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A Guide to James Dillon's music

The composer James Dillon has created some of the most inventive and thrillingly expressive
contemporary music around
Tom Service
Monday 4 February 2013 15.50GMT

In the world of contemporary music, epic scale is often viewed as the preserve of
composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Morton Feldman, whose notoriously
gigantic theatrical and instrumental essays Stockhausen's Licht Cycle, Feldman's
Second String Quartet seem to be the ne plus ultras of new music set on a huge, cosmic
canvas.
That's partly because so much contemporary music commissioning asks for pieces of
about 10-20 minutes' duration. Thus it is rare that composers have the chance to pitch
their imaginations at the largest of scales. But convention hasn't stopped the 62-year-old
Scottish-born composer James Dillon from writing some of the boldest and most
expressively extreme orchestral, chamber and theatre works out there.
With a composer as uncompromising as Dillon, there is no substitute for starting by
plunging ears-first into two of his huge musical cycles. First comes the utterly
unclassifiable Nine Rivers project, a collection of nine pieces for forces ranging from six
percussionists to a large ensemble with live electronics and pretty well everything in
between.
Next, the Book of Elements, a five-part essay in continuity versus discontinuity and
concentrated substance for solo piano that amounts, I think, to the most significant
contribution to the pianist's repertoire since Gyrgy Ligeti's Etudes.
In both pieces, Dillon's combination of sonic immediacy and multi-layered complexity
creates some of the richest experiences you can have in new music. This is music that
seems to animate a mythic power that is both primeval and preternaturally
sophisticated.
As Dillon says of the whole cycle, which took him 17 years to compose: "Nine Rivers is a
mythos of imagined waters, of fairies and snake-gods, a melancholy of flow, a requiem
for poisoned rivers, an odyssey, a theatre of memory "
That suggests some of the elemental intensity that Nine Rivers contains: its soundworld
of teeming, ever-changing energy, its fundamental investigation of the two types of time
and experience that the word "river" suggests. As Dillon says, you have the idea of
flowing water, of course, but more rarely, a "river" can also denote "he who rives who
tears apart, or in pieces, who severs, divides or cleaves".
All that means is that when you encounter the piece (whose world premiere as a single,
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day-long event was held in 2010 in Glasgow) you're in for about five hours of full-on
musical flux, after which you're left existentially battered and bruised. From the strange,
still centre of the piece to the multimedia meditation of La Coupure, (The Cut), it is like
being put through a wringer.
The richness of Dillon's music in Nine Rivers lies partly in its surfeit of information and
influences. He talks about quantum mechanics, the poetry of Rimbaud, the aphorisms of
Heraclitus, among other things, as being important for the cycle. The relationship
between acoustic instruments and electronics is just one of many questions asked by the
piece. As a listener, you grab on to any thread you can and hold on tight. The idea of
comprehending the whole of what's going on at any given moment seems thrillingly
impossible. But, as Brian Ferneyhough has recently said, that's a basic condition of life.
We are always filtering out excess information to focus on what we need, whether we are
commuting to work or listening to a Beethoven symphony.
Next to Nine Rivers, and partly because it is written for solo piano, The Book of
Elements, composed between 1997 and 2002, contains music of relative clarity and
distilled energy. But its subtlety and the kaleidoscopic experience of listening to the
trajectory of all five volumes is just as all-encompassing as anything else Dillon has
written. The cycle moves from the 11 short pieces of Book 1 to the single movement of
Book 5. What you hear is an idiom that sounds less iconoclastic than some of Dillon's
earlier music, one that that is unafraid of subconscious references the ghosts of
Debussy, Bartk and even Schumann and Chopin haunt some passages and that finds a
lyricism and flexibility that is definitively Dillon's own.
Now, those aren't the only cycles in Dillon's output. There is his orchestral triptych on
the idea of illumination, made up of Helle Nacht, Ignis Noster, and a flute concerto,
Blitzschlag. That is not to mention his collection of six string quartets, his opera
Philomela, and other self-contained orchestral works such as a craggily melodic violin
concerto and a piano concerto Andromeda, written, like so much of his piano music, for
his wife, Noriko Kawai, to play, or the coruscating brilliance of La Navette.
Dillon's music is fearlessly, relentlessly explorative. To hear it is to confront a volcanic
imagination that makes listening an act of thrilling, vertiginous unpredictability.

Five key links

The Book of Elements
String Quartet no. 2
Ignis Noster
La navette
Andromeda
More blogposts

Topics
Classical music

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