New music for soprano saxophone and piano
McKenzie Sawers Duo Jackson l Iles l Fitkin l Turnage l Bryars
Notes on the music
The Coral Sea
New music for soprano saxophone and piano
McKenzie Sawers Duo Sue McKenzie saxophone Ingrid Sawers piano
24-bit
Piano: Steinway Model D, 1995, no 527910
Piano technician: Norman W. Motion
Page turners: Anna Jones, Frances Cooper
Saxophone technician: Ruth Prowse
Performer photography © Marc Marnie
As a relative newcomer to the Western instrumentarium, the saxophone inhabits an intriguing position, seemingly able to be at once a symbol of otherness and an essential part of the sound-world of what we think of as contemporary ‘classical’ music. It’s worth briefly tracing the story back to its beginnings. After the development of the instrument in the midnineteenth century by Belgian instrument-maker and clarinettist Adolphe Sax, the members of the saxophone family found their earliest home in military marching bands in France and Belgium. To European concert audiences in the early 1900s the instrument must have seemed a real curiosity in works such as Debussy’s Rhapsodie for alto saxophone and piano (1901, later orchestrated). Indeed, perhaps also something of an oddity for composers themselves: Debussy could not disguise his indifference to the instrument while struggling to fulfil this particular commission, comparing it unfavourably in almost every respect to the clarinet.
two tenors and one baritone saxophone. The work is, in biographer Eric Walter White’s opinion, ‘the most ambitious and most successful of his various flirtations with jazz’.
Cover photograph © Andrew Smith, Cuba Gallery
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
When the instrument did begin to find its way more regularly into the work of ‘classical’ composers, it often bore the traces of its life outside the concert hall. Milhaud, Ibert, Stravinsky and others were attracted to the saxophone after hearing its use in early jazz bands, the instrument having found its way into Dixieland-era ensembles by way of dance bands and marching bands. Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto (1945) for solo clarinet and jazz ensemble, composed for Woody Herman and his band, utilises two altos,
Both the saxophone’s jazz heritage and its more classical conception as a single-reed instrument related to the clarinet may be heard to inform the music on this disc; but the identity of the instrument as it appears here is also strongly shaped by developments in the second half of the twentieth century associated with the breakdown of ‘classical’ music as a clearly distinct category –or at least, with the loss of some of its previously identifying features. So in the 1960s we see the American minimalist composers Terry Riley (himself an accomplished saxophonist) and Philip Glass looking to models from popular musics and as a result using saxophones and electric keyboards in their music, which, moreover, was often written for performance by groups in which they themselves were involved. Younger English composers with similar interests, such as Michael Nyman and Steve Martland, followed suit when assembling their own performing ensembles (or ‘bands’, as they were revealingly called in both these cases). And in the Netherlands in the 1970s, groups such as Orkest De Volharding had taken the ‘street band’ as the starting point for creating their wind-drenched sound, which, naturally, heavily featured all types of saxophones. All these composers and ensembles were seeking to furnish their sound from outside the normal parameters of classical concert music,
and as the possibilities have continued to broaden then previously marginal instruments such as the saxophone have crossed over and have become a significant presence. There is also now a particularly fast-growing repertoire for the saxophone family’s very own chamber grouping –the saxophone quartet, which usually comprises a soprano, an alto, a tenor and a baritone.
To return for the moment to jazz, most of the composers featured here have at some point in their oeuvre referenced the language of jazz – some more overtly than others – and, in some cases, its procedures and structures. Nikki Iles is closest to the field in practice, being a renowned jazz pianist and teacher as well as a composer. Her composing and performing work frequently overlap – she has led various groups under her name and has recently been writing for a new ten-piece ensemble – while another significant compositional activity in her recent career has been the ongoing creation of a series of graded exams for jazz horns and jazz flute with the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. Alma Venus was one of her first commissioned works, composed in 1996 for Rob Buckland and Peter Lawson. Although it is entirely written out (only twice relinquishing control of metre in sections marked ‘Freely’ in the score), Iles manages to convey the spontaneity of a relaxed improvisation; the mood is languid, the melodic lines lithe and supple, and the music moves effortlessly through a series of short sections, never lingering for too long. She
keeps the soprano saxophone generally in the lower registers of the instrument, an important contributing factor in sustaining the piece’s nocturnal mood.
The saxophone has been an essential ingredient in the sound-world of Mark-Anthony Turnage since the beginnings of his music in the early 1980s. Saxophonist Martin Robertson was a fellow student at the Royal College of Music in London; composer and performer have been close collaborators ever since, and Robertson’s distinctive sound can be heard on several recordings of Turnage’s music. The composer’s worklist reveals several important projects with this performer, including a saxophone concerto, Your Rockaby, written in 1994, and an important soloistic role in Blood on the Floor, Turnage’s major nine-movement work from the 1990s for solo jazz quartet and orchestra. Blood on the Floor is arguably one of the most successful marriages of jazz and classical music ever written, its success partly down to the way in which Turnage expertly keeps both streams constantly in play while seamlessly shifting the foreground – and differing degrees of foreground – from one to the other. In its most extreme form this means that he deploys jazz improvisation at a number of key points in the work, a strategy that places great faith in his collaborators, including Robertson. The two short solo elegies heard here (written separately at a distance of five years apart and put together as a pair at a later date) both have a very personal connection with the saxophonist:
the first, Trier, was composed in memory of Stephen Trier, Robertson’s teacher at the RCM, while the second is a memorial to his mother, Meryl, written the day after she died and played at her funeral. Both pieces are melodies with typical Turnage fingerprints: Trier is, by turn, playful and dark, the music growing out of an initial, nagging two-bar phrase. Memorial is haunting, bittersweet and infused with melancholy – a beautifully crafted melodic line.
Like Turnage, Gavin Bryars has collaborated with a number of celebrated jazz musicians –composing works for bassist Charlie Haden and guitarist Bill Frisell, for instance – and in his early twenties worked extensively as a free improviser, performing with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley in the trio Joseph Holbrooke. Improvised music was, in fact, Bryars’ first professional musical activity; his own instrument is the double bass. His 1978 work My First Homage is a beautiful tribute to the piano playing of Bill Evans and, more specifically, to the trio that Evans led from 1959 to 1961. But the composer’s own programme note for the piece makes it clear that while My First Homage celebrates music that was once very important to him, it also served ‘in part to exorcise my repudiation of jazz’, Bryars having developed in the meantime what he calls ‘an almost pathological aversion to jazz and to other forms of improvised music’. Five years after My First Homage, the jazz saxophonist Jan Steele commissioned Allegrasco, which, like a number of Bryars’ works, exists in more than one
instrumentation. The original score is for soprano saxophone and piano but from the outset the piece also had connections with the clarinet, Bryars having had in mind Ferruccio Busoni’s Elegie (1921) for clarinet and piano and the playing style of its first performer, the clarinettist Edmondo Allegra – hence the punning title. Later, Bryars would allow the solo part to be played by clarinet, as well as making alternative scorings of the accompaniment for string orchestra and for a small chamber ensemble of percussion, piano, electric guitar, violin and double bass (the composer’s own ensemble). But the original scoring also preserves a connection with Bryars’ first opera, Medea, whose orchestration included two saxophones (serving there, Bryars himself has suggested, as substitute oboes) and to which Allegrasco relates much as the Elegie related to Busoni’s opera Doktor Faust
The worklist on Graham Fitkin’s website divides his compositions into categories in the traditional way – orchestral, large ensemble, vocal etc. – but also includes an additional division marked simply ‘Saxophone’. One of his earliest explorations of saxophone sonority was Stub (1991), the first of his two saxophone quartets. It was one of a number of early works where Fitkin felt compelled to work in slabs of single timbre: four saxophones, two pianos, four marimbas or six pianos were typical instrumentations for him in the late 1980s and early 1990s, producing a uniformity of timbre which Fitkin felt let the structure or process of the work articulate itself,
without clouding the issue with colouristic distraction. Clearly, this approach came both from his love of the music of the early American minimalists and also perhaps from living for a few years in the Netherlands, where he undertook study with Louis Andriessen after completing his first degree at Nottingham University. Latterly he has worked a lot more with mixed ensembles, and has composed a number of works featuring the saxophone both as a solo instrument and also in small chamber combinations. He has led a number of versions of his own performing ensemble over the past two decades, and the last two incarnations of this have featured saxophones – two of them in the latest line-up, functioning alongside a trumpeter as something resembling a jazz horn section. Gate (2001) is a driven, toccatalike piece, which takes a piano trill as its starting point. Glass (1998) spins a lyrical soprano line over a chordal accompaniment, and its simplicity may surprise those listeners who only know Fitkin’s music as muscular and rhythmic.
Gabriel Jackson is well known as a composer of choral music but less so for his equally fine instrumental music, a situation that needs rectifying. He has composed two saxophone quartets, Rhythm and Blues (1993) and LM-7: Aquarius (2006); The Coral Sea for soprano saxophone and piano was composed between these two works, in 1996–97, although unusually for Jackson it was revised, nearly a decade later. It was commissioned for Martin Robertson and the pianist Antony Gray, who gave the first
performance at a concert in the Tate Gallery, London (now Tate Britain) – an appropriate venue for the premiere of a piece that finds its distant origins in a photograph entitled ‘The Coral Sea’ by the late American artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Several of Jackson’s compositions have referenced the visual arts as a starting point, but in this case the referentiality goes one step further, to produce a piece of music ‘about’ a literary work which is a posthumous eulogy to Mapplethorpe and his art. In 1996 the poet and rock musician Patti Smith, who had been a close friend of the artist, published a prose poem also called The Coral Sea, which consists of three main sections – ‘Prologue’, ‘Voyage’ and ‘Litany’. Jackson uses these titles for the movements of his piece but he also follows Smith in the microconstruction of the larger sections; ‘Voyage’ and ‘Litany’ are divided up into the same number of subsections as the corresponding parts of the poem, a typically Jacksonian structural conceit.
© 2013 Laurence Crane
Laurence Crane is a composer living in London, where he also works as an editor for music publishers and as a teacher of composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has written music for ensembles such as Plus-Minus, Apartment House and the Ives Ensemble and for pianists including Michael Finnissy, whose CD of his complete piano music was released in 2008. He is currently working on a piece for contrabass clarinet and eight players, for the Norwegian ensemble Cikada.
Sue McKenzie is a graduate of the Royal College of Music (studying with Kyle Horch), a past winner of the British Clarinet and Saxophone Society Young Performers Competition and a Royal Overseas League Woodwind Finalist; she also studied with Dr Eugene Rousseau at the Hamamatsu International Wind Festival (Japan). She has regularly been an invited solo recitalist at the British and World Saxophone Congress. As one of Scotland’s leading contemporary saxophonists, she has given UK and Scottish premieres of many new works for saxophone.
Sue has performed in Celebr8 with Scottish Ballet, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, as a soloist with the National Saxophone Choir of Great Britain, and at the St Albans International Organ Festival. She has appeared at Celtic Connections, Womad Festival, Cambridge Folk Festival, Glastonbury Festival, on BBC Alba, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Scotland, and in concerts in Iceland, Greece,
France, Belgium, Ireland, Spain and Germany. She has also performed and recorded with US-based Unknown Prophets, James Ross (Greentrax Records), Rumba Caliente and Salsa Celtica. As a jazz performer Sue has appeared at the Glasgow International Jazz Festival, Manchester Jazz Festival and Edinburgh International Jazz Festival, and has recorded with the Haftor Medbøe Group and supported Bill Frisell and the Esbjörn Svensson Trio.
Sue is the leader of the Scottish Saxophone Ensemble, who recently released their debut album Mrs Malcolm with Largo Music. In 2009 she was awarded a grant by Katherine McGillivray’s Get a Life Fund which enabled her to study in the US with Lynn Klock at the University of Massachusetts as well as taking lessons in improvisation and composition with David Murray (World Saxophone Quartet, Paris) and David Binney (New York). In 2012 Sue was the Assistant Director of the 16th World Saxophone Congress. She is also in demand as an educator, teaching at St Andrews University, Edinburgh Napier University, Sheffield Music Academy and St Mary’s Music School.
Ingrid Sawers was educated at Edinburgh University, where she studied piano with Peter Evans and Alexandra Andrievsky. Subsequent tuition was undertaken either privately or in masterclasses and seminars with Roger Vignoles, Imogen Cooper (IMS Prussia Cove), Paul Hamburger and Malcolm Martineau.
As a performer her special interests lie in accompaniment and chamber music, and she has performed throughout the UK and in Ireland, Canada, Austria, Malta and Denmark. Previous recordings include works with the ensemble One Voice and music by Andrew Keeling. She has a longstanding commitment to new music and has given Scottish premieres of pieces by many composers including Thomas Adès, Graham Fitkin, Martin Butler and Richard Causton.
Additionally Ingrid has a thriving practice as a teacher and coach, has been a guest coach at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, has given masterclasses and workshops at various UK universities, and travels worldwide as an examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.
McKenzie Sawers Duo are passionate about presenting new music to new audiences. Encompassing classical, jazz, world and folk music they have given Scottish and UK premieres by contemporary composers including Gavin Bryars, Graham Fitkin, Joe Duddell, Chick Lyall and Gabriel Jackson. Dedicated to commissioning and writing new music, performances have taken them to concert halls, theatres, stately homes, schools, artists’ studios, salons and even a former Victorian asylum.
www.mckenziesawersduo.com
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– The Scotsman, April 2008
‘The young musicians of the Fell Clarinet Quartet mightily impress with their recital of 20th- and 21st-century works’
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‘deceptively simple sounds whose complexity is revealed in the aftertaste … jazz riffs on the double bass against a distinctly Caledonian drone, hypnotic and insistent. Whenever I hear Bryars’ music, I want to hear more’
– Norman Lebrecht, www.scena.org, November 2009some superb singing from the chorus. “The many rend the skies with loud applause,” they sing. And so they should’ – The Observer, February 2011
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Nicholas Wearne organ
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‘On this outstanding CD, driven by scorchingly focused performances from the Edinburgh Quartet, the impact of the four pieces is colossal … Each of the composers is at his and her peak, and the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’
– The Herald, February 2007
