Barrett, Richard (b. 1959)

[Beef Oven!]

I've been listening to Richard Barrett's natural causes I, IV, X, XIV for 16 performers and electronic sounds (2016-2017) a fair bit lately and I look forward to its completion - the intention being sixteen compositions which can be performed in different interleaved combinations. Read more here.

When thinking about starting this thread, I went back to the first piece of Richard Barrett's music that I first heard; a work that convinced me on one hearing that I was listening to a very special contemporary composer indeed. The work that I refer to is 'Vanity'. I still find it an astonishing work.

I have provided a YouTube video of it below (the CONSTRUCTION minidoc/performance follows on from Vanity in this link)

Many of us on the forum have enjoyed subsequent works such as "DARK MATTER" (1990-2003), "CONSTRUCTION" (2005-2011) and last year's release of "life-form", "nacht und träume" and "Blattwerk" (music for cello and electronics featuring Arne Force on 'cello). This was my personal choice for CD of the year for 2016.

I would say that anyone interested in music that his happening nowadays, should check out 'Vanity' then follow up on the subsequent music that RB has composed.

[richardfinegold]

Perhaps the Composer himself could identify which pieces he thinks would serve as a gateway to his Music

[Quarky]

Many thanks!!

I was just about to post, saying Frank Zappa / LSO Vol.1 was the best piece of Symphonic music from a "new" composer that I've heard for ages, but I can see I will have to reserve judgement!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm very grateful to BeefO for starting this Thread. I, too, have been listening to the natural causes pieces with great pleasure, trying to articulate a coherent response that would communicate my gratitude for such Music, and being unable to.

Huddersfield in November 1996 was the last year that Stockhausen visited the Festival - and the first in which ensemble Elision performed; their programme including Richard's Negatives. I was bowled over by the Stockhausen experiences, which I'd been expecting, but also by Richard's work, which I hadn't been expecting to be so intense an experience because I'd not heard any before. It immediately "resonated", and I have never looked back - it is Music that I find incredibly exciting; powerful and sensuous, with a huge range of "character" - humour, ferocity, playfulness: it can caress, scream with fury at the injustices of life, and cry out with ecstatic exuberance at its joys, and it presents ways of working with sound that demands I reconsider and re-evaluate what I think Music can be fully capable of. I started buying whatever scores I could find (those glossy, black covers - the impossibilty of following Opening of the Mouth with the score) then ordering them from UMP - telephone conversations with "Rebecca" whilst she checked stock and availability (and got things wrong, so her boss had to 'phone me back) - and the packaging of Tract, having to take the greatest care removing the wrapping sellotape that had got stuck to the cover of the score, following works like stress, mesopotamia, and anatomy from cassette tapes of broadcasts (which are still lying around somewhere, hissing to themselves) and wishing there was a broadcast/recording of coigitum so I could see how closely (I hope) my reading of the score is to the sounds that the Musicians actually make.

I'm beginning to gush - always a problem for me when I'm so enthusiastic. This whole "intellectually detached" idea I like to cultivate in my discussions of Music is really shown up as a facade when confronted with such work. I even collected the broken strings from Arne Deforce's 'cello after the Huddersfield premiere of Blattwerke, for goodness' sake - I was in my late forties at the time! (They're still sellotaped into my programme from the Festival - a memory of one of the magnificentest concerts I've ever attended.)

It is for me, a profoundly important body of work - one that has frequently given me renewed enthusiasm to be alive when such energetic, imaginative and defiantly hopeful Music is still being created.


(He's got some crap taste in Music, though - I mean; doesn't like Schoenberg, doesn't like Brahms - but likes Scheherazade! No hope for the poor bloke. )

[Bryn]

... wishing there was a broadcast/recording of coigitum so I could see how closely (I hope) my reading of the score is to the sounds that the Musicians actually make.

Is that you sly way of asking if Richard has a recording?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Is that you sly way of asking if Richard has a recording?

It wasn't so intended, but ...

[Richard Barrett]

Thanks BeefO for starting this thread and thanks others for your kind words. It makes it all worthwhile to know that people are listening with such attention and enthusiasm and intelligence!

There is a recording of Coïgitum on my Soundcloud page along with a great deal of other hard-to-find stuff (including most of the other titles you mention, fg). Here's a link https://soundcloud.com/r-barrett/co-gitum-1985-for-five It's a performance from 1991 transferred from a cassette sent me by the BBC. It was performed often in the 1980s by Ensemble Exposé which I co-founded with Roger Redgate and Michael Finnissy, but the ensemble became less active after I left the UK in 1993. It wasn't performed again until last year, by the Fonema Consort in Chicago. I have a multitrack recording of that which I need to mix at some point, but I haven't got around to it yet, partly because this music is so far in the past as far as I'm concerned (no.4 in a catalogue of 134 works so far...).

richardf, I would probably be the least suitable person to suggest the right sort of gateway - it would be a bit like trying to come up with an answer to which of my children I love more... And it really depends on what a listener's prior knowledge might be: for people more steeped in popular idioms the music with electronics and/or more improvisatory features might be easier to get into, while for those more familiar with "classical" repertoire the orchestral pieces might be a better way in. But it could also be the other way around, and I would resist the idea that there's some general scale of "accessibility" which some of these pieces have in greater measure than others. To me it's all accessible, it's what I would have wanted to hear if I were in the audience. I guess that's almost too obvious to be worth stating.

Many people tend to think of orchestral music as some kind of supreme test of a composer's abilities, but it's never really been at the centre of my way of thinking because I take my inspiration more often from long-term collaborations with individuals and ensembles with whom it's possible to work at the limits of what it's possible to perform and perceive, resulting in music that couldn't have been brought into being by any other means (or, in the first instance, with any other performers). Working for a few days of rehearsals with 80-90 players who for the most part aren't going to engage very closely with the philosophy underlying the music demands a different kind of approach, not a question of "compromise" as such but of the music evolving from a process of putting instruments together rather than so to speak taking them apart. The sound of a solo cello can embody as much complexity and depth as a symphony orchestra, but there has to be something about the music that draws a listener into hearing it that way.

Not sure why I launched off on that last paragraph, but it's there now!

[Alison]

Were you writing a piece for harp, Richard? All finished?

[Richard Barrett]

Were you writing a piece for harp, Richard? All finished?

Yes, that was last year. It's been played a few times since then, although more often in the context of a concert-length (70-minute) ensemble piece it forms part of (a sextet for recorder, trumpet, cello, accordion, harp and electronics). Which, by the way, I'm currently working on bringing to the UK on tour next March - I won't say more now in case the whole thing implodes...

[Bryn]

Thanks for the link, Richard. I had feeling you might have a recording of the Chicago performance. I look forward to your having the time and inclination to mix it.

[Richard Barrett]

I suppose this might be an appropriate place to mention that this has now been released:



You can read more about it here https://divineartrecords.com/recordi...sic-for-flute/
and indeed here https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/...usic-for-flute

I'm looking forward very much to hearing it, in view of my having until now only heard an mp3 of a rough mix of one of the pieces...

[Bryn]

I suppose this might be an appropriate place to mention that this has now been released:



You can read more about it here https://divineartrecords.com/recordi...sic-for-flute/
and indeed here https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/...usic-for-flute

I'm looking forward very much to hearing it, in view of my having until now only heard an mp3 of a rough mix of one of the pieces...

Just ordered a "Used - Very Good" copy.

[Beef Oven!]

Taking a break from Bob Simpson, I've just finished listening to Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The great art of light and darkness) from the overall work DARK MATTER. RB begins one paragraph in the booklet notes "although many of the components of DARK MATTER can also function as separate pieces........" I took the liberty of interpreting this a license to dip in and out of the work, as well as listening right through the entire piece from time to time.

[Beef Oven!]

Just played 'Vale' through twice. I would love to see Richard Craig perform this live as it's hard for me to know how he gets those sounds from the flute and what techniques he uses. I'm not quite getting the leaf floating down a stream, but I do like the Fauvist analogy for the album in the Gramophone review.

I also like this from the CD booklet ...........

"The flute is one of the instruments closest to the audible human breath and is caught in the process of continually becoming something other than a metal cylinder. Listening to Richard Craig’s playing, one becomes aware not of the limitations of the flute but of its expansion into a vibrant sonic biosphere. We listen, not just to the flute, but to the flautist; singing, whistling, humming are added to his palette and become integrated with the sound of the instrument" - John Hails

[Richard Barrett]

I'm not quite getting the leaf floating down a stream

It's not just any leaf though, but the line traced by this chain of leaves in Andy Goldsworthy's film Rivers and Tides,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yRHilnkb9E (from 4'00" until 6'00")

as it's carried downstream, was a starting-point for thinking about how the music traces a line through the range of sounds a flute can produce, and how the form of the piece proceeds towards the breakup and disappearance of the floating leaves as they reach the sea (which was an imaginary extrapolation from the film). Doesn't matter if you don't hear it like that of course!