Graphic Scores, Volcanoes and a Piano Concerto - In Conversation with Cat Hope
Cat Hope. Photo: Megan Burslem, 2020
When looking at the score for award-winning composer Cat Hope’s new piano concerto Lampi, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a work of visual art. Brightly coloured lines of changing thicknesses and textures weave their way across the screens of network-synced iPads. They scroll steadily past a solid vertical line that indicates to the musicians where they are up to in the piece. Each instrumentalist follows the lines of a particular colour, interpreting its contour, shape and texture into dynamics, pitch, articulation and timbre.
Lampi - Hope’s first ever concerto - will be premiered this weekend by pianist Dan Thorpe and Forest Collective at Abbotsford Convent.
“I have a graphic score practice” Hope explains, “but unlike a lot of graphic notation, mine provides quite precise instructions for performers.”
Because there are no actual notes written on a musical stave, the performers have to make choices about which pitches to play, based on the lines and shapes.
“But once they’ve made that decision, they follow directions on how to manipulate those notes from that point on.” Hope continues. “This requires a lot of careful listening between players in the ensemble.”
The iPad app Decibel ScorePlayer allows for this controlled coordination of what some would normally considered aleatoric or “chance” music. It was developed by Hope’s new music ensemble Decibel for rehearsing and performing graphic scores with greater accuracy and cohesion. It also allows live musicians to synchronise precisely with pre-recorded media - a feature that Hope uses to great effect in Lampi, which features an audio track of lush low-frequency sub tones, created by the Low Tone Orchestra.
A sample of the graphic score of Cat Hope’s new piano concerto Lampi.
For Hope, graphic scores were a liberation from the strictures of traditional notation, which she felt could not properly express her musical ideas.
“It opened up a whole world of possibilities that I’d been thinking about for a long time but hadn’t resolved how to present to players. At uni I was doing lots of drawings of sounds... line drawings basically. I was drawing the sounds as I heard them in my head, but I didn’t think they’d ever be played.”
But when Hope was studying music in the 80s, she felt that this unorthodox, non-traditional notation was not an option for her.
“All through uni I wanted to work out why I could never get the stuff that I had in my head written down [as traditional notation]. I beat myself up about that for a long time, thinking that I wasn’t good enough. It took me a long time to realise that I just didn’t have the right tools. Now I’ve found those tools, and it’s a good place to be.”
Graphic scores ultimately allowed Hope to give her ideas their truest expression.
“It’s enabled me to break that instinctive tendency to always fall back on what you learn. Like every other composer, I learned those Mozart minuets at university - it’s all there!” she laughs, “But graphic notation let me break away from that and find a path that suited the work I wanted to create.”
“I’m interested in very low sounds and long form structures, like drones [as well as] aleatoric processes and improvisation. Graphic scores also allow for greater control of elements like dynamics and texture, which traditional notation is not great at.”
Hope’s work builds on a history of composers who have also strained at the leash of traditional notation.
In particular, Hope mentions 20th century Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, whose papers she is translating into English.
“You can see in his scores, Scelsi is really battling against traditional notation to get his ideas across. He would improvise his music to tape and get other people to transcribe it. I also looked at Xenakis and Ligeti’s pre-notation drawings, which are always in colour and actually look a lot like my scores today. They made drawings and translated them into notation in different ways, whereas I’ve cut out that step altogether.”
Australia’s own Percy Grainger used graphic notation for his Free Music compositions for theremins, but lacked the technology to fully realise these scores in performance.
“Now in the ScorePlayer, you can play those pieces to a very high level of accuracy, which was not possible in Grainger’s lifetime.” Hope says. “So I feel that the ScorePlayer has overcome some of those restrictions that other composers battled with, not just my own.”
Hope’s interest in low sounds was sparked during a formative period of her life living on the Sicilian active volcano Mount Etna.
Mount Etna, photographed by Cat Hope in 2019.
“The volcano is such a strong presence there - you can see it from everywhere and it would sound on a regular basis. But it’s not just the volcano making the sound - it’s all the things around the volcano vibrating. There is a kind of roar, and the vibration of everything in and on the earth.”
Hope explains that many volcano sounds are far lower than the human ear is capable of hearing.
“We still experience that sound, but as vibration through our bodies,” she continues. “We were listening basically through a process of transference, and that was much more interesting than what was coming in through our ears!”
Hope draws inspiration from this idea of sensing sound through skin and the body, and also from the way that the human brain nevertheless interprets these physical sensations as sound. It is a process that celebrated deaf percussion virtuoso Evelyn Glennie speaks about when she says that music is “something you create and listen to with your whole body, not just your ears.”
“This happens all the time in rock music and ‘doof parties’ as a driving rhythmic support or harmonic base,” Hope says. It is is a context she understands, as she has been a bassist and singer for several bands including MiceVice and Gata Negra, supporting acts like Nirvana, Hole and Primus on their European tours in the 90s. “But I was really interested in taking these low frequencies and turning them into something that is soloistic, textural or melodic.”
Indeed, she became so interested that she wrote her PhD on this topic, entitled The Possibility of Infrasonic Music.
Soloist Dan Thorpe and the musicians of Forest Collective will be using ScorePlayer when they premiere Hope’s first piano concerto Lampi this weekend.
The new concerto is based on Italian poet Antonia Pozzi’s fiercely intense six-line poem Lampi (Italian: ‘Lightning’), written in 1929. It is a poem of deep longing and bright desire, using the ultimate chiaroscuro metaphor of a storm. Pozzi was a young writer of immense talent who lived a short and passionate life, dying tragically at the age of 26. Her poems were published by her father after her death.
“I have never set full texts to music, not even in my opera,” Hope explains. “In Lampi I use the poem as a sort of structural device. I set myself the challenge of recreating the atmospheres of the poem in the musical texture. In this case, the poem informs the texture and direction of the solo piano part, and the rest of the ensemble is there in support - like a traditional concerto. I’m actually quite traditional when it comes down to it!” she says with a laugh.
In her program note for the concerto, Hope states that “the work examines the contrasts of sharp and blunt, light and dark, dream and wake, sickness and wellness, action and stasis, which form cornerstones in the poem. Sharp moments of action, attack and volume contrast with the sensual sub tones of the Low Tone Orchestra, a fixed media part of multiple low frequency sine tones.”
Although the work is dedicated to Dan Thorpe and written specifically for his unique style of pianism, Hope says that it was the emotional sensibility of the poem that prompted her to use it as the starting point for her concerto.
“This is a poem that in some ways relates to Dan and some of the life experiences he’s talked to me about, and how they have contributed to his unique style of pianism.” she explains. “I know he’ll make it into his own piece, like he did with Chunk. He made that into his own piece and I welcome that. I’m not one of those composers who thinks there’s only one way to play my music.”
The two composers have an obvious affinity, considering their shared backgrounds in rock, metalcore and slowcore music. And while Thorpe has been mentored by Hope in the past, he now has become a champion of her work.
For Hope, these relationships in creative practice are fundamental. In her recent publication with Louise Devenish The New Virtuosity: A Manifesto for Contemporary Sonic Practice the opening line emphatically affirms that “Creativity is a team pursuit.”
“I look at my practice over the years, leading to this point, and collaboration has been incredibly important. And sometimes it’s difficult to acknowledge that in a formal way. Other times you can make structures that do that, and I’m working on that concept at the moment.”
Lampi is a new concerto that is born of that spirit.
Lampi will be premiered as part of Emo Phase: Dan Thorpe in Focus, which will take place at the Industrial School, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St. Heliers Street, Abbotsford VIC, on the following dates:
Friday 23 April 7.30pm (Preview)
Saturday 24 April 8pm
Sunday 25 April 8pm
Tickets: https://www.eventfinda.com.au/2021/emo-phase-dan-thorpe-in-focus/melbourne/abbotsford?
Preview - $25
Standard - $42
Concession (Student, Pensioner) - $32
Senior & Front line workers (Inc. hospitality, medical, education, transport workers) - $35
Forest Collective accepts Companion Card bookings via email info@forestcollective.com.au or by calling 03 9296 6600.
A small portion of revenue from ticket sales will be donated to offset the carbon footprint of this event.
Rating - M15+
Trigger warnings: mature language, sexual content, loud noises, mentions of death & trauma
The Industrial school is wheelchair accessible. An access map of Abbotsford Convent can be found here: https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/app/uploads/2020/03/Convent-accessmap.pdf
Guide/assistance dogs are welcome to all Forest Collective performances. (Dogs must be kept on a leash at all times)
Further information on accessing Abbotsford Convent can be found here: https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/accessibility/
PTV:
10-15 min walk from Victoria Park Station (South Morang/Hurstbridge Lines)
Bus 200 or 207 to stop Clarke St/Johnston St (cross via bridge above road) and turn left at St Heliers Street
Tram 109, 12 or 48 to stop Victoria St/Nicholson St (Abbotsford) and 20-25 min walk up Nicholson Street
More info: https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/visit/
Presented by Forest Collective, Abbotsford Convent & Midsumma Festival, as part of Convent Live and Midsumma Festival 2021
Forest Collective is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and the City of Yarra
