Philip Venables

A composer of ferocious dramatic instincts
— Alex Ross

Tag: Numbers 96–100

  • Profile by Tayyab Amin for hcmf//

    Profile by Tayyab Amin for hcmf//

    I was very fortunate to be featured this year at hcmf// across three concerts of my most recent works: Answer Machine Tape, 1987, performed and commissioned by Zubin Kanga; Numbers 81–100, performed and commissioned by Lovemusic; and My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variations, performed and commissioned by Andreas Borregaard. As part of that focus, writer Tayyab Amin wrote a lovely profile for the programme book, which is copied below. Please contact Tayyab here if you would like to license this profile for other uses. The article on the hcmf// website can be seen here.

    Philip Venables’ personal, political storytelling

    Among the most fascinating of contemporary British composers is Philip Venables, whose flair for the theatrical is matched by a subversive sleight of hand that comes inherent to all natural storytellers. Recurrent themes across their works include politics, sexuality, gender and violence – motifs that do of course intertwine, though more broadly share the quality of relating to whether one lives alongside or against the grain of our society. There are all sorts of tales Venables opts to tell, from maternal memoirs and posthumously performed plays to true-story accounts of runaway teens and the vengeful reflections of world-class boxing athletes. They come in all manner of guises too: operas for adults or for children, site-specific soundworks, concertos and pieces of spoken word. Even shouted word, in some cases.

    Based between Berlin and London, Venables nurtured their career as a composer and collaborative artist for several years before their breakthrough operatic adaptation of late playwright Sarah Kane’s final work, 4.48 Psychosis. Since then, Venables has established a trend of preferred elements to focus on in their compositions: working from texts as source material, immersing audiences in a multi-dimensional experiences, and inflicting or at least channelling a certain sense of violence, for example through how abrupt a work’s components are cut together, interrupting or compounding each other. There’s an intent behind such rhythmic intensity, one that Venables admits to calculating formulae for, transposing compositions from numerical spreadsheets onto musical scores.

    One text Venables is compelled to return to is Simon Howard’s Numbers, first in 2011 and as recent as 2021. These poems traverse seemingly vivid memories that devolve into onomatopoeic fervour, streams that wander to the brink and back again. Venables has described them as ‘unfussy, evocative, violent and visceral’ – attributes they look for in music too. These qualities are evident in the setting of these poems of course. Take Numbers 91-95, where the speaker’s account is interrupted by their own sudden outburst as harp, woodblock and flute resist interjecting and lucidity slips from view. The text and music aren’t driven by narrative, but their colour and imagery, the political brutality and fractured hardness of them speaks volumes. We’ll see a comprehensive demonstration of the dynamism of verbal expression as Strasbourg-based new music collective lovemusic perform a selection of works from the Numbers series as part of their programme at hcmf// 2022.

    Venables’ compositions aren’t always written for typical chamber instrumentation – there’s often a multimedia element to their works. Also appearing at this year’s festival is the recent solo piece Answer Machine Tape, 1987. Teaming up with frequent collaborator, dramatist Ted Huffman, as well as software programmer Simon Hendry and innovative pianist Zubin Kanga, Venables devised a work for piano where keystrokes are detected and input to software through MIDI detection and MaxMSP. This transforms pianist into transcriber and annotator, developing an archival, perhaps parasocial storytelling relationship with recorded and projected source material: the answer machine tapes of New York visual artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. These recordings capture the last days of Wojnarowicz’s former lover and close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, where the banal snippets of everyday life in a setting of artistic vibrancy and gay expression are loomed over by the onset AIDS crisis. Contrast to the technologically mediated interfacing at the crux of this work, Venables presents unflinching intimacy as both invitation and challenge.

    Much like Answer Machine Tape, 1987, the accordion piece Andreas Borregaard is due to perform at hcmf// takes verbatim audio material and negotiates the levels of their directness with their conversational quality. Yet in this composition, titled My favourite piece is the Goldberg Variations, interviews come from the personal life of Borregaard’s mother Susanne to more actively explore the accordionist as storyteller.

    As long as there are stories to be told, Venables will discern new ways to share them in whoever’s voice they can – even if it takes a full reset on creating abstract music following a stint composing for opera. Their role is to challenge both the politic of the status quo and our intrusive storytelling intuit in one fell swoop.

  • numbers 81–85; numbers 96–100

    numbers 81–85; numbers 96–100

    This is the catalogue page for numbers 81–85 and numbers 96–100 (published together).

    numbers 81–85 and numbers 96–100  were commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Musica, festival international des musiques d’aujourd’hui de Strasbourg and Lovemusic.

    The first performance was given by Lovemusic with Grace Durham (mezzo-soprano) on 1st October 2021 at the Cité de la Musique et de la Danse in Strasbourg, as part of Musica, festival international des musiques d’aujourd’hui de Strasbourg. The video above is from a concert by the same performers at Arsenal in Metz in November 2022.

    These pieces may be performed alongside numbers 76–80 and/or numbers 91–95 (both published by Ricordi), in which case they should be performed in sequential order.

    The text for all these pieces comes from Simon Howard’s long-form poem, Numbers (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010).

    Duration

    numbers 81–85: 12 minutes
    numbers 96–100: 8 minutes

    Instrumentation

    Voice (F3 to A5)
    Alto Flute
    Clarinet in A
    Violin
    Viola
    Cello
    Projection (optional but recommended)

    Programme Note

    My relationship with Numbers by Simon Howard began in 2011 when I worked with two poems from the book: numbers 76–80 and numbers 91–95.   Ever since, I had the intention to set more poems from the book, to gradually form a kind of loose ‘meta-piece’ of all 100 stanzas.  The 2011 settings mark the beginning of my explorations of spoken text within my work, and were pivotal pieces for me in that respect.  Ten years later, when the circumstances arose to be able to return to the book, I found that, having spent a decade working primarily with spoken text, I wanted to focus back on musical settings of text.  To remember, if you like, how to compose.  So these two pieces from numbers are just that — my attempt to get back to a more music-led setting of text, while retaining a strong relationship to the structures and ideas in Simon’s work, but hopefully refracted through a musical lens. 

    numbers 81–85 is a series of five episodes, each quite different from the other.  In each episode I’ve tried to distill a feeling or action from the narrative of each stanza, and illustrate it in music.  In numbers 96–100 the fives stanzas are taken as a single form.  The form of text is mirrored through the fractured pronunciation of the words, the overall idea is of a collective meditation.

    Press

    “...which seems to focus the composer’s intention to explore certain pathologies from which our societies suffer. He goes even further with Numbers 91-95, framed by Numbers 81-95 and Numbers 96-100. His music resonates/differs with the words of the poet Simon Howard, clattering forcefully in semantic explosions charged with meaning.” — DNA Magazine (machine translated from French)

    “Grace Durham’s voice is invocative, mysterious, rebellious or nonchalant in the first block [Numbers 81–85], supported by highly refined instrumental textures. The block 96-100 is more homogeneous, inscribed in the very stretched temporality of a collective meditation. From cry to murmur, the powerful yet velvety voice of the English mezzo-soprano proceeds in snatches of phrases and silent spacing over the circular and bewitching movement of the instruments.” — Hémisphèreson (machine translated from French)

    Buy score — available soon

    Hire performance materials — available soon

    [Post Photo: the premiere performance in Strasbourg with Grace Durham and Lovemusic, © Didier Jacquot]

  • Venables plays Bach

    Venables plays Bach

    This is the catalogue page for Venables plays Bach.

    Venables plays Bach is a 42-channel looping sound installation commissioned by Festival d’Automne à Paris for their 2021 Festival, installed in l’Église de Saint Eustache.

    My introduction

    Twenty-five years ago, I learnt to play J.S. Bach’s Prelude in D minor BWV940, and ever since then, almost without exception, I play it every time I sit down at the piano to compose. It is the only piece that I can play from memory, with my poor piano skills, and playing this Prelude is a ritual that I go through every time I sit down to write. Improvisation often grows out of this prelude, from mistakes I make, or repetitions and variations. New music is catalysed from old music. This ritual for me is a way of focusing, shutting out other thoughts, clearing the mind, sparking ideas.  Indeed, versions of Bach’s Prelude have appeared in a number of my pieces (Scene 19 in 4.48 Psychosis; the male chorus in The Schmürz).

    I was asked by Festival d’Automne to make a sound installation for Saint Eustache, and so I decided to try to capture some of this compositional process. For around 50 days I recorded my daily ritual of playing Bach’s Prelude on the digital piano in my studio, complete with my improvisations, my mistakes, my singing, my tangents, my thoughts, improvisations and repetitions, as I sketched out a new piece (also for the Festival d’Automne) for mezzo-soprano and quintet, based on text by the late British poet Simon Howard. Using excerpts from these recordings, I have moulded a kind of ‘meta-composition session’ across 42 speakers in the church. Wander around and you will find small details of different days, but I hope that the whole effect it creates is an honest and reflective meditation on the act of composing, and my personal relationship to this Bach prelude.

    The resulting installation has a very strong relation to the chamber piece numbers 96–100, also commissioned by Festival d’Automne, Festival Musica Strasbourg and Collectif Lovemusic.

    Introduction from the Festival

    Philip Venables got into the habit of starting his composition work by playing Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor BWV 940, which he has known since the age of fourteen and which he plays by heart, sometimes deviating from of the text following an oblique movement which takes in other directions.

    For his installation at the Saint-Eustache Church, the composer recorded himself every day and for several weeks on his electronic keyboard, creating a sort of “audio diary” of the work in progress. The idea of ​​the “making” of the work and the “thinking presence” of the composer are at the center of the process, the playing and the voice of Venables letting “the wanderings of a mind and its music” filter. Thus we can discern in Venables Plays Bach this divergent path which leads to the composition of Numbers 81-85 and 96-100, parts under construction at the time of registration. Around fifty small speakers are distributed in the space of the church, broadcasting the daily recordings in a loop and at low voltage, in a soothing atmosphere conducive to listening and reflection. “Besides the sound experience,” the composer tells us, “the piece explores the depths of my intimate relationship with Bach’s prelude and constitutes a meditation on the act of composing”.

    Technical details

    The installation is a 22-minute loop that can loop indefinitely, depending on technical constraints of the speakers used. In Paris it was installed on 42 small battery-powered speakers. (Zealot S36), each running a single wave file off a micro SD card, and only roughly synchronised by technical staff. There was no unified system to synchronise the speakers. In Paris it ran in 3-hour blocks. Charging, setup, and starting the installation required two staff, as the church was very large.

    In Paris there was an accompanying “conceptual organ performance” that happened on two evenings in admist the sound installation. More details about this performance can be found here.

    The installation lends itself particularly well to very resonant acoustics, like churches. It is also connected closely to the chamber piece numbers 96–100, and would work very well as an accompanying project to a performance of that piece.

    Press

    “Everywhere, the sound is there, it becomes natural, it enters… Then the melody comes as a surprise when it is no longer expected, when the whispers, breaths and voice were taking over. The loudspeakers disappear completely into the vastness of the church… You will not be left unmoved by this intoxicating thirty-minute loop!” — Toute la Culture (machine translated from French)

  • Portrait concerts at Musica Festival and Festival d’Automne announced

    Portrait concerts at Musica Festival and Festival d’Automne announced

    Musica Festival in Strasbourg has just announced its 2021 programme, and I’m delighted to say there will be a portrait concert of my work in the festival on 1st October. The concert will be performed by Lovemusic, with guest artists Grace Durham (mezzo-soprano), Andreas Borregaard (accordion) and Romain Pageard as the host of the evening. The show is called Talking Music, and will feature Klaviertrio im Geiste, Illusions, My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variations and Numbers 91—95 alongside the world premiere of two new settings of Simon Howard’s Numbers: Numbers 81—85 and Numbers 96—100. These new pieces have been commissioned by Musica Festival, Festival d’Automne in Paris, and Lovemusic. Oscar Lozano Pérez will be making video projections and mise-en-espace for the show. Talking Music will be repeated in Paris on 26th October in Theatre de la Ville / Espace Cardin, as part of a larger feature on my work in the Festival d’Automne.

    More information about the concert in Strasbourg is here.

    More information about the concert in Paris is here.