songs to transcribe. I think that Richard even did the initial transcription for ‘Sai Ma’, but for the two Songbooks, I treated the transcription as a more integrated part of the composition process. After all, the way in which you write an idea down is already an act of interpretation – so it became very important for me to find the right relation between my ears and eyes at the outset. I also discussed different versions of the transcriptions with various friends, so the whole process was quite sociable compared with other projects!
Once I had some material settled on paper, we had some workshop sessions to try out various approaches. For some of the pieces I also experimented with electronic processing of the original tracks – for example changing the speed, or using different filters to emphasise particular regions of harmonics. I then played these to the quartet and we collectively explored approaches to imitating the processed recordings – you can hear the fruit of this approach on, for example, ‘Muttos’, the last movement of Sardinian Songbook. I then went away and composed the scores, but for a long time I treated these scores more as temporary working documents. I’ve actually only just finished preparing the ‘definitive’ edition, several years later – and long after completing the CD recordings!
When was it that you first encountered overtone singing practices?
I can’t remember for sure. In the broad sense of the term I think it might have been through listening to Stimmung by Stockhausen as a teenager. For the Sardinian songs, I’m pretty sure I was introduced to the Tenores di Bitti by another university friend and housemate Joe Browning (now an ethnomusicologist). And for the Tuvan music, it was thanks to my sister Barbara Keal, who as a birthday present booked me a place on a workshop with British Khöömei singer Michael Ormiston in an old warehouse by the river in Lewes, Sussex. Perhaps I’d already heard recordings by that point, but it was definitely a formative moment.
Tenores di Bitti Mialinu Pira in concert.
How did those overtone practices shape your writing process for Songbooks?
It’s the idea that the note – the basic unit of most Western notated music – is not just one sound, but many. And that you can actually emphasise that aspect of sound – its inner energy and diversity. So the aim became to harness and magnify these inherent acoustical phenomena through compositional processes. I suppose there’s an obvious parallel with spectral thinking. But what became interesting as the work progressed, was the way it which the layers of material – the ‘fundamentals’ and the ‘overtones’ – were able to separate from one another and sometimes take independent journeys.
A concert inspired by Mongolian Khoomii overtone and undertone singing featuring Michael Ormiston and Candida Valentina.
What was the biggest creative challenge that this project presented?
Finding (or defining) the boundary between self and other.
Have you written instrumental work inspired by the voice before, or was this a first for you?
There are some examples from before this, such as the last movement of my violin and piano duo Learning Self-Modulation, which requires the players to sing while playing and is also melodically inspired by ‘Old Roman chant’ (as recorded by Marcel Peres and Ensemble Organum). But since composing the Songbooks the notion of voice and the imaginative extensions that flow from it are becoming increasingly important in my work. In fact, the piece I am working on right now is called The Singing Tree [for BCMG, Ex Cathedra Children’s Choir and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart], setting a specially written text by Paul Griffiths which also takes the visual form of tree. In it I conceive the entire ensemble of voices and instruments combining to form an immense imaginary chanting tree – an idea not dissimilar to the quartet embodying the traditional songs.
How has the Songbooks project evolved since its inception?
One thing that I’ve noticed – which wasn’t necessarily the intention at the outset - is that the large-scale structure and dramaturgy of the Tuvan and Sardinian Songbooks corresponds closely to the traditional string quartet medium: four movements with a specific order, defined by contrasts of character and energy. I think this aspect is very important because it balances the musical contribution of both traditions in a manner which I feel is musically more significant than the simple fact of getting two violins, a viola and cello to play some folk tunes. On the one hand, the materials are based on traditional musics; on the other, the structural attitude is very much rooted in the string quartet tradition. For me, the two biggest decisions with both Songbooks were ‘which pieces?’ (material) and ‘which order?’ (structure) – everything else is detail.
What is your vision for the subsequent Songbooks?
We are hoping, and indeed planning, that rather than transcribing from recordings, future projects will see us collaborate with practitioners of the traditions that we are engaging with. The next two will be an Inuit Katajjaq Songbook, and a Xhosa Umngqokolo Songbook. Beyond those – in the rather distant future – I hope to create an ‘Imaginary Elsewhere’ Songbook which blends aspects from all of them (and who-knows-what-else!) into something culturally non-specific, yet retaining a sense of voice deep within it.
OUT NOW
Songbooks Vol. 1
The debut release from the Ligeti Quartet, featuring works by Christian Mason and Tanya Tagaq. Available now on CD and digitally.
Meet our new Board members – Alan Davey and Karen Lee.