Laurence Osborn Mute
for Chamber Ensemble
Mute for Chamber Ensemble (2024-5)
DURATION 25 minutes
INSTRUMENTATION (12 PLAYERS)
Flute db. Piccolo, Alto Flute (also plays Polystyrene Block in Mvmt. 3)
Oboe db. Cor Anglais
Clarinet in B flat db. Clarinet in E flat Bassoon db. Contrabassoon
Trumpet in B flat (with plastic straight mute and harmon mute)
Trombone (with metal practice mute and harmon mute)
Harp (also plays Polystyrene Block in Mvmt. 3)
Accordion
Violin
Viola
Violoncello Contrabass
SCORE IN C (OCTAVE TRANSPOSITIONS APPLY)
Commissioned by the London Sinfonie a with funding from the Cockayne Foundation. Composed while resident as Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge (2024-26).
World première given by the London Sinfonie a conducted by Geoffrey Paterson at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, April 3rd 2025.
PERFORMANCE DIRECTIONS (GENERAL)
Mute is devised as a series of twelve miniature ‘anti-concertos’ distributed across four movements. Each of the twelve players has a solo passage that is muted, muffled, distorted, or drowned out by the rest of the ensemble. e struggle for each soloist to be heard is wri en into the score; therefore no concession should be made to each soloist beyond what is wri en on the page. Each solo, however, must be performed ‘soloistically’ regardless of audibility. In performance, I’m looking for a tension between what we strain to hear, and what we see onstage.
PERFORMANCE DIRECTIONS (FLUTE)
e flute part sometimes specifies the consonant syllables used to a ack the note. ese are always given as underlined le ers below the stave (t, sh, p, etc.). Where the consonant sound is u ered for the duration of a given pitch (as in the case of sh, f, and so on), a crossed notehead is used. Where consonant sounds are rapidly repeated or alternated, a small arrow is used (p , tk , etc.).
PERFORMANCE DIRECTIONS (BRASS)
e trumpet and trombone parts use harmon mutes. I notate the harmon mute sound ‘as heard’ using lyrics below the stave, rather than ‘as played’ using symbols representing ‘open’ and ‘closed’. I ask the players to use the harmon mute freely to approximate four sounds — ‘w’ (likely fully closed), ‘aw’ (to rhyme with ‘pour’), ‘ah’ (to rhyme with ‘car’), and ‘aa’ (likely fully open). e la er three sounds can also be used in combination with ‘w’ for three corresponding types of ‘wa’ sound: ‘waw’, ‘wah’, and ‘waa’. Gradual transformation between two sounds is shown using an arrow, like this: Rapid repeated ‘wa’ sounds are notated like this:
PERFORMANCE DIRECTIONS (HARP)
In the third movement, part of the harp needs to be prepared with baking paper. e range of pitches is shown at the beginning of the movement. e baking paper should be folded threaded through the strings. I’m looking for a buzzing, degraded sound, as if the harp’s music is coming from a broken speaker.
PERFORMANCE DIRECTIONS (POLYSTYRENE)
e flautist and harpist are instructed to play polystyrene blocks by in the final section of the third movement. e blocks are played by scraping with the fingernails. e harpist’s block should be mounted so it is possible to play with one hand. e polystyrene blocks used for the world première were approximately 30 x 20 x 10cm, with a rough surface. e sound I’m trying to emulate is the hiss and crackle of an old gramophone recording — alternative means can be used to mimic that sound if polystyrene blocks are unavailable.
PROGRAMME NOTE
Mute is a series of twelve miniature ‘anti-concertos’. Each of the twelve players has a solo passage that is muted, muffled, distorted, or drowned out. Each of the four movements contains three solo passages.
e first movement deals with two types of ventriloquism found in the 1964 film My Fair Lady First, elocution: I wanted to write something that appeared to force soloist and ensemble, like Eliza Dooli le, to speak in certain ways, hijacking and manipulating their voices as if from outside. Second, dubbing: Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice is not her own, but the voice of the socalled ‘Diva of Dubbing’, Marni Nixon. Some of the music is inspired by an interview with Nixon, in which she describes her creative process as a dubbing artist, standing side by side with an actress and creating what she calls ‘a ghost image’ of her presence and voice.
e second movement recalls the voices of three fish/woman hybrids in sequence: siren song as heard through beeswax ear-plugs; the voice of Andersen’s suicidal mermaid as it is lost a second time, drowned out by a throng of ethereal voices; finally, a er Adriana Cavarero’s critique, the drowning death-ra le of Magri e’s inverted mermaid, washed up on a beach with its gasping fish-head and exposed human legs and genitals.
e third movement is a tribute to the oldest known recording of a human voice, reconstructed from an 1860 phonoautograph reading (or phonoautogram). e recording is of five seconds of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’, sung into the phonoautograph by its inventor, Édouard-Léon Sco de Martinville. Lots of my music in this movement explores this five seconds of sound, both melodically and texturally. When the reconstruction was made in 2008, it was accidentally rendered at twice the speed (BBC news presenter Charlo e Green famously corpsed live on air upon hearing it for the first time). e second half of the movement is a set of variations on the speeded up 2008 version.
e fourth movement is inspired by an interview with the electronic musician Burial from Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. Fisher describes the untethered, spectral voices that resound through Burial’s work as ‘flu ering, flickering abstractions, angels liberated from the heavy weight of personal history’. Burial’s voices have become such an important touchstone in British electronic music over the last two decades that I feel a bit sheepish referring to them here. But they are important to this movement, along with the revelation in Fisher’s interview that Burial’s vocal sampling is influenced by the ghost stories of MR James: ‘You go cold, just for those few lines when you glimpse the ghost for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It’s like you’re not reading anymore. In that moment, it burns a memory into you that isn’t yours.’
Laurence Osborn
CONTENTS
I - p. 1
II - p. 29
III - p. 59
IV - p. 82
C l a r i n e t i n B b
Ba s s o o n
Tr u m p e t i n B b
Tro m bo n e
? & ( t o b 1 8 ) 3 ?
s o l o ( t o b 3 5 ) w/ ha r m o n m ut e &
re p a