Rolf Hind Composer Portrait Programme

Rolf Hind - A Portrait Sunday 30th September 2018 5pm The Print Room @ The Coronet Notting Hill, London

The Octandre Ensemble presents Way Out East: Three Composer Portraits

Rolf Hind - A Portrait Performed by the Octandre Ensemble Sunday 30th September, 2018 at 5pm The Print Room @ The Coronet, Notting Hill Gate, London

Programme Composer in Conversation: Rolf Hind talks to Christian Mason A Syllabary (2017)

Rolf Hind

The City of Love (2002)

Rolf Hind

Soprano: Lore Lixenberg

King David (2008)

Rolf Hind

Way Out East (2016)

Rolf Hind

Soprano: Lore Lixenberg Three chamber pieces for stage 1. Follow the Leader 2. Varanasi Haiku 3. This is the Cow

Rolf Hind – A Portrait Hind: A Syllabary for Solo voice plus wandering Spring drum (2017) This short piece is the 12th (penultimate) movement of On What Weft Are Woven The Waters, a large scale piece for 16 players which takes as its main point of exploration one of my favourite books: KA by the polymathic Italian writer Roberto Calasso, a book which retells and reconsiders a vast swathe of Hindu and Vedic myth as a huge circular story. It has inspired me for twenty years and been a starting point of many of my pieces.

Claims are made in Hinduism for the magic properties of the sounds of Sanskrit, and in this piece a singer lists those very sounds (the alphabet, or syllabary, because it always contains an implied short aa sound.) As if exploring the space in a ritual, she sends the various sounds out to the audience, and the composition of the sounds uses all the devices and numerology that have run through the larger piece. She treads a line between the precision of the notation, and the moment of freedom, of intuition demanded in making the communal space alive, and readying it to share in a ritual. (RH)

Hind: The City of Love for voice, violin and piano (2002) These three settings of the lyrics of Bihari form a sequence lasting about ten minutes. Like most of my music with voice, they were written with the specific, and amazing, gifts of Lore Lixenberg in mind, along with Zoe Martlew on cello and Dominic Saunders at the piano.

There is also a version with violin.

The poems are intense, haiku-like meditations on love: its craziness, sweetness, and the secret forms it takes. In the last of them, in the sounds of the language of the text (Brij Bhasa, a precursor of modern Hindi) a secret name is hidden. But the work is also very much an instrumental landscape that explores colours that seemed to me redolent of the sounds of Hindi, which I had started to learn a couple of years before I wrote the piece. There are some extended techniques, and widespread vocalising and sound-making, so that the focus of the piece has an alternately confusing, blurred or twisted patina, despite sometimes being very simple.

It is dedicated to my very dear friend Lalita du Perron, who taught me Hindi, and then became so much more. (RH) (Texts for City of Love overleaf.)

City of Love Texts I Chhutana na payyatu chhinaku basi, neha nagara yeha chala Maaryau phiri phiri maariye, khunee phirai khushyaala This is the way of the city of love - once settled for a moment, you cannot leave; The stricken one is struck wherever he turns, the assassin wanders at will II Urati guree lakhi lalana kee a(n)gana a(n)gana maa(n)ha Bauree lau(n) dauree phirati, chhubati chhabeelee chaa(n)ha Seeing the lover’s flying kite, the lady in the courtyard runs about like a a lunatic, touching its lovely shadow III Kyau(n) basiyai kyau(n) nibahiyai, neeti neha pura naa(n)hi Lagaalagee loina karai(n) naahaka mana ba(n)dhi jaa(n)hi How can one dwell or survive the city of love? There is no propriety there; the eyes it is which ensnare, yet hearts are caught unjustly

Hind: King David caravan for clarinet and violin (2008) This short piece for violin and clarinet was written for Stuart KING and DAVID Alberman, and is not by any means an attempt to digest the whole of the Old Testament. It has several episodes increasing in intensity and rhythmic complexity, until it becomes necessary for the players to stamp their feet to show who has the speed.

Like many of my pieces, sometimes unwittingly, it explores a flavour of the east, without specifically adopting techniques or sounds. I think of it as alluding, teasing us with an idea of some kind of folkloric procession, but not one that belongs to any culture known to me. (RH)

Hind: Way Out East for voice, saxophone, percussion and piano (2016) 1. Follow the Leader 2. Varanasi Haiku 3. This Is The Cow My music is sometimes described as meditative, probably because I do meditate, but those who never have done so might be surprised to learn how often brutality, lust, boredom and anger crop up when you sit on the cushion.

The mass-market Western reading of pretty much all Indian classical music is that it’s lovely and relaxing, perhaps because its hard for us to read the encoding of mood from melody and

drone, and it was an eye-opener to me when I began to learn more about the Indian raga system to find a richly catalogued range of mood and subject is covered by it.

The three movements of Way Out East take varying approaches to texts that are by turns nostalgic, brutal and comic.

The first is a song in Burmese, which is heard live only in a scrambled, deconstructed version by the singer, as she plays a game with the roving percussionist. When that game comes to an end, a full version of this song - about a remembered, or imagined idyll of country life - is heard on tape. When I wrote the piece, this seemed an apt response to aspects of what we know about Myanmar. It still does.

Varanasi Haiku, the second song I call a “scena” - it is quite long and developed, with very difficult parts for the three instrumentalists. Its starting point was a haiku I wrote myself. I had spent the day getting from Varanasi to Delhi whilst wearing a hastily constructed nappy to prevent accidents after a night of horrible food poisoning. By the time I got to my destination I was pretty much hallucinating, and wrote this in the middle of the subsequent, sleepless night.

There was a huge distant thunder storm rolling in, and in my mind’s delirious eye I could still see dogs by the Ganges trying to eat hunks of ash that may have once been people.

Dogs eat death ash. They writhe and whimper. Dawn brings Thunder and far muezzins.

‘This Is The Cow’, the third piece, has a text that became famous online. It was originally an Indian student’s anonymous exam essay, replete with wonderful mistakes and strange uses of language that seem to have been through Google Translate and back again. At the same time though it has a lovely sense of tenderness and real affection for the national animal.

I’ve nodded to a formal device that comes from Indian music called a Ti hai - a rhythmic phrase repeated three times that signals a change of section. In this piece, the entire structure is based around this idea, but in 3 levels of speed. (This becomes clear when a second voice enters twice as fast as the first.) The middle section (where the cow is “in the meadow in the grass”) I have called a Shreds with Stretto, which I think/hope may be a new form.

The last two movements were written for Lore Lixenberg and Trio Zoom, who commissioned them. When premiered in Denmark, Lore staged them with some film, and had the extraordinary and powerful idea of showing a cow being led to abattoir during the last movement. I resisted at first. Even though I’m a vegan, I’m not generally polemical in life or music. But there was something necessary and intensifying about it which might be worth bearing in the imagination of the listener. (RH) (Text for ‘This Is The Cow’ overleaf.)

Text for ‘This Is The Cow’ The cow is a successful animal.

Also he is quadrupud, and because he is female, He give milk, but will do so when he is got child.

He is same like God, Sacred to Hindus and useful to man.

But he has got four legs together.

Two are forward and two are afterwards.

His whole body can be utilised for use.

More so the milk. What can it do?

Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth.

Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally.

His motion is slow only because he is of asitudinious species.

Also his other motion is much useful to trees, plants as well as making flat cakes in hand and drying in the sun.

Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating.

Then afterwards she chew with his teeth whom are situated in the inside of the mouth.

He is incessantly in the meadows in the grass.

His only attacking and defending organ is the horn, specially so when he is got child.

This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards.

He has got tails also, but not like similar animals.

It has hairs on the other end of the other side.

This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his cohoa body whereupon he gives hit with it.

The palms of his feet are soft unto the touch, so the grasses head is not crushed.

At night time have poses by looking down on the ground and He shouts his eyes like his relatives, the horse does not do so.

This is the cow.

Sitting for a Composer Portrait In advance of this evening’s concert, Octandre caught up with Rolf to ask him about his approach to composition, the ideas and stories behind his music, and many other things. Two excerpts of the conversation are below; you can hear much more in our podcasts at https://soundcloud.com/theoctandre-ensemble.

Christian Mason – Rolf, what do you use to compose?

Rolf Hind – Well, I do start with pencil and paper and at home I have a little study, which is pretty small, with lots of scores and books in it, and a desk. I sometimes work in there, but we also have a big through-lounge piano room downstairs and sometimes I work there, sometimes I stand up at the piano, and sometimes I work in the garden if it’s nice.

I vary it; I don’t really have a routine.

Christian Mason – Is the piano part of your [process] Rolf Hind – Er, no, not really. It’s an important part of…. most of my pieces that have a piano in them have the piano prepared in some way – similarish ways, actually. There are a few things I like, but they’re all very slightly different, and often I will have my piano at home – which is also the one I teach on, so this can be a bit of a problem – prepared in that fashion, so that I can get used to it. Or, I’m tweaking with it as I go, just seeing what works for the piece. I think I got that idea from Per Norgard actually. He was talking about one of his pieces from the ‘70s where he retuned his own piano so that it was in third tones. There’s one of his pieces called Turn from 1976 which is meant to be played in that tuning, but obviously usually just gets played in a standard, tempered [tuning]. The starting point for pieces for me is often a very particular sound world, and coming to that for the flavour of the piece. It comes with other ideas in the conception at the same time, but for that I use the piano. But I don’t really write at the piano in the sense of trying out ideas. I think I’m reasonably good at, you know, figuring that out in my head. In fact, as I’m using microtones more,….. that’s hard to do on the piano.

There are some harmonics you can access and stuff. Then I use Sibelius [computer notation software] at a certain point, but I have to be a little bit strict with myself, because I have found that if I start too early with Sibelius, I just start messing around with my ideas before I’ve really got enough of a strong idea. That’s just my process, I think that could work differently for everyone, but I quite like to have quite a lot on paper. It doesn’t mean that I won’t change things when Sibelius comes into play. I don’t really use it much for playback purposes because it’s so approximate – especially is you’re using microtones of funny timbres or funny instruments. But sometimes I find it quite useful for setting the architecture of things – just listening again and again and fiddling speeds and things like that.

Jon Hargreaves – Do you talk to other musicians if you’re writing for them?

Rolf Hind – Yes, absolutely, always. I don’t feel like – I mean obviously I play the piano – I feel fairly confident about the piano and what I can do, and then I have gradually taken on more instruments as I’ve gone on. I played the violin and the viola as a kid, so I’m reasonably good on the viola. And so I feel more and more comfortable with string instruments generally.

And then I have used percussion a lot; gradually started using the clarinet more – gradually getting more comfortable using multiphonics and things. I find it[‘s] a really slow process, I mean I would never try a whole load of new things in one piece. I’d feel like ‘that’s now working, and what might work with that?’. I think my process has been incredibly slow – I stopped for 15 years! It’s not that each piece takes an inordinate amount of time, but I think how I develop feels to me…. [I’m] trying to keep it really organic. I don’t really force anything vey much.

Occasionally something comes along which makes me…. You know, there’s a possible big project in the offing now which is going to make me really step out of my comfort zone, but that will probably be good!

The Happy Composers’ League! ………I try to compose when I want to. Meditation helps this. I mean I’m not saying that I don’t want to, but there are certainly mornings when you get up and you look at it and you think ‘`well….. I’m just not in the mood’. That does sound a bit, you know, ‘first world problem…’, but we don’t really need composers who are just writing loads of music and don’t really feel like it! There’s enough people composing anyway, so finding that sort of genuine spark and impulse – I do quite a lot of meditation retreats. Just recently I did one that was of a sort of different flavour to those I had done before, where we were silent for 10 days, but mostly thinking about raising particular qualities of heart, rather than the sort of ‘awareness of an object’ type meditation. I found it particularly useful to work with joy. Just to notice it. Actually, you know if you cultivate an awareness of when you feel happy it can allow it to radiate a bit more, because apparently our natural predisposition, because of evolution, is to notice seven times as much of the negative things as the positive ones. This is neurological research – I forget where it’s from, but I heard it from a reliable source! And it certainly fits with my head!

Christian Mason – so it’s not just the newspapers!

Rolf Hind – Ha! Yes – Fake news! It makes evolutionary sense, because we’re looking about for danger in our caveman head. It’s going off the subject a bit, but cultivating a joyful, peaceful place to start with composition, rather than a kind of pinched, slightly depressed, claustrophobic state is what I try to do. It doesn’t mean all the music sounds, you know, spaced out and peaceful! It’s a bit of a cultural thing where, we live in a culture where perhaps because of this predisposition, evolutionarily, we favour the source of inspiration that is kind of darker, and more depressing – that there’s something more genuine about that. That’s something I really like about your music [Christian] is that you deal with joy. And a lot of the music I like deals with joy, and positive mind states if you like – without being childish or facile.

Christian Mason – It’s an interesting point. I guess a lot of the music that I have loved over the years is quite dark, but I always wondered why it had to be so. Definitely there is a sense that….there’s almost an expectation that if you’re going to be a composer, you’re going to be dark and melancholy. It seems reasonable to try and redress that balance from time to time.

Rolf Hind – The Happy Composers’ League. Haha!

Biographies Rolf Hind (b. 1964) In a career that has taken him all over the world in the last fifteen years, Rolf Hind has worked with many of the greatest names in 20th and 21st century contemporary classical music. As a pianist he has performed at all the major European new music festivals, appeared five times at the Proms, and played in Carnegie Hall and Sydney Opera House. Tours have taken him as far afield as Cuba, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and New Zealand. He teaches the piano and sometimes composition at the Guildhall School of Music in London.

In the year 2000, after a long silence, Rolf began to compose again, inspired by repeated trips to India and a subsequent fascination with the culture and language. Since then, most of his works have sprung from that source: The Horse Sacrifice, for six instrumentalists, The City of Love (a setting of Hindi texts) for voice cello and piano, Your Black Mouth, for clarinet and harp, and Sunnata for six keyboards. In 2008 he premiered his piano concerto "Maya-Sesha" with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, which was nominated for a british composer Award, as was the piano piece A single flower, a jasmine petal, seven mattresses, a pea… (2009).

He has already built up a significant list of performances and commissions from notable organisations: Bromsgrove concerts, Brighton Festival, South West German Radio, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Soundwaves festival, Spitalfields Music, York Late Music. His clarinet concerto "Sit stand walk" for Stuart King and Chroma was premiered at the Spitalfields Festival in 2011, and an accordion concerto for James Crabb and the BBCSO called The Tiniest House of Time, will be premiered by the BBCSO in the Barbican in Nov. 2012.

His work for percussion and gamelan with pianos Tiger's Nest was commissioned by SBC (London) and Cheltenham Festival in 2015, and his meditation-opera Lost in Thought sold out the Barbican Centre later in the year. In 2017, Rolf was resident composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where his On what weft are woven the waters premiered.

Octandre Ensemble The Octandre Ensemble was founded in 2011 by conductor Jon Hargreaves and composer Christian Mason. The group focuses on music written after 1945, with an emphasis on timbre and ritual. Sound is an eternally fascinating phenomenon, and music can harness its power in ever more original ways: new music, ancient ideas. During 2018 they presented ‘Way Out East’, a series of composer portraits (Nicola LeFanu, Frank Denyer, Rolf Hind) hosted by The Print Room at The Coronet and supported by RVW Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation and PRSF. Thegroup also recently recorded Frank Denyer's CD The Fish that became the Sunfor release on 'Another Timbre' Records in 2019. Recent invitations have included the International Shakuhachi Festival 2018, Little Missenden Festival, York Late Music Festival, St John’s Smith Square Lunchtime series (featured on BBC In Tune), and the Coronet International Festival. In April 2016, the ensemble featured at Principal Sound Festival in a programme including UK premieres of Christian Mason's Layers of Loveand Claude Vivier’s Samarkand, which was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 3 ‘Hear and Now’. In December 2015, Composer-in-Residence Sinan Savaskan, won a British Composer Award with Many Stares through semi-nocturnal Zeiss-blink (Module 30), an Octandre Commission.

Personnel Octandre Ensemble Clarinet – Adam Slater Saxophones – Stefan Baur Percussion – George Barton Piano – Siwan Rhys Violin – Rowena Kennally Soprano – Lore Lixenberg Artistic Directors: Christian Mason & Jon Hargreaves

Weblinks Rolf Hind’s website has a wealth of information about his career and activities as a composer and pianist: www.rolfhind.com Rolf Hind also has a facebook page, ‘Rolf Hind pianist and Composer’, where he posts more extensively: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=279434608737696&ref=content_filter Visit https://www.ricordi.com/en-US/Composers/H/Hind-Rolf.aspx to hire or buy scores and performance materials for his music George Barton and Siwan Rhys play together in the GB & SR Piano and percussion duo: www.gbsr.co.uk Stefan Baur’s website is at: www.stefanbaurmusic.com Lore Lixenberg’s website is http://lorelixenberg.net Adam Slater’s website is: https://adamslatermusic.co.uk

You can buy a recording of some of Rolf Hind’s Orchestral and Chamber music, including The City of Love, from the NEOS records website: https://neosmusic.com/?language=english&page=output.php%3Fcontent%3DKuenstler/R olf_Hind.php www.octandre.com