Martin Iddon on 'Hesperides'

I’ve been trying to think about what I can tell you that might be useful. Or interesting. Something that the music doesn’t already say or do. The pieces on this album are pretty much all incredibly quiet and incredibly static. Perhaps not as quiet or as unchanging as some lowercase or onkyokei music (if unfamiliar to you, do look ‘em up! Terrific genres both), but I’d go out on a limb and guess that for at least most of the people who are reading this, I could probably say “I know you think you’re imagining something hushed and still, but it’s much quieter and it does much less than you’re imagining”. 

“No. Even less than that.” 

I remember when this all started. I was a second-year undergraduate; it must have been 1995 or 1996. I was at my friend Adam’s house—he was a music student too—before our next lecture. With an hour and a half before that lecture, we put on, I don’t recall why, a recording of Górecki’s Third Symphony (the one everyone had, the Dawn Upshaw recording with the London Sinfonietta). Again I don’t know why, but we looped about a twosecond fragment of somewhere in the final movement: Adam’s CD player had this, then quite unusual, facility.

After about ten minutes of this two-second loop of Górecki, I was more musically bored than I had ever been. After twenty minutes, it was worse. I don’t know why we didn’t just stop it there (and I’m not wholly sure that Adam didn’t leave me to it). But at half an hour it started to get interesting: I began to hear fine detail I’d missed before; the upper partials of the pitches started to reveal themselves. After forty-five minutes, the loop had revealed itself as incredibly rich, a subtly nuanced interior world, full of sound. At the hour mark, or thereabouts, I was devastated that the impending lecture meant that I would soon have to press stop and, when I did, I was left with a sense of profound emptiness, even regret, now that it was gone. 

I also remember—it must have been round about the same time— showing Steve Martland an organ piece that he became enthusiastic about: “This is much better”, he said, compared with what I suspect was a pretty derivative bit of minimalism I’d previously presented, “It keeps looking like it’s going to get started, then doesn’t.”

I also remember—it must have been round about the same time— showing Steve Martland an organ piece that he became enthusiastic about: “This is much better”, he said, compared with what I suspect was a pretty derivative bit of minimalism I’d previously presented, “It keeps looking like it’s going to get started, then doesn’t.” I’m not one for big statements or claims about the work, but I recall that the average shot length in a Hollywood movie is about the 2 second mark. 

In Béla Tarr’s wonderfully slow Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), the average shot length is going on for four minutes. It’s not that one is better than the other, but something happens in the sort of slowness, stillness, and concentration of Tarr that doesn’t in, say, Michael Bay. Something happens, I think, when nothing happens. Because there’s so much less time for nothing happening in a world of ‘content’ and it’s so much harder to focus on one thing, when that content is ever new, ever changing, I want to keep trying to stake a claim for the value of slow, quiet attentiveness. 

One of the reasons, I suspect, why I’ve had these near thirty-year-old anecdotes in mind is because, if you’d told then-me, listening in the music school’s library to NMC’s releases of Jonathan Harvey, Simon Holt, or the Bingham String Quartet, that he’d have an album on NMC one day, he’d hardly have believed it. It’s an incredible privilege to be added to that roster. I’m grateful to NMC, as well as to Jack Adler-McKean and the quiet music ensemble for their generosity and commitment to the work. 

Martin Iddon