Simon Emmerson: Sound Around – both near and far at once

Nearly all the works I have written over now more than 50 years combine live performers and electronic resources. I first heard live electronic music in June 1969 at a concert of the London Sinfonietta – performing Pulses for 5 x 4 players by Roger Smalley whom I had just met in Cambridge. I clearly recall its visceral impact on me – and a love of this complex soundworld has never gone away. I also remain interested in studio-made fixed works, though these are always about liveness in some way, too.

Around 2010 I developed a live performance system that I explored with different instruments. Based on live sampling this develops sustained but evolving harmony which I hear equally as three dimensional timbre generation of pitch modes from multiphonics. This became Solo Flute Quartet (2018). 

With Heather Roche playing clarinets it was the breath sound within pitch that caught my ear as well as the amazing range of key and mechanism sounds she produced - Wind Clouds Showers (2019-20) emerged. But let’s be clear – these studio sessions are not for the collection of ‘pure sounds’ to assemble later, they capture the embodied sound that I hope to replicate in live performance.
 

The piano has been a constant companion, with electronics (‘ring modulation’) since I heard Roger Smalley play his Transformation (1969). He played some graduation pieces of mine with electronics in 1971-72, so it felt right to revisit this in modern form for Piano Ring (2018) written in memoriam for Roger who died in 2015. The other piano work (Microvariations II (2014)) was written as a gift for Philip Mead who had commissioned three works with electronics from me over the years. This, too, is a memorial - to Jonathan Harvey whom I had known since the 1970s and whose works with electronics I greatly admired.
 

The instrumental recordings were a ‘covid lockdown’ project – at least when things eased up to allow strictly controlled access to studios. Zubin Kanga and Philip Mead came to north London for an excellent Steinway, while by total contrast Heather Roche and Carla Rees came down to a studio in Brighton overlooking the Downs. I am so grateful to NMC for accepting the album proposal that resulted shortly after. Their request to include a Dolby Atmos streaming mix was perfect for my surround sound works!

There are two fixed studio pieces – both are sonic journeys, real and imaginary. One (Aeolian (2016)) is an evocation of an over sea odyssey, the other an imaginary soundwalk across my home city Brighton, from windfarm, through the city, up to the Downs - Near and Far (at Once) (2022) helps give the album its title. All the pieces surround us, near and far in space, near and far in time – all at once.