With the work of Belgian composer Maya Verlaak, there are a number of questions to consider before we begin to think about the forms and sounds that make up her latest album, All English Music Is Greensleeves. There's the playfully provocative title – more on that later. Before that, though, there's the question of formats, and how best to consider music wedded so specifically to one context when it appears outside of it.
For those unfamiliar with the way Another Timbre operates, an interview with Verlaak which accompanies the release is available online. I would recommend the interview as not just supplementary reading to the album, but essential for grasping elements of the compositions that might go unnoticed on both first and repeat listens.Footnote 1
The compositions presented on Greensleeves begin with an analysis of a given context (a place, action, etiquette or convention). There, they are met by a subversion, and a piece is formed out of that relationship. These subversions are often structured as games, where dialogues occur pre-context and new context, live and pre-recorded, composer and performer (or in this case, co-creator). That subversive tendency errs on the side of constructive reform rather than revolution, involving internal reversals or contestations rather than dealing in aesthetics of refusal and denial. The subjects of the subversions are idiosyncratic, with multifaceted results, variously involving performers playing solely from musical analyses, dialogue with pre-recorded elements and pieces involving pitches that make musicians stop playing rather than start.
If such subversions are treated as internal and constructive, in order for them to ‘work’ an onlooker has to be able to identify both the before and the after – the subject and the switch. Or do they? There's an obvious challenge when reviewing music that is presented and experienced in a totally different manner to the context it was born into and which it relies on. But assessing how the musical experience changes as it passes through various technological lenses of mediation ushers in many of the same questions we've all encountered in the past year. If live concerts as we know them are impossible, what replaces them? Do we try to replicate them via digital means, and if so, which features are residual, which change and which are discarded? Are any new features added by the change in circumstances? And which extraneous conventions remain?
From standard-fare orchestral CDs to studio-produced pop albums, most recordings happily gloss over such questions. But their creators aren't usually as reliant on specific contexts for construction and delivery as Verlaak's music is. Putting music that deconstructs, riffs and comments on a certain context on to a CD brings with it a whole set of new questions. What stays and what gets left behind as the music is mediated through a different experiential lens is just the beginning. Do we hear the subversive process in absentia and appreciate it as such? Is the act of preparing an album for CD, in full knowledge of an attainment gap, an act of subversion in itself?
The best example of is the title track, performed by the assorted forces of Apartment House. Opening with a cluster of warped strings, there are flickers of that subversive tendency – the detuned flattened seventh, the occasional dotted rhythm. It goes deeper than a simple twisted theme, though, as tension develops between live material and pre-recorded sounds; the decision of which pitches trigger the pre-recorded version of the piece is given to an automated computer. The strings of Apartment House conjure something almost viol-like here, the tone extending across the ensemble into blemishes from trumpet, horn and melodica, and there's something quietly genteel about the hazy fragment of the Greensleeves theme that closes the piece.
The work forms the centrepiece around which the rest of the album is arranged. Two Formations surround Greensleeves, for Sarah (Saviet) and Mark (Knoop). All three pieces involve conflict between multiple, ultimately irresolvable, levels, but the characters of each are quite different. Formation de Mark is an austere exercise with a macabre, torturous edge, as a singer, untrained, vocalises a succession of pitches separated by intervals they have no conception of. A computerised voice retorts, telling them which note they were actually singing, and Knoop tries to navigate a route towards parity.
Resolution seems a much more achievable prospect in Formation de Sarah, as Saviet attempts to find a route towards matching her violin sounds with the pitches of a nail violin and the cutting sine wave. Yet, what thwarts her are not the conventions of technical ability (as is the overwhelming feeling of Formation de Mark) but a computerised score reacting to her every move, adding bends and curves that complicate the route to her goal.
The album achieves a focused simplicity through complex means. However, sometimes the sustained simplicity of the soundworld becomes a little trying, especially when divorced from the context it subverts. When pieces like Lark, an exposition of the sentimentality of childhood, and Song and Dance (subtitled ‘An excessively elaborate effort to explain or justify’), which swaps written music for performers playing from musical analyses, both result in a sonic simplicity, it becomes easy to forget the varied means by which they are created in the midst of a persistent earnestness. But it's this earnestness that allows a situation whereby something quite radical can happen – when it's not entirely clear whether the joke is on the performers or not, it's best to approach the whole situation in jest…
The inspiration for the title All English Music Is Greensleeves comes from a conversation between Verlaak and her former teacher in The Hague, Gilius Van Bergeijk. ‘What they do, basically, is rewrite Greensleeves all over again’, said Van Bergejik of the UK music scene. Throughout the album and in the title track, Verlaak is reluctant to reduce the Greensleeves idea to an artefact, opting for a subversion of the less bottleable ‘living tradition’. As we continue to live that out that tradition (in many corners uncontested), the statement poses some interesting questions for the international future of the UK's wider musical community.
Recent debates between the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and MPs in the House of Commons were accompanied by musicians from Elton John to Roger Taylor proclaiming in the national press the importance of restriction-free touring in Europe to musical development. But who is shouting for the rights of non-EU (and, indeed, non-UK) musicians to work and play in this country? Without people willing to stand up against British exceptionalism (and in support of internationalism) our wider musical experiences threaten to move closer towards those songs of old, endlessly reflecting inwards to try and save our own backs in an increasingly unsympathetic artistic environment. All English Music Is Greensleeves serves as a timely reminder that traditions can and should be constructively subverted, especially when they threaten to become more ingrained than ever.
