New Album: Versions of the Pastoral

The idea of the pastoral is central to a great deal of Western culture, at least since the middle ages. The pastoral is the city-dweller's fantasy of the countryside, or rather "fantasies" since they are never just one thing. Sometimes they're regressive stereotypes but sometimes the pastoral represents a radical kind of freedom. This release is inspired by different versions of pastoral music, and different ideas of what the pastoral might mean today. A bit more context below the fold but meanwhile listen for free here, pay what you like to download on Bandcamp and find the album on all the streaming services within the next couple of weeks:

I'd like to jump to some musical context without going into the history of the pastoral, so will just point you to William Empson's book Some Versions of the Pastoral, after which the album is named. It did a good job of showing its readers that the pastoral isn't just pretty hillsides and shepherds pining for their loves; it's weird and contradictory and (like all utopias) it's a reflection of the problems, anxieties and politics of the present.

So to some musical points of reference. Here's Delius, one of the so-called "English pastoralist" school, invoking the English countryside as a lush soundscape:

Although this is very distant from my own musical style I wanted a bit of it, at least at the beginning of the project. "Aires, Vernal Aires" and "PPEGORHRASS" use an ensemble of strings and woodwinds in a way that's supposed to be a bit reminiscent of this kind of writing, although of course it doesn't sound very much like it. In particular I employed the cor anglais, also the voice that introduces Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", for that sophisticate's-idea-of-what-a-rustic-pipe-sounds-like-ness.

A half century or so after Delius (but what a half century!) this is what a sort of pastoral music sounded like -- Birtwistle's "Silbury Air", a symphonic poem of similar length to Delius's but emphasizing the strangeness and oldness of the countryside:

There's a lot of Birtwistle in my music. I like short motivic gestures that keep coming back, strong dynamic jumps and sectional forms and all of those are in full effect on this album. But I don't think "Versions of the Pastoral" came out sounding much like Birtwistle.

The sound-world probably has more in common with Ferneyhough, but I don't think he's much of a pastoralist. Their contemporary Michael Finnissy has made some pieces that reflect on the idea of
musical nature-painting and folk authenticity, but with heavy irony; I can't resist linking his "Sea and Sky" here, a Turner-inspired orchestral piece will be accessible to all the harsh noise fans reading:

Well, that's some musical context, although I'm aware I've linked three orchestral pieces and nothing on this new album is remotely orchestral. In fact, one track features solo violin and is inspired by Henry Flynt

... and to some extent Bartok, who has in common with Flynt a high-culture intellectual's fascination with the earthy and folkloric:

The titles reference different "versions of the pastoral". "Aires, Vernal Aires" is rhapsodic and naive, the cottagecore vision of a simple life without too many hardships. "Damon the Mower" is a figure from a poem by Andrew Marvell, a stereotypical lovestruck rustic who meets a rather comical end. "Mud Celestially Pure" is a line from Francis Ponge's poem "Unfinished Ode to Mud", a curious postmodern nature poem about the purpose and proper subjects of poetry, revisiting again the question of what happens when the elevated high-cultural gaze falls on humble things. "PPEGORHRASS" is of course from e e cummings, a poem about a grasshopper that's also about the raw material of its medium -- paper and type; a way of slipping the self-conscious concerns of late modernist art into a harmless-looking nature poem.

Finally, "Sasquatch" is a reference to folk culture: the urban myth of the animal in the woods, and particularly the "Sierra sounds", a recording alleged to be of the Sasquatch's calls that's certainly a hoax:

I didn't try to imitate these sounds but I did like the idea of the clarinet and flute evoking a very refined idea of the sounds a woodland beast might make when it thought nobody was listening -- talking to itself, calling, grumbling and rejoicing. The sasquatch myth is a version of the pastoral that has roots in old European tales of wild folk in the woods but really came into being in the 1960s, as modernism was collapsing into what would come after, conveyed through grainy electronic media.

All this is kind of the cultural background I wanted to make a broad gesture towards with this album. As for the music, it has a very long gestation and for me that usually means it's not very systematic. There are some weird tunings in play and most of the pieces involve some mixture of classical and electronic sounds but the music evolved from that largely by means of a process of refinement. As usual these days I wanted to make music that communicates as clearly as it can without compromising. The pieces are mostly episodic in the sense that, although motifs persist and transform throughout their lengths, they go through a sequence of phases that in some cases could almost be different pieces (or at least separate movements). So there's no need to over-think this one despite all the blather above.