Emerging pat terns

Photo: courtesy Kenneth Wilson

ON TOP OF THE WORLD: British cellist Kenneth Wilson stops off near the French-Italian border for an impromptu recital. The former vicar, from Cumbria, embarked on an epic 2,000-mile cycling trip from Carlisle to Rome, giving performances on his carbon-fibre cello, named Libre, all the way.

‘I perch on one of the stones, and struggle with cold fingers,’ Wilson wrote on his blog. ‘In the thin air Libre sounds weak and reedy. She’s also gone very sharp. But the audience is large, and appreciative, and everyone wants to video this idiotic madness.’

PREMIERE of the MONTH

COMPOSER Liza Lim

WORK String Creatures

ARTISTS JACK Quartet

DATE 14 August 2022

PLACE KL Luzern, Lucerne Hall, Lucerne, Switzerland bit.ly/3ymAE6M

I wanted to think about the instruments and ensemble as organic world – the liveliness of their properties, ‘I wanted especially their strings,’ says Australian composer Liza Lim of her new composition for string quartet String Creatures. It will be premiered by the JACK Quartet at the Lucerne Festival. The work largely looks at the idea of physical strings:

‘Things that tie us together, bind or unbind, tangle, knot – all the language that comes from the properties of strings,’ says Lim. The 26-minute, three-part work looks at these ideas with a focus on the organic forming of patterns.

The work’s first part, ‘Cats Cradle: Three diagrams of grief ’ refers to the children’s game of the same name. ‘It’s found across cultures and is a medium for storytelling and transformation.

The music starts with short patterns that are woven into new shapes.’ Lim explains that the three diagrams are brief snapshots forming the basis of the work’s other parts. The second part, ‘Untethered’, gives a sense of ‘pulling these threads apart, to show that things are not fixed, and can be woven into other patterns’.

Liza Lim

JACK Quartet

QUARTET PHOTO BEOWULF SHEEHAN. LIM PHOTO HARALD HOFFMANN

The last part, ‘A nest is woven from the inside out’ takes inspiration from the creation of birds’ nests. ‘They just drop sticks in one spot; it’s random but dynamic. It self-organises into beautiful patterns when the bird does it again and again, and then uses the friction of its body against the material – which is also what I try to achieve through several techniques.’

A violinist herself, Lim considers stringed instruments her ‘happy place’, and another avenue for experimentation. ‘They are fancy acoustic chambers – bodies that relate with other speaking bodies.’ The composition’s first violin part demands an octave G string (specially made to sound an octave lower than the original). ‘It makes it almost sound like a cello, so it becomes a sort of shapeshifter that can speak in the lower ranges of all the other instruments.’