Hearing Places is a 7-movement work for large orchestra.
It uses field recordings as the starting point for a set of tone poems, integrating the recordings (and video footage) into the fabric of the music.
I. Steel and Steam II. Wind Clatter III. Pale Rain With Birds IV. Out of the Machinery V. Water Songs VI. Hive VII. Winter Sunrise
“An atavistic soul … the whole thing glowed … what you might not expect was the humour.” (Ivan Hewett - Daily Telegraph)
“An exhortation to listen … a powerful seven-movement ode … celebratory and mournful” (Rian Evans - Guardian)
In Hearing Places I am aiming for a new kind of symphonic experience, one that involves immersive listening and a way of sharing in the noticing of often inconsequential, yet hugely beautiful sounds. The music aims to capture both the fragility and the massive power of our world, and to illustrate simply what we stand to lose in the environment crisis we are now in. I hope that, by noticing our surroundings, we can begin to value our world more. Natural elements are frequently referenced in the music (weather, times of day, natural phenomena and the changing seasons), as are the human imprints left on our world (machinery, vehicles, pattern-making, conversation).
Hearing Places celebrates the rich audio and visual patterns found all around us: I’ve spent the last year travelling to all corners of Wales collecting field recordings and video clips of interesting places; universal and deeply emotive. The small building blocks of pitch, rhythm and pattern then became the materials for the creation of the music itself. Sometimes I adopted a natural emotional response in terms of mood and feeling, while at others my approach was more forensic. The audio forms a strand of the orchestral fabric, woven differently in each movement, and is ‘played’ from within the orchestra (as are the video clips) by the keyboard player.
I Steel and Steam
The might of this huge industrial structure set against the sky forms one element of the music. The ever-changing clouds of steam emitted from the chimneys forms the other. The music is a fusion of these two elements: everything grows inexorably from the low rumble of the factory, captured in the fading evening light.
2 Wind Rattle
The capricious clangs and rattles from moored boats in a harbour create a sound that has fascinated me for some time. The rhythms are intoxicating and yet random. These sounds will have been heard through the centuries and represent a poetic intervention of humans in the landscape – weather and technology in a kind of musical marriage, if you like. T
3 Pale Rain with Birds
On a wet afternoon I visited the Dylan Thomas writing hut in Laugharne that looks down on the shifting panorama of the Tâf estuary. An estuary is a point of constant comings and goings – tides, gatherings of birds and weather conditions. In ‘Poem in October’ Thomas describes the melancholy sounds from the harbour and the neighbouring wood: sounds of seagulls, rooks, blackbird and larks. ‘Pale rain over the dwindling harbour and over the sea wet church’. I took my title for this movement from a line of this poem, as it seemed to be the kind of title for a painting: this music is like a slow-moving painting.
4 Out of the Machinery
Here the whole orchestra becomes a giant rhythm section, and through four passages of interwoven grooves the music builds, forming increasingly tightly knitted and energised textures. It was important for me to break down the complex machinery of the woollen mill, with its shuttles, cogs and wheels, into tiny individual blocks of audio Lego. From here I could then rebuild the machine into a reimagined version of itself. Similarly, small video images of the mechanisms are playfully woven to form a funky visual component.
5 Water Songs
If you sit quietly within nature, gradually it comes to you. The details become more acute and you seem to absorb all manner of sights, sounds, smells and feelings. The sound of a stream has been the source of inspiration for many composers over centuries. This musical meditation draws attention to the tiny hidden repeating melodies that you can often hear inside the sound of the trickles and eddies, if you take the time to listen.
6 Hive
After just a few minutes standing in a busy place where all around you is in a constant state of motion and busyness, you become somehow absorbed into the place. Your own stillness is accentuated by the ‘hive of activity’ around you. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to look down on Central Square in Cardiff from high up. This revealed to me the grid system of the square heightening the sense of those walking across it being in a kind of game of pathways, traces and collisions. It’s a beautiful happenstance, and the interconnectedness of us all is there every day of the week, if we care to notice it. Recordings of everyday conversations collide with the sounds of bikes, skateboards, building site drills and car horns to form a sound-picture of the heart of Cardiff.
7 Winter Sunrise
There is something about the sounds of birds and bells that have deep emotional resonance for us. In their very different ways they chime with a deep melancholy, but also a strong sense of hope. This final movement brings together these two elements in a journey from dark stillness to a rapturous outpouring of light and joy. As with many of the pieces that make up this suite, the music is transformed from the small to the large, reflecting something of our beautiful insignificance in time and space.
My thanks to: Jeevan Rai for designing/programming the keyboard patches and for his additional sonic processing and manipulation, Anna Grime for allowing the recording and filming at Solva Woollen Mill, Peter Furniss for guiding me up the bell towers of Ruthin, the North Wales Association of Church Bell Ringers for their support and knowledge., and Yusef Bastawy at BBC NOW for filming with me in Cardiff Central Square.
I have written several blogs about the process of creating Hearing Places:
In Search of Sights, Sounds And Smells
“Bring some overalls and a torch. You’ll need them.”
Daily Telegraph Review - BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ★★★★☆
“Occasionally nowadays an atavistic soul comes along who wants to put music back in touch with its ancient roots in wind, birdsong, and splashing water. One such is Colin Riley, a composer of amiable eccentricity who’s written works with titles like Rock Paper Scissors and Earth Voices. His latest opus Hearing Places, premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales on Friday, is rooted in the sounds he recorded during a year’s ramble across Wales – though not all of the sounds were primordial. He also recorded the clattering of the Solva Woollen Mill in Pembrokeshire, the vast hum of the Port Talbot Steelworks, and the knocking of small boats in Porthmadog harbour. All these, plus tricking water in the Brecon Beacons and birds and bells in Denbighshire, were each allotted a movement in Earth Voices. On a screen above the orchestra video images of the locale appeared, while the players engaged in a dialogue with the sounds, often beginning in a very modest way – a lone tuba imitating a foghorn here, a twitter of birds in the woodwind there – and then took on a poetically suggestive musical life of their own. That sort of response you might expect; what you might not expect was the humour of the piece, as in the second movement where the rattling of moored boats and seagulls’ cries prompted a dance of slouching not-quite-jazzy elegance. The whole thing glowed in this performance by the BBC Now under the intelligent baton of Matthew Coorey.”
