Jonty Harrison: Articles indéfinis: liner notes

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Articles indéfinis
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Playful Volatility

by Denis Smalley |imed_9627-0001|

In contemplating the Harrisonian style, my first thought is of ‘volatility.’ Volatile in its agitation, its wayward energies, the restlessness of its short-breathed phrases, the unpredictable pushing and shoving of its gestures, its punchy presence, its elegantly controlled aggressiveness. Relaxed, gentle moments are to be savored in a sound world where sudden impulse dominates the soothing curve. This is a music volatile also in its playfulness — sparks fly, fireworks cavort, objects dance as well as collide, sonic events from the family diary felicitously mingle with studio life.

The notion of the sound object is forever evident as morphological types and the panoply of solid and malleable substances are lovingly explored. The elements of earth, air, fire and water are a constant thread, whether overt or allusive. Only in the most recent works has obvious human presence intruded on the world of invisible energies, provoking unsettling ambiguities.

If there are favorite morphologies then it is those based on iterative behaviours which have pride of place, for this is a very rhythmic music—exchanges of pulse patterns, peculiar bounces, granular interiors, halted accelerations, fleeting ritardandi, twists and turns which evolve their own particular logic.

Object and texture are in joyous equilibrium. The ear can savour minuscule, passing ephemera and at the same time admire the surrounding view. Behind the etching of detail, and the gauging of densities and rates of change, I detect the influence of those many hours of performing with the BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) system: I hear Jonty’s malleable fingers and effusive diffusion style, and when I hear Hot Air I know that it is designed to explode spectacularly in diffusion, but that I can only discover its secret corners on CD.

Look through the stereo window and discover this expansive, exuberant world.

Denis Smalley, London (England, UK) [i-96]


Indifinite Articles, the disc

by Jonty Harrison |imed_9627-0002|

Just over twenty years ago, after a 45-minute introduction to the studio, I set out on a journey in the electroacoustic domain. As I was about to progress to a composition doctorate, I felt that I should know something about how electroacoustic music fitted into the broader picture of composition. I soon realized that it was more a question of how instrumental composition fitted into the broader picture of working with sound!

The field of possibility in the electroacoustic medium being more or less infinite, the old certainties of the act of composition can no longer be sustained. Composing can no longer be restricted to formulating abstract relationships between material drawn from a limited array of ‘musical’ sounds via an intermediate system of graphic (visual) symbols — a formulation which is frequently more firmly rooted in notational (‘notatable’) relationships than in the perceivable relationships of sound. No, in the studio one works with sound itself and tests the results on that most fickle and yet most potent discriminatory organ of perception — the ear. Composition becomes ‘concrete’ — a collaboration between composer and the organic sound matter which (like a kind of sonic DNA) carries clues to its behaviour in various musical contexts, and to which the composer must be sensitive or risk the musical consequences of a mismatch of local and global structures. This collaborative venture involves a shift of focus away from instrumental generalizations based on an acquired cultural memory of sonic exteriors. Listening inside sounds reveals interior structures which can give rise to new, external(ized) musical forms — no longer abstract, but abstracted from the material itself. Where this initial material is drawn from recognizable sounds, the sounds of our everyday experience, then the purely musical, spectromorphological relationships between sounds are complemented by a wider frame of reference: alongside Schaeffer’s écoute réduite we can perhaps also experience ‘expanded listening.’

Little did I realize back in 1974 that my encounter with the electroacoustic medium would change my attitude to composition — and, indeed, to music itself — so fundamentally. Over this period I have travelled from formulaic throwbacks to structures built from spectromorphological connections and free associations of sound images. The pieces gathered together on this CD chart some of this journey.

Jonty Harrison, Birmingham (UK) [i-96]

Jonty Harrison: Articles indéfinis: liner notes

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