John Croft's first monograph CD has recently been released by First Hand Records, an interesting label with an impressively diverse catalogue. Readers of TEMPO may be familiar with Croft, not only as a composer, but also as the author of the bracing ‘Composition is not Research’ from volume 69 of this journal, which stands as one of TEMPO's most-cited pieces.Footnote 1
It must be said at the outset: this music is beautiful. If not post-spectralist per se, it is certainly informed by French music in a number of ways; for what it's worth, virtually all of Croft's published writing to date name-checks Grisey in some fashion. His compositional concerns in these eight works fall into two categories. The cycle, for which the album is named, instantiates a dialectical approach to musical surface in which melody emerges and submerges over several distinct pieces. Intermedio I, Intermedio III and La terra lagrimosa … una luce veriglia all focus on seamlessly integrating live electronics with a single instrument. In the liner notes, Richard Whitehouse explains ‘the electronic sound here consists entirely of live treatments of the instrument, eschewing both sound files and the intervention of a computer operator during the performance’.
With works spanning from 2006 to 2018, the through line is an emerging unique idiom that has clearly been the focus of much compositional work and creative thought: timbrally rich, melodically centred, semi-opaque, rhythmically undefined. This is discursive music – there is an intuitive grammar to the local phrasing (most clearly manifested in the function of silences: some are commas, few are periods, most are ellipses). Distinctions between foreground and background grow subtler as the pieces get more recent. Overall forms tend to be labyrinthian with even pacing. Perhaps we are invited to consider a reevaluation of the form/content binary: the content is the idiom, while form is better understood as the instrument for which it is written, rather than a sequence of events. The potential problem with this idiom-driven composing is self-similarity verging on monotony: more than half of these works begin with a crescendo from niente, and almost all end by settling into an uneasy silence.
Intermedio I for bass flute begins the album, La terra lagrimosa … for cello and Intermedio III for bass clarinet conclude it. So thoroughly intermeshed are these pieces’ acoustic instruments and their electronics, both sonically and compositionally, that it really is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. With effects smoothly morphing from reverb to resonators to harmonizers, electrification becomes mythical, Homeric – instruments re-told through the hazing years of embellishment and exaggeration. The bass flute of Intermedio I dances and dips through melodic pirouettes, dissolving here into breathy wisps and resolving there into pure tone; poltergeist knocks form a separate thread of the discourse and insinuate themselves into the texture, growing to a frightful climax. Remarkably, these knocks too must be a live treatment of the flute – whence these spectres? Richard Craig's playing is forceful and delicate, elegantly phrasing the sinuous lines. Intermedio III presents a more unified material palette and a more cyberpunk aesthetic. Bass clarinet multiphonic honks sound like blaring futuristic car horns. Marij van Gorkom taunts us through a hall of mirrors with several duplicate MvGs. La terra lagrimosa … for cello and live electronics is the earliest composed piece on the disk. The legacy of spectralism is most obviously on display here. Séverine Ballon is exquisite, exciting, brutal, bringing out upper partials with the precision of a brass player; every grain of sound, every multiphonic flash, is breathtaking.
Seirēnes is a cycle consisting of five acoustic works sequentially increasing in forces – two solos, a duo, a trio, and a quartet. These are the most recently composed works on the album. The slightly unusual instrumentation – flute, viola, cello, guitar – departs from the rather oversaturated Pierrot subset. The inclusion of guitar is quite an inspired choice, adding some clear edges to a texture dominated by softness and blur.
The first of the two solos, Peisinoë for humming ‘female violist’, performed by Emma Richards, is a ruminative and thoughtful music. Perhaps it is a meditation on Grisey's Prologue, with which it shares some affinities, but as the first statement of a larger work, it is more of a disruption than a fanfare – an auger not an inauguration. The interaction between instrument and instrumentalist's humming is not dissimilar to the resonators on the electrified instruments, but the foreground/background distinction is clearer here. The viola is very close while her humming is very distant. Richards’ performance is liquid and confident; the humming is not at all awkward or distracting. The second solo, Ligeia for flute, is complimentary, with a melody of larger leaps and smaller steps than its partner. Syrinx and Density 21.5 are strong influences. A melodically enmeshed octave multiphonic delicately ends this piece with both an ascending semitone for closure and a minor ninth unsettling that closure.
Duo for viola and guitar, at the centre of both the album and the cycle, is both the shortest work here and, to my mind, the most interesting. It sits in an uncanny valley of genre and history; contemporary chamber music with microtones and muted strums, certainly, but also a melody accompanied by a guitar, a half-remembered dream version of some Ciconian curiosity. The brevity only increases the mystery. Trio for bass flute, viola and cello, which consists of tutti compound gestures, is a string of fallings and crashes. The material is caught between liquid and solid states. Croft's grammatical silences punctuate each fall with cruelty. Melodies sometimes entwine in the aftermath, sometimes not. The foreground/background distinction is at its most ambiguous here.
The cycle concludes with Quartet for alto flute, guitar, viola and cello, combining elements of all four of the preceding works. The first portion, roughly a third, is a struggle to get off the ground, as if all those weightless materials combined now suddenly weigh a tonne. Formerly grammatical silences exceed their function, oppressing the momentum. The deus ex machina of the piece and the cycle is the emergence of melody in its most colloquial guise. With its held notes and fast runs, it resembles a French Overture but without the pomp, and is accompanied by alternating almost tonic and almost dominant plucked guitar chords.
As a 54-minute listening experience, one is struck by the proximity of these sounds – particularly in the trio, the component parts completely envelope us, we drown. Unfortunately, for many tracks the low-mids are simply too high in the mix, making for some claustrophobic listening. I don't fault Croft, who produced the recordings himself, for making everything sound as vivid and striking as possible, but particularly for the acoustic music, it's difficult to know what these pieces are beyond the studio walls. For example, the liner notes describe the trio as tantalizingly on the cusp of audibility, while the recording is comfortably cuspless. While individual works are absorbing, if the album were a concert programme the pacing would lag between the conclusive end of Seirēnes and the expansive opening of La terra lagrimosa ….
Croft's music has hitherto mostly been performed in the UK. With his first portrait CD, this fabulous work can reach a much wider listenership. Performers, festival organizers, take notice.
