SOUND WITHIN SOUND / KATE MOLLESON

Kate Molleson is a Scottish journalist, broadcaster and commentator specializing in contemporary classical music. She presents BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show and Music Matters, and her articles have been published in the Guardian, Herald, BBC Music Magazine, and Gramophone among others. Her BBC documentaries have focused on music in Greenland, opera in Mongolia, lost recordings of Arabic classical music and the Ethiopian nun/pianist/composer Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou. She studied cla
SOUND WITHIN SOUNDrinet performance at McGill University and musicology at King’s College London. Five of her six brothers are folk musicians. 

Sound Within Sound is a collection of ten essays each portraying a ‘periphery’ music-artist, each who received classical music training, yet did not stay within the strict boundaries imposed through their education and/or community. Molleson says defensiveness will suffocate the classical music culture, and inclusion of the bold, the diverse will ensure its longevity, fertility, progress and preservation of its legacy. Instead of operating from a myth of absence and forever revolving around a few untouchable centers, a real and living picture will emerge with the experimenters. She says she is not interested in creating new heros- and her portraits are not of ‘alternative’ composers because ‘the word suggests an incontrovertible core’. Molleson’s book is a wonderful guide to start exploring the peripheries in a world where we are constantly goaded to hold fast to the centers, the stars, the unanimously approved. 

Molleson has great skill in storytelling, description with sincerity, humor, playfulness and love in her writing. You could know nothing about music theory, or maybe even be deaf and still enjoy this book. Her writing almost materializes a hand that reaches out from the pages, and touches the reader. She has carefully painted all the portraits within their contexts of political, social climates and personal biographical influences- so the age old question rears its head, does the personal life of an artist matter? A. Lockwood’s burning of pianos would not have caught my interest, and I could have been quick to dismiss them as pointless attention-seeking destructive nonsense. 

Julian Carrillo (1875-1965) was a Mexican violinist, composer and inventor of instruments. His theory of the 13th Sound (Sonido 13), was an exploration of microtones, 

and he built microtonal instruments and composed for them. Molleson says despite his European training, he did not resort to a marketable exoticism that would sell in Europe, but was not politically correct for his country, either- he blew his own microtonal horn. He, along with S. Revueltas resisted the dogma about what authentic music should sound like. 

Ruth Crawford (Seeger) (1901-1953) was a brilliant American composer who upon marrying her teacher, ‘got swept up in what she called ‘composing babies’ and the American folk movement that emerged out of the Great Depression, during which she became a folk-song transcriber and a writer of books’. She did go back to composing in the late 1940s, but her life was cut short- here a nod to Rimbaud. There are five more female composers in the collection, each who dealt with different ‘strategies’ for handling the dilemma imposed upon women regarding ‘children and/or career’. 

Walter Smetak (1913-1984) was a Swiss born composer, ‘de-composer’, aural sculptor who lived most of his life in Brazil. He built more than 150 aural sculptures/instruments, mostly out of cheap and easily found materials, most of which could be played by anyone- for example, his Pindorama is a construct that can be played by 60 musicians at the same time. Vina is a one-man-band ‘instrument’. Ovo project was an egg shaped enclosing where the feeling would be like being inside an instrument, an organ. Influenced by Brazil’s theosophy, Eubiose, he wanted to go beyond consonence and dissonance, ‘beyond sight and hearing and past and present to arrive at a state he called ‘caossonance’ where light becomes sound and a grand union of the senses is achieved’. 

Jose Maceda (1917-2004) was a Filipino composer who once engaged all of Manila for almost an hour to participate in the broadcasting of his Ugnayan. Also with the blurring of the performer and the audience, he aimed for a collective harmony, a transformative event, yet it also became an Imelda Marcos funded spectacle of patriotism. His other work also often involved many people with little musical knowledge, and he also experimented to ‘free time’ with his music. Maceda spent 50 years researching the traditional music of the Phillippines as well as of other countries. 

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) was a Russian composer who wanted to be an orchestra when she grew up. Her writing was very physical in the sense that it strained the performers’ physicality as well as the instruments. Think ‘repeating a cluster chord about 150 times on the piano with dynamics of fffff or ffffff’. According to composer V. Silvestrov, ‘her music is like a naked person standing on the street shouting ‘Don’t look at me!’. 

Emahoy Tsegue-Mariam Guebru (1923-2023) was an Ethiopian composer/pianist/nun. Born into a wealthy and connected family, she received European training, but was for a mysterious reason rejected by the Ethiopian government to go to the Royal Academy of Music in London where she was offered a place. She gradually left her high-society life and became a nun. She left her life as a nun on occasion to be with her mother and to record albums, eventually settling with the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem. ‘With Emahoy, nothing is regular. There is no strict meter, no pulse that can be fixed in notation, no adherence to any one scale system. Her music spins on its own axis.’

Else Marie Pade (1924-2016) was a Danish electronic music composer. Bedridden with illness in her youth, she found solace in the sounds around her, also imagining the sounds of things she couldn’t hear- stars in the sky and the glass beads of a board game. During the 1940 German invasion she joined an all female resistance headed by an explosives expert with whom she specialized in blowing up telephone boxes, until imprisoned in 1944. Married and had kids after the war, yet never became a tradwife, disregarding criticism from all sides. She made a film and wrote the soundtrack about a famous Danish amusement park; wrote another soundtrack for Hans Christian Andersen’s tales where she used both musique concrete and electronic music techniques. At the time, Paris had Schaeffer’s musique concrete school, and Cologne had Stockausen’s elektronische Musik, and after her fusion, later ones appeared. 

Molleson often refers to A. Madrid’s proposition of composers of the periphery having a certain freedom compared to central ones which I agree with, yet, for example Maceda would not have realized his work without I. Marcos’ help, so my theory is that there is an interval for maximum ‘efficiency’ when one is in a purgatory state where he doesn’t belong to the periphery or the center. 

Drawing up from Ulysees and her childhood impressions, Pade composed a piece depicting 24 hours in Copenhagen in a 20 minute tone poem. Molleson says she put the protagonist in the picture, personalizing the work which was different from what Varese did where the audience and the performers remained as spectators. In her Seven Circles, ‘she wanted the music to move like the stars’. Stockhausen used the example of her Glasperlespil pieces in his lectures to demonstrate that serialist music did not need to be sterile; a kaleidoscopic result was possible. 

Pade’s perspective, her connection with her past seems more organic, sincere and cheerful compared to the one described for Duchamp’s work, ‘a chess game’ of a life. A happy insistence on childhood dreams, rather than solemnly moving around pawns. Yet, after a diagnosis of PTSD, Pade converted to Catholicism and lived a secluded life. Marstal says, Pade had a lot of humor in her music, but the deep trauma underpinned it all. 

Muhal Richard Abrams (1930-2017) was an American composer, a central, ‘enabling’ figure of the AACM, a significant music collective founded soon after the assassination of Malcolm X, that ‘challenged the policing of borders between jazz and classical music’. ‘His radicalism was not about ripping things up and starting again, but about honoring several deep heritages that all involved experimentation of sorts’. 

Eliane Radigue (1932-) is a French electronic music composer. She was another musician influenced by P. Schaeffer’s music made of street sounds, and she became his and P. Henry’s apprentice until they had a fallout, at which time she ended up raising kids for about 10 years. Later she went to NYC, met musicians there, divorced husband, and resumed her music career. In 1974 she discovered that she had been half deaf since birth, which she framed as an advantage: ‘Her hearing has shaped the acute way she listens, the way she internalizes sound and the magnifying care and attentiveness that she devotes to a note’s interior life’. She likens her own music to a plant: ‘We never see a plant move, but it is growing continually’. She never wrote a fast piece: ‘By nature, slowness is expansive, yet it allows us to hear up close’. After her son’s death in 1974, Radigue retreated to a Buddhist center. (She has continued composing to this day, as I confirmed from Wikipedia.)

Annea Lockwood (1939-) is a New Zealand born American composer. Her main point of departure in composing was through intense listening experiences. In her 1968 concerts, she was shattering glass in darkness. She called her glass works ‘anti-composition’ because the process was more about uncovering and revealing than imposing a grand design. She thought the focus was always on creating more and more complex structures, and ‘the inherent detail of any one sound tends to get buried’. Lockwood spent 46 years of her life with another composer, Ruth Anderson. In the 60s, she started documenting rivers. On her Sound Map of the Hudson River, she says that for many, Hudson was only a visual entity, and by bringing its sound to the people, she aimed at giving them some sense of its energy, power and physicality. ‘The vital importance of developing recognition of non-separation from the other phenomena of the world. It’s been what I’ve been moving to all the time, ever since I started recording the environment. The necessity of reattachment to the natural world, and a deep level reattachment to ourselves’. ‘What we are at one with, we cannot harm’. 

‘There was plenty of camaraderie among her fellow prisoners in the women’s block H17. Her piano teacher Karen Brieg was there, and together they organised performances. They staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Brieg arranged music for three-part choir and Pade composed songs and notated [them]. She gave them names like ‘The Sailor, the Girl and the Little Cat’, which would become a minor hit when it was released as a single after the war. On her twentieth birthday, the women of H17 clubbed together to set up a modest collection so that Pade could study music when the war was over. They asked how she was able to keep her mood so positive. ‘Because’, she replied, ‘I am not really here. I’m in the future, writing music.’

‘[Eliane Radigue] says she is always on the hunt for sound within sound- a realm of partials, harmonics and subharmonics. Which is to say, not any ordinary, fundamental note you might strike on a piano, but the intangible cloud that makes up that note’s aura.’

‘[Annea Lockwood’s] hunch was that if we allow ourselves to listen properly, if we start to really feel a sound in our bodies, we might also start to take more notice of the thing that made it. If that thing is a river, or a cat, or a neighborhood, or a fellow human being, we might start to care about the source in new and deeper ways.’

Author: Kate Molleson
Title: Sound Within Sound
Published: 2023, by Faber
First published: 2022
Pages: 354