Krzysztof Penderecki studied electronic music in the 1960s, working with early modular synthesisers, white-noise, filters, electronic oscillators – he understood all those contemporary sound-making techniques. But, having learnt everything there was to know about these sounds, he returned to orchestras – knowing, I think, that an orchestra could make these same sounds, and in a far more interesting way. 

 

This is still true. Early electronic music can be fascinating, but it’s in aspic: the recordings have frozen it in the 1960s, or the 1990s – or whenever the technology that was used to make them peaked. But a piece of acoustic music such as Penderecki’s Polymorphia, for example, still sounds timeless 58 years after it was written, even if the technology used – the string orchestra – is much older. 

 

It’s important to make that judgement in the concert hall, though, not from recordings. No-one’s earphones are good enough to replicate the experience of sitting in the same room as an orchestra. I often wonder, if you’ve not heard a piece of music live, whether you really say you’ve heard it at all. You know how it goes, but then, I know how Hamlet goes – but I’ve never seen it, so I don’t know how it feels to be in a theatre with it. 

 

Contemporary orchestral music – if I can still be allowed to call music from the 1960s contemporary – certainly suffers from being recorded, and suffers more than most music. It often translates as something that is simply harsh, acerbic or monotonous. In real life, the sounds are far softer and stranger. The microphones and loudspeakers filter all that out, making things louder, but less colourful. This is easily forgotten when you have a whole Spotify’s-worth of, say, Thomas Adès recordings sitting on your phone. The temptation to hear, and judge, when presented with the whole catalogue, is just too strong. Add to this the impossible task of attending any particular concert – to say nothing of funding the performance of contemporary music – and it’s not easy advice to follow. 

 

So, while it’s undeniably a good thing that the next Thomas Adès can come from anywhere in the world, and we can hear all of his music – all of everyone’s music – despite living hundreds miles from the nearest concert hall, I can’t stop obsessing about the live performance. It’s a question of complexity. Of moving parts. Yes, I love my software, and I love making music with electronics. But I also know that, every time I press play on iTunes, or on a Protools session, or an Ableton session, I’m going to hear exactly the same thing, from the same pair of speakers. There’s no delicacy, because there’s no peril. Ironically, in some ways earlier synthesisers were more complex. Contemporary electronic music no longer uses temperamental equipment, which is good for reliability, but when used for performance, can feel creatively boring. When there’s nearly nothing that can go wrong, where’s the struggle? Where are the surprises, welcome and unwelcome?

 

This isn’t true with a room full of string players. It’s not even true of one string player, or one pianist, playing a single note. Add other notes, other players, other performances, and the complexity multiplies beyond comprehension. Not that I’m necessarily looking forward to things going wrong tonight: but the potential that every individual note can, and conversely the collective effort to put music across in a room of people, generates an energy that only comes with this kind of group performance.  

 

So I do look forward to this complexity, this lack of certainty. And I think about the individual players too: what kind of day they’ve each had today, how they feel about the music I’m asking them to play. As well, the mechanics of it all – that mass of fingers, and all the horse-hairs on all those bows. The years of collective lessons and practice, from all those teachers, distilled into a few minutes of music-making. Each factor multiplies the complexity again, and it starts to feel like an infinite potential – and those plug-ins that allow you to tweak a few settings in a Protools session begin to look smaller and smaller. 

 

Horror vacui is the fear of empty space, usually in paintings. Children, and outsider artists generally, are liable to feel that a picture is unfinished if there’s any space left unfilled. For this music, I’ve focused on all the different ways there are to electronically create reverb and echoes, and translated them into the complexities  of a string orchestra. Daniel Pioro’s solo violin treats  the orchestra like a big reverb chamber, triggering resonances, echoes and granular-style stretching of time that emulate how artificial reverbs work. Reverbs that range from the early 20th century, with amplified resonating strings, though tape echoes and analogue delays, to today’s latest digital treatments that stretch and compress time. 

 

Perhaps this comes across as an attempt to copy electronic music – in fact it’s meant to be better. Only meant to be – I get to find out at the same time as everyone else which parts of it, if any, work (the only full rehearsal happened yesterday, and it’s too late to change it now …) so it’s a wide-open goal for hubris. But that’s alright. I love these sounds. I feel lucky and honoured to be given access to the musicians who can make them.

 

Programme note © Jonny Greenwood