Sound and Music

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Recovery/Discovery, a compilation CD/sound DVD based around one of the first major ‘surround sound’ pieces in the UK, Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Chronometer. Recovery/Discovery, a project funded by the British Council, brings together a quadraphonic version of Birtwistle’s pivotal piece, which was up until recently believed to have been lost, alongside major electronic works by Jonathan Harvey, Javier Alvarez and Mira Calix in surround format.
 
Today’s feature films, sports TV broadcasts and computer games soundtracks all have surround sound that can be brought into the living room, but previously the use of the direction of sounds and their movement in space remained limited to specialised concert set-ups and the limited circles of hi-fi buffs. Many successful electronic works, such as the ones on this CD/DVD, were only released on stereo CDs, even if they had elaborate spatial distribution in their concert versions. Indeed the original quadraphonic version of Chronometer had all but disappeared into oblivion until the Artistic Coordinator of the Holland Festival, Lieven Bertels, initiated a search for it in 2006:
 
Featuring sound recordings of Big Ben and the Wells clock from London’s Science Museum, Chronometer was one of the most complex electronic music endeavours of all time. The recovery operation was the stimulus to ask what other works could complement Chronometer in the context of being the first major ‘surround sound’ piece in the UK, and in particular focusing on its exploration of the mechanisms of recording time.
 
Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) is a quintessential part of the British electronic repertoire and a beautiful tribute to the British choral tradition, its many cathedrals and the bell ringing associated with them. The piece, which was made at the IRCAM studios in Paris, sets up a dramatic interplay between the deathly peeling bells (recorded at Winchester Cathedral) and a lone chorister’s voice singing a text found on one of the bells, revealing the contrasting forces of life versus death and is, according to the composer, symbolic of the battle of the human spirit to penetrate the intimidating world of the machine.
 
Although Javier Alvarez is a Mexican composer, it is his electronic piece Temazcal, composed at the Royal College of Music in London in 1984, that is perhaps his most successful to date, and one of the party pieces of the ‘live+electronic’ repertoire worldwide. The piece for surround tape and live maracas, inspired by the likes of Stephen Montague and Trevor Wishart, shows an ear-opening eclecticism and a fresh sound that even today sounds new and exciting. For this release percussionist Joby Burgess made a new high resolution surround recording of the live maracas part.Mira Calix is a UK-based composer and DJ in the UK signed to the WARP label. Her piece Nunu Wadudu (2008) uses the sounds of London Sinfonietta players and a swarm of live insects, scratches, scrapings, buzzing wings and crickets, to create a delicate yet refreshing live+electronics surround soundscape that has received worldwide public acclaim since its première.