Ian Pace Rebecca van der Post
James Dillon – Del Cuarto Elemento
Michael Finnissy – Mississippi Hornpipes
James Erber – Te’amim
James Erber – Aurora
Ian Moore – Yoruba
Chris Dench – Tilt
Richard Barrett – Reticule
Giacinto Scelsi – L’Âme ailée / L’Âme ouverte
This programme draws a fascinating arc across multiple branches of modernism, connecting the New Complexity movement in Britain with post-serial abstraction, mystical minimalism, and transcultural composition. The pieces offer contrasting philosophies of sound, structure, and expression—from the ultra-dense to the spiritually spare.
James Dillon’s Del Cuarto Elemento (Spanish for “The Fourth Element”) reflects his lifelong fascination with poetic ambiguity, layered textures, and numerological symbolism. The piece likely embraces fluid form and flickering gestures, all shaped within Dillon’s characteristically unstable harmonic language. Compared to others in this list, Dillon’s music often plays at the edge of recognisability—never entirely abandoning expression, but continually fracturing it.
By contrast, Michael Finnissy’s Mississippi Hornpipes represents a radically different take on complexity. Here, he uses fragments of American folk and fiddle tunes as raw material, which he reassembles through violent transformations. The work is a hallmark of Finnissy’s critical engagement with cultural memory: playful, intense, and ironic. Where Dillon may dissolve material, Finnissy stresses it to the edge of rupture—reconfiguring folk as a prism for personal and political statement.
James Erber is represented by two works—Te’amim and Aurora. Te’amim, named after cantillation marks in Hebrew biblical chant, hints at a hidden rhetorical structure beneath an otherwise abstract surface. It suggests an interest in micro-inflection, silence, and phrase as breath. Aurora, on the other hand, implies emergence and radiance—perhaps through slow gestural unfolding. Both works likely demonstrate Erber’s refined use of instrumental colour and his preference for organic forms of complexity, in contrast to the more aggressive rhetoric of Finnissy or Barrett.
Ian Moore’s Yoruba marks a cross-cultural moment in the programme. Its title references the West African people and their rich musical traditions. While not directly quoting traditional Yoruba music, the piece likely channels its rhythms, ritualistic pacing, or spiritual overtones. Moore often works in an introspective idiom, and this piece may function as an homage, or a reimagining of ceremonial energy through a contemporary lens.
Chris Dench’s Tilt carries a title that immediately suggests imbalance, instability, and dynamic force. Dench’s music is among the most intricate and densely detailed in the New Complexity school, and Tilt likely plays with shifting momentum, dislocated metre, and extreme registral contrast. In spirit, it stands near Barrett in its relentlessness but may contrast with Erber in its volatility.
Richard Barrett’s Reticule (a word meaning a fine net or mesh) is characteristically multi-layered and aggressive. Barrett’s music often weaves together gesture, extended techniques, and dramatic density—frequently incorporating electronics or improvisational elements. In this context, Reticule might be read as a web of interactions, a piece that entangles its players in a struggle of wills and timbres.
Finally, Giacinto Scelsi’s L’Âme ailée / L’Âme ouverte offers a stark contrast in both sound and philosophy. Scelsi's work, grounded in single-note meditation and spectral nuance, stands apart from the metric and pitch complexity of the others. These two piano pieces (The Winged Soul / The Open Soul) come from a deeply spiritual place. They do not develop in the conventional sense, but rather unfold inwardly, through vibration, resonance, and stillness. In a programme dominated by intellectual rigor, Scelsi’s music reminds us of another kind of intensity—one that listens more than it speaks.
Together, these pieces chart a rich landscape of late-20th-century composition, moving from the fractured and the febrile to the still and transcendent. Each composer contributes a different model of musical modernism, asking us to listen not just to what the music does, but to how it thinks—and, in Scelsi’s case, how it feels beyond thought.
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