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Musical Opinion

At less than 25 minutes overall duration, critics who complain about short playing time for CDs are going to have a field day with this issue [again a reviewer who overlooks the fact that this is a CD single!!] but it is one that proves that length is no guarantee of quality – or indeed, of value for money. As will be seen, these two pieces are very recent creations, Mulvey’s slightly longer pieces created for an art installation, and Fox’s was first heard at last year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

But ‘new’ art is a relative concept, and whilst that growing band of ‘young millennial composers’ may well find themselves attracted to these pieces, one might direct what one might term the mainstream music-lover to comments by the composers themselves, which say pretty much what needs to be said.

Gráinne Mulvey: ‘All the source material is derived from recordings of one of [sculptor] Mark [Garry]’s harps, along with the ambient sounds of wind and birdsong captured by chance when making the field recordings. Percussive sounds that appear in the middle section are derived from the strings being plucked and struck. The piece starts quietly with just the sound of the wind,. Pitched material gradually appearing as the strings start to vibrate. As the piece develops, the birdsong emerges into the foreground and a three-way dialogue ensues between the nature sounds, the unprocessed harp and electronically manipulated recordings treated in the manner of musique concrete. This builds to a peak about halfway through the piece before dissolving back into faint echoes of the opening material, eventually receding into silence.’

Christopher Fox also explains: ‘untouch is the first part of a work in two parts, untouch-touch… In the second part, touch, the percussionist plays six Thai gongs, suspended around him, striking them with his hands in slow, almost ritualised, repeating patterns. In untouch, as the title suggests, the percussionist performs the same series of movements, but without striking the gongs. Instead, each hand movement triggers a sine tone, gradually introducing the six strongest overtones of each of the six gongs: ‘untouch’ as an abstraction of ‘touch’.