Background

Composer Helen Grime (b. 1981) is an artist whose career is in ascent. This is amply demonstrated by the consistent demand for new pieces from her for a variety of forces, which are performed by many of the world's luminary artists. Grime's most recent orchestral work, Woven Space, was commissioned and premiered in 2018 by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Her Percussion Concerto, composed for soloist Colin Currie, will be premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, both conducted by Marin Alsop, in January 2019.

Born in York but raised in Scotland, Grime began her musical studies as an oboist. In conversation, she relates that

Subsequently, she studied the oboe with John Anderson and composition with Julian Anderson and Edwin Roxburgh at the Royal College of Music, receiving Bachelor's and Master's degrees there in 2004. In her first major coup, Grime played the premiere of her own Oboe Concerto, a work which garnered her a British Composer Award in 2003. She returned to the RCM as a Junior Fellow from 2005–07.

Her training was capped off at Tanglewood where, first as a Leonard Bernstein Fellow and the following year as a guest composer, she heard the Elliott Carter centennial year's offerings in 2008 and her own Clarinet Concerto and Ten Miniatures for Solo Piano performed in 2009. While at Tanglewood, she worked with composers Michael Gandolfi, John Harbison, Shulamit Ran, and Augusta Read Thomas. 2009 also included another watershed experience for Grime, the first appearance of her music at the BBC Proms, where Virga (2007), an orchestra piece that has become something of a calling card, was performed.

Grime joined the faculty at Royal Holloway, University of London as Lecturer in Composition in 2010. Also in 2010, the BBC commissioned Everyone Sang to celebrate the BBC Scottish Symphony's seventy-fifth anniversary. Starting in 2011, Grime spent four years as associate composer to the Hallé, which also recorded her first portrait CD, Night Songs, for NMC. From 2016–18 she was the Wigmore Hall Composer in Residence. In addition to commissioning other works, the Wigmore shared a co-commission of Grime's Aviary Sketches with New York's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She currently teaches at the Royal Academy of Music where in 2018 she was appointed Professor of Composition.

The late Oliver Knussen was a great champion of Grime, presenting her music at Tanglewood and premiering several works, including Cold Spring (2009) and the Piano Concerto (2017) with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Cold Spring was commissioned by the Sue Knussen Trust, created in memory of the composer-conductor's wife; further testament to his support. The piece is exemplary within Grime's earlier catalogue, combining the variegated textures, scintillating rhythms and virtuosic solos that distinguish her orchestral writing. Cold Spring was performed at the 2015 BBC Proms by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Thierry Fischer, and is on the NMC CD as well.

In 2016 two of Grime's pieces appeared in the BBC Proms, both orchestral compositions based on paintings by Joan Eardley (1921–63). Eardley is best known for landscape paintings of shore scenes in Catterline, a Scottish fishing village where she lived from 1955 until her death. The paintings that serve as ‘starting points’, as the composer calls them, both hang in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, the same city in which the nine-year-old Grime began her oboe studies. Eardley is an artist with whom Grime has been familiar for a long time. The painter's determined work ethic and evocative paintings spoke to Grime both on an artistic level and as a touchstone from her own background and childhood home.

The first of Two Eardley Pictures, Catterline in Winter (2016), inspired by one of the artist's most celebrated paintings, was composed for the BBC Scottish Symphony. The second, Snow, based on another of her best-known landscapes, was written for the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. In 2017 the pieces were recognized with the inaugural Scottish Award for New Music.

While the work for youth orchestra features more coordinated gestures and doublings than the piece for the BBC SSO, both are formidably challenging, requiring athletic solos within the orchestra as well as passages for entire sections to be played in tightly knit counterpoint. Snow is an ideal starting place to observe some of the rhythmic and pitch devices that Grime regularly uses in building her compositions. In addition, it contains a technique that is seldom employed in Grime's music: quotation.

Quotation as Cultural Artifact

It is tenuous to ascribe too much correlation between a visual inspiration and a piece of music, but there are some striking similarities between aspects of Eardley's painting technique and Grime's composing. The paintings are often deliberately coruscated with various materials besides paint (Eardley used both oil and boat-paint): the artist incorporated newspaper, sand, and grasses onto hardboard. Yet the results are deliberate and masterful in their shaping. In her late paintings of impoverished children, Eardley integrated sweet-wrappers and cigarette butts into the texture of the canvasses. Grime's use of musical material in layers, and her penchant for morphing pitch and rhythm into interpenetrating variations, displays similar craftsmanship, interweaving initially disparate elements into a multifaceted whole.

Another way in which Grime demonstrates her own Scottish cultural background is by importing and, for the most part, layering over, a piece of traditional music, a Bothy ballad called ‘The Scranky Black Farmer’. It serves as a musical sweet-wrapper or scrap of newspaper that can be overlaid with richly textured brushstrokes, and in a handout Grime made for a recent masterclass she shows several different ways in which this material is deployed. Example 1, taken from the handout, shows the ballad and a second line that Grime uses to harmonize it. The only time the ballad's melody appears in toto is in the piccolo at rehearsal U, centred around G#, the significance of which will be revealed presently.

Example 1: The Black Scranky Farmer (traditional Bothy Ballad) Harmonization: Grime (reprinted with kind permission of Helen Grime).

The tune and its harmonization are used to derive much of the material for the Eardley pieces. In addition, another Scottish inflection is found in both pieces: highly ornamented pibroch melodies. Derived from the tune and its harmonization are a set of trichords that also includes transpositions of the aforementioned material (Example 2). All of these appear at strategic places in the piece. The pentachords and hexachords described below, which are the overarching superstructure of the harmony, are all derived from combinations of the trichords. Indeed, the composer indicated to the author that virtually all the material is derived from the melody, its harmonization, and pibroch fragments. Grime also creates a ground from the ballad and harmonization that appears in several sections of Snow (see Example 3), including the opening in the E-flat clarinet and at Rehearsal B in oboe and trumpet (both transposed up a twelfth). Note the split intervals in the harmonization, to which we will return presently.

Example 2: Trichords in Snow (reprinted with kind permission of Helen Grime).

Example 3: Ground and harmony derived from Snow (reprinted with kind permission of Helen Grime).

Interpenetration and Stratification

Much of the material that structures Snow’s formal design appears in the opening. Marked ‘Bright, joyous’, multiple rhythmic gestures overlap: triplet quavers in the flutes and oboes, an upward semiquaver flourish in the clarinets doubled by celesta, sustained breves in the brass and first violins, and repeated crotchets in the second violins. The triplets and semiquavers almost immediately interpenetrate, making a hybridized line that combines them into flurries of activity.

The pitch palette is split among various harmonic identities. These are stratified into different layers, a hallmark of Grime's compositional approach. The breves combine an F-sharp major chord divided between horns and the topmost divisi of the first violins, while the rest of the brass and strings play a G–D open fifth. All of this is underpinned by a low A♭ in the tuba and pizzicato double bass. In the faster linear passages, two synthetic scales are deployed. The opening gesture in the winds overlays a C half-diminished seventh chord and a G dominant seventh chord (omitting the fifth). Thereafter the lower half of the motive articulates a pentachord from the C Dorian mode (a scale found in the ballad) and the upper outlines another modal segment, the first five notes of G Lydian (derived from the harmonization): thus, tune and accompaniment are inverted. At first, the A–C# dyad is emphasized to make a split tenth with the A# in the horns and a minor ninth against the tuba's A♭. Later, the B–C#–D trichord (see Example 2) takes over as both harmonic and melodic elements. Placed alongside the G–D vertical, it makes G sound as a more explicit pitch centre. The violin divisi sustain a minor second, a treble register C#–D that, along the F#–G dyad and the A–B♭, creates a minor second weighted hexachord (this shares trichords with the pentachords that Grime used to derive the ground – see Example 3). The linear and harmonic pentachords and the harmonic hexachord provide a superstructure for the piece. Another structuring element is the positioning of G#/A♭, which, as we shall see, moves from bass pedal to inner voice to melodic centre.

The significance of the G#/A♭ is multifaceted, but primarily based on the use of pibroch melodies. In recent times, bagpipes are tuned quite high, around A4 = 470 Hz. Thus, the lowest note of the bagpipe's chanter, G3, virtually sounds as an A♭3. In addition, the lowest note in Grime's harmonization of ‘The Black Skranky Farmer’ is also an A♭3. It is no surprise that A♭ appears in various other contexts and registers, imparting an alternately centric and sometimes disruptive harmonic presence. As discussed, the only appearance of the ballad in its entirety, played by the piccolo, is centred on G#. Just as the droning lower A♭s evoke the instrument, it seems likely that the high register in which the tune shows up is an evocation of the bagpipe's chanter.

The collections also undergo traditional permutational processes, such as transposition and inversion; these are often used to reposition previously articulated pitches to allow them to be pitch centres instead of subordinate notes. For example, leading into rehearsal B, the pitch material is transposed to allow A♭ and A, found in an angular solo line doubled by oboe and trumpet, to take on the role of prevalent minor second. This also allows A♭, which started as a bass note and then moved to the middle register, to be the onset of a strong soprano register melody. Once again, the split tenth of A–B♭ (previously spelled A#) ambiguates the context of the sustained F#.

The A♭ continues to remain a formidable presence in various registers throughout the piece. At Rehearsal L, marked ‘hushed, distant’, A♭ now reasserts itself, forming the crux of a melodic line in D-flat major that is then ambiguated by another split interval – this time a major seventh – with the introduction of A in the bass.

Despite its presence throughout the piece, A♭ is not Snow’s ultimate destination. At the piece's conclusion, Rehearsal Z, a familiar juxtaposition, G♭–B♭, this time put into the bass register, appears alongside a C–G fifth in the trombones. Another interval from the opening, the C#–D dyad, also transposed down, appears in the upper register of the bass trombone and tuba. Strings and harp include two different collections: a whole-tone segment (G, B, C#, and D#) as well as a chromatic one (B♭, B, C, and D♭), with C appearing in octaves at the very close. A constellation of chromatic notes with C seeming to be its centre, but with G♭ and then B♭ serving as bass notes, concludes the piece in something of a bitonal fashion. It is worth noting that just prior to this last section, a descending white-note diatonic segment in the double bass strongly articulates C, so the battle between C and F#/G♭ is also waged in that register. Thus, similar collections to those found in the Snow’s opening, but in a very different registral context, form an ending that is emblematic of Grime's stratified approach to pitch material.

Interpenetration also remains an important element at the piece's close. First appearing in the harp in Snow’s opening, a semiquaver pattern of single and paired pitches, each interspersed by rests, returns and is expanded to encompass both strings and harp. The final rhythmic gesture combines both of the ones heard at the outset of Snow, morphing the triplet quavers into tapering triplet semiquavers, each followed by a sustained note. This rhythmic passage has another connection: it appears in the opening of Catterline in Winter. Thus, its reappearance connects the two pieces, bringing the music full circle.

Self-similarity

Self-similarity is a mathematical term, famously used by Benoit Mandelbrot in his research on fractal geometry. A number of post-tonal composers, ranging from Charles Wuorinen to Per Nørgård, have used the idea of fractals to explicate a means of organisation in which small pieces of material are replicated in both detailed and larger segments to create compositions. This idea is particularly resonant in pieces that inhabit well known formal designs in unconventional ways.

Composed for Malin Broman and the Swedish Radio Orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding, Helen Grime's Violin Concerto (2016) has a traditional three-movement design. Many twentieth-century pieces in the concerto or symphonic mould take their starting point – a motive or harmonic sequence – as organizing material. In the opening of Grime's concerto, however, there is only a whiff of the piece's generating material, hereafter described as a four-note cell (the composer's preferred term), embedded in an angular melody that passes in a flash. Instead of a recognizable presentation of the cell at the outset, the composer treats it as a kind of Matryoshka doll. She builds the entire piece from the solo violin motive in the concerto's central movement; specifically, the four-note cell D♭–B♭–C–A♭, from which much of the rest of the piece is derived (see Example 4). Note that, in its first iteration in the score, the D♭–B♭ dyad is reordered; this soon changes.

Example 4: Violin Concerto opening and first significant appearance of four-note cell, composed by Helen Grime, copyright 2016 Chester Music. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.

The cell is presented both melodically and harmonically: in transposition, inversion, augmentation, diminution; extended, and bifurcated into its constituent dyads as material for harmonies or sequences. In places the interval widths are also expanded to be two fourths in a row instead of two thirds, but with similar rhythmic profiles to allow for their recognition as derivations (Ralph Shapey called this technique ‘interval perversion’, to distinguish it from more traditional operations).

In diatonic contexts, one could evaluate the four-note cell in two ways. In major, it could be scales degrees 1–6–7–5; but Grime never harmonizes the cell in a manner suggestive of major tonality; this possibility may be discarded. If instead one presumes that B♭ is an important pitch centre that behaves as a kind of minor tonic, albeit one in a very chromatic context, then the dyadic framework shifts. The first dyad forms scale degrees 3–1 in a tonic minor chord, while the second dyad can be seen to function as a kind of ♭VII or minor dominant segment, which we find in pieces derived from the natural minor scale: the whole cell would then be scale degrees 3–1–2–♭7. This supposition is sometimes, though by no means uniformly, supported by harmonies that surround presentations of the cell.

Heading too down far the path of diatonic relationships will, however, send one astray in the analysis of the concerto. Transpositions of the cell frequently move to pitch centres that are quite distant from diatonic relationships. In the most prevalent instance, the cell appears in several places starting on E (E, C#, D#, B), a tritone axial relationship to B♭ that stands in contrast to traditional diatonic harmony. What appears to be more important than the motive's quasi-tonal implications is its deployment in self-similar ways, and the various permutations and contexts in which this property is used. This is underscored by the way in which the piece departs. Instead of ending with a strong cadence delineating a final pitch centre or collection, there is a flurry of activity. Suddenly, and with chromatic flourishes of multiple, simultaneously presented, transpositional levels of the motive, the concerto practically leaps from the stage. It is also worth noting that the last two intervals in the low register, reiterated double stops in the double basses on E♭–G and G–B, employ none of the notes of the original four-note cell. In addition, both intervals are major thirds: the cell's second dyad. A connection to earlier can be found: G–B is also the dyad with which the first movement is concluded. Thus, the concerto's self-similarity needn't include a tonal or motivic reference point, or even a permutation of the entire four-note cell; it is also replicated on the dyadic level. All of these facets of the pitch language demonstrate the thorough way in which Grime works out details large and small to create a consummately organic whole.

Solo versus Ensemble

Premiered by Huw Watkins with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the Piano Concerto has something of an ensemble-based design and is cast in a traditional three movement structure. Like Carter and Birtwistle, Grime uses placement of ensemble members and instrumental characters to delineate various sections of the piece, allowing it to take on a narrative component.

At the concerto's opening the piano resides in a layer of activity alongside pitched percussion and harp, creating a sort of super-percussion instrument from which the principal musical material unfolds. The piano then takes off on in treble register solo passages that will later form the music used in the cadenza. These are repeatedly juxtaposed with the percussion and harp, creating a Stravinskian tableau of sectional slices. The two parts of this layer conjoin once again, punctuated by increasingly insistent crotales attacks. At the marking ‘Bright, with energy’, a layer of woodwind flourishes is added. This music in turn alternates with the piano/percussion layer, with an extended flute and clarinet duet taking a turn before a Poco meno mosso section brings the two layers back into juxtaposition.

The wind duo then moves to the back of the stage, continuing to alternate with the piano and percussion until the music again slightly slows down and at last overlays all the constituent parts in a chromatically saturated, vivacious section. It concludes with considerable syncopation in the winds against repeating demisemiquaver arpeggiations in the piano. Also found at this section's conclusion is the belated entrance of sustained strings. Violin and cello take up the next passage, marked ‘Distant, austere’, with gentle, dovetailing filigrees, accentuating C#s an octave apart. The duet ends with a minor second saturated hexachord (G#–A–B♭–B–C#–D) that is a more compact cousin to the one employed in Snow. The buoyant winds and ostinato piano/percussion material return. As these layers build in dynamic, they are underlaid with soft sustained string chords. Gradually, the softer dynamic prevails, with the percussion articulating progressively softer chords, the piano lines fragmenting and also moving into the realm of pp, and the strings supplying hushed sul tasto trills to conclude the first movement in veiled fashion.

The piano opens the second movement with a two-voice passage in rhythmic unison that sits lower than its previous iteration (at the meno mosso section of the first movement). After a brief introduction, the piano part begins to spread out. It is joined by alto flute and clarinet, playing a brisk heterophonic line. The winds break up into overlapping angular lines, similar to their interaction in the previous movement, while the piano's two-voice line crescendos to ff. In the next section marked ‘Poco agitato’, the piano returns to treble register filigrees (again, derived from the first movement), cross-cut with the duo. Tremolando strings, vibraphone echoes of the piano, and harp chords all contribute to the proceedings in the most rousing tutti yet of the piece. Essentially, all of the instrumental characters in their various rhythmic roles have coalesced. The piano's duo thickens to four-voice chords, the flutist switches from alto back to C flute, continuing the duo interplay with the clarinet but in a much higher register. Finally, six-voice piano chords, fiercely articulated, and a thunderous low D♭, bring us to the piece's cadenza. Now on three staves, the piano continues its virtuosic treble register runs, punctuated by ff sustained bass notes. The other parts respond by fragmenting and once again becoming hushed, with the strings echoing the piano's initial two-voice passage, ceding the stage to the soloist whose own line, while retaining dynamic intensity, is sliced into successively smaller fragments until the movement's close, a brief section marked ‘Calmo, lontano’.

The final movement begins at a quicker pace, with the piano playing a fff gesture that continues the cadenza material. Once again, it is accompanied by the entire ensemble, but the dynamic weighting of the various instruments is stratified: f pizzicato strings, dyads and trichords on the vibraphone played p (with its motor on slow), and a ppp wind duo, now alto flute and bass clarinet and in correspondingly lower registers. The latter move quickly move to match the piano's dynamic intensity, with sforzando attacks.

Dropping the cadenza music for a time, the soloist plays ppp trills that are offset by animated playing, and a fortissimo climax, in the winds. Meanwhile percussion and harp, the instruments previously associated with the piano, now form a new grouping with the strings that alternates with the piano/wind interactions. Cadenza material then returns, intercutting with trills. From here to the end of the piece, there is an overall accumulation of activity, inhabited by material that is derived from the preceding music, interrelated in different ensemble contexts. Shifting dynamics and the passing of gestures from one heterogenous grouping to another cause the piece to take on a kaleidoscopic effect. Rather than building to a sustained climax or another extended cadenza, the concerto finishes with a mercurial flourish.

Grime's voice is a strongly individual one and the Piano Concerto is certainly no exception. The character-based interactions of instruments and groupings are, however, at least somewhat suggestive of Elliott Carter's treatment of instruments as players in a drama. It is in comparing the relationship between soloist and ensemble that we can see how Grime's voice is distinct. Instead of a concerto in which the soloist is cast as a single man/woman against a large overarching force, such as the Cold War narrative of Carter's Piano Concerto, or the soloist taking on outsized import, drowning out the ensemble, as one finds in Carter's Dialogues, in Grime's Piano Concerto she casts the soloist in a third role, as an individual trying to navigate relationships with different groups or strata within society. Much in the way that we negotiate the challenges and opportunities of societal interaction, Grime allows the pianist to move between moments of individual agency and others in which the accommodation of differences moves into focus.

In the three pieces encountered here, different facets of Grime's work have been highlighted. What brings them all together is the composer's brilliant sense of colour, both timbral and harmonic, and the strongly etched and unerringly paced rhythmic profile that her music, no matter how contrapuntally varied, embodies. As we have seen, she has a vivid imagination that is spurred on by a plethora of sources, visual art, folk song, geography and culture among them. It is exciting to contemplate where her imagination and formidable technique will take Grime next.