Beige House
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Poet: Frances Kruk
Composer: Nick Scott
Singer: Lucy Hall
Conductor: Maite Aguirre Quiñonero
Flute: Lucy Driver
Clarinet: Emily Heathcote
Violin: Anton Carballo
Cello: Patrick Johnson
Listen to Beige House
“Beige House” is a fragmented species of murder ballad, influenced in part by horror film soundtracks and structured on the tension arising from both the musical and thematic dischord therein. The idea was to create a picture of calm and comfort perverted from beneath, a happily mundane environment undercut with a growing suspicion that something very sinister was developing. After an initial period of sharing personal music influences and interests via emailed sound files and online links, the piece grew from sessions in which we dissected and frankensteined the direction of the music and text as a trio, making group (dis)agreements on volume, phrasing, delivery, and placement and elimination of words. This “Beige House” became, perhaps, a pastiche of our individual conceptions of how a forced journey through the woods might entail.
Beige House Score April 2nd
Beige House Score April 10th
Earlier versions of the song text:
Final version of the song text:
A bibliography of sorts
The Piece:
“Beige House” is a fragmented species of murder ballad, influenced in part by horror film soundtracks and structured on the tension arising from both the musical and thematic dischord therein. The idea was to create a picture of calm and comfort perverted from beneath, a happily mundane environment undercut with a growing suspicion that something very sinister was developing. After an initial period of sharing personal music influences and interests via emailed sound files and online links, the piece grew from sessions in which we dissected and frankensteined the direction of the music and text as a trio, making group (dis)agreements on volume, phrasing, delivery, and placement and elimination of words. This “Beige House” became, perhaps, a pastiche of our individual conceptions of how a forced journey through the woods might entail.
How:
It all started when Nick and I agreed that Mozart and Motörhead deserve equal appreciation.
Interesting as the combination of powdered wigs and leather jackets is, it was not the look we wanted to go for with our Voiceworks project. The appreciation, however, of disagreement and juxtaposition in both poems and in musical compositions was a concept that we thought would be very fruitful to explore. We both already employed techniques in our respective fields that enact this, i.e. whether in snagged melodies and disrupted harmonies, or in the doublespeak of poems that set out to do the same. So we wanted to see what we could create that would carry the weight of double mischief. We wanted beautiful sounds and long tones and thick tonal sedimentation, as well as brightness and clarity and songishness, but we wanted something to sound a bit wrong in it. Out of place, a little sour. Was it possible to do this in both the music and the words, simultaneously? It seemed too easy to set pleasant words to dark music, or vice versa. Nick, for example, wrote later that in “A Little Priest” from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, ”the music is jolly, as the two characters bond for the first time, but the text is talking about making pies of minced people. I don't think I know a jollier song about cannabalism!”
With no set ideas beyond that, we thought that as a first step we would simply start sending each other sound files and links to foster further common interests in music, focusing on pieces of music that reflected what we each wanted, albeit vaguely, to create in a potential project. We chose to start by sharing musical interests rather than words because it was common ground for all three of us; the sharing of poetry samples and suggested readings was to follow not long after.
So it began. Schoenberg’s “Mondestrunken”, bits from HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!, Knut Nystedt’s “Immortal Bach”. And a funny (horrible?) video clip of a parachuting accident. The dark-humoured and well-crafted songs of Randy Newman, the pathologies of Connie Francis, clips of Angela Lansbury singing in Sweeney Todd; the layers and layers of Giacinto Scelsi’s “Konx-Om-Pax”, a long contemplation of light, and the thick sounds of Gyorgy Ligeti. Some unconventional vocal styles of interest were Patty Waters screeching “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair”, Luigi Nono’s garbled tape operas, This Heat’s droning and dial-shifting fuzz in “Radio Prague”, Tanya Tagaq’s intricate throat singing, the mix of choral speaking and singing in Pekka Jalkanen’s neo Finnish folk tunes. We focused on qualities of the pieces that we liked and could adapt, and contemplated what might not be as desirable or that would potentially develop only into something cliché. Perhaps cliché or kitschiness might be something to explore rather than to bar from our project?
Our correspondence was quite extensive, as most of our work had to be done while we were all in different parts of the country. A few snippets that trace the direction of the exchange, before we finally got to meet:
Lucy:
I have been listening to some of the things Nick has sent so far....
My first reaction to Scelsi - Anahit was that I wasnt too enthused about it. I then listened to the Konx om pax which I really liked. The way the texture seemed to build was exciting and I have no idea what its about but I liked the feel that it felt kind of sacred, religious but yet quite dark and sinister. I liked the stillness at the first part of part two as well.
So then I listened to Anahit again... and I appreciated it a lot more. Its very atmospheric with that long passage at the beginning, sounds quite eerie and then the texture gets thicker and thicker which is quite exciting.
I think what is really effective is the contrast between really still passages, silence and very thin texture and then very thick, rich texture and harmony. Makes for a very beautiful atmosphere in my opinion. I really like the Ligeti music. Can totally see why it was used for space oddysey.
As a short person....I am most offended by Randy Newman's 'Short People' ps not really thought it was quite hilarious. I really liked Germany before the war as well, very bleak, and like the idea of the narrative, having a story, whether it be told through words, music or a mixture.
I think musically for our project I am happy to explore spoken text and different ways of using the voice to create atmosphere for example using the voice as other instruments or just to create other sounds...you know what I mean! And different ways of portraying spoken text contrasted with full singing. I also listened to George Crumbs Ancient voices of children at school recently and I loved that. Just to let you know my range I am comfortable high placed and also with coloratura, I do not have an extensive low range, I guess an A flat is about the lowest. But I am willing to explore anything vocally to see what works and what doesn't.
Frances:
I think Lucy has given apt descriptions...i.e. of Konx om pax as “sacred, religious but yet quite dark and sinister”(...) Nick, you had mentioned the idea of using repetition, both in music and in text, i.e. such as that which happens in Berg’s poems. Repetition, or almost more of a permutation, which I think would be cool. anything in particular you are thinking of? Are you thinking in terms of serialism?
I make a few longish texts of some sort, variations of themselves, perhaps, and we could pick out what might be of most interest, single words, even, to repeat or (per)mutate with/in the music (although the exploration of individual parts of a word or the sonic components of it is going into the field of sound poetry, which is not something I’m really into..I have mixed feelings about it and I think it’s been done to death).
Anyway, I’ll get on with playing with letters and we’ll see what comes of it. In the meantime, a cluster of what I figure is recurring in the music thus far, whether thematic or subjectively interpreted or musically constructed:
discomfort, perversion, the grotesque, tragedy AND travesty, trickery, desperation, manipulation, corporeality, viscera, sinister religion, folklore, cold grey blank manky climates/spaces/atmospheres, swarming, hypocrisy, injustice, a lack of differentiation between presence/absence, cracking into what seemed to be singular and one-dimensional sounds or spaces or narratives (revelation of limbo? attack of the dialectical bees..................and that ancient theme about murder by the river (rivers and bodies of water being some of the mot haunted of places/things).
Nick:
“Liked some of the poets you mentioned too. Some dark stuff in there. Liked "In the Guinea Pig Cave" by Aase Berg (how do you feel about using repetition like this, Frances? I love the use of repetition in this poem, and I obviously use repetition a fair amount in my own music), and a few things by Tim Atkins.”
“I do like pieces which feature and play with a very limited number of notes, like Scelsi (Gérard Grisey is another similarish composer), and I sometimes like to do such things in my own music, and our eventual work will be quite short so limiting the material would probably be a good thing. As for repetition, I'm not thinking serially, I'm thinking more in terms of developmental manipulation. I don't like to ever repeat a phrase exactly in my music, I prefer to change things slightly every time you hear it. The only example I can think of with words is that game whereby a letter is replaced, tagged on or removed in each subsequent word, so that it becomes a new word. For example, word, sword, swore, wore, etc. Although what I do is, I think, sometimes closer to elongating letters or sounds. For example, word, wooooooooord, worrrrrrd, worD, etc. You mentioned you didn't like that sort of sound poetry, which is fair enough, I think it's a bit of a cliched example, but it's only the only one I could think off the top of my head.
Other words for your mixing bowl I just skimmed from your e-mail, which I like, but you may or may not want to use: "sufficiently disturbing" (adequately disgusting? suitably uncomfortable? moderately unaesthetically pleasing? aesthetically unpleasing? I'm a big fan of understatement), "mixed feelings" (uncertainty, desire, disgust), done to death.”
Our first meeting consisted of Nick and I sitting in front of a piano with an almost arbitrary text that wasn’t even pretending to be a poem. After weeks of music exchange and a few pointers toward the poetry world, it was time to begin something concrete, and having watched a film featuring a glamourous riverside stabbing, I brought this hodgepodge to Nick as a preliminary experiment, and he later emailed a brief melody as a quick response. We weren’t certain at the time whether to use any of our material and considered it to be a first active attempt to create a piece, but in the end both the melody and the basic vocabulary of the text remained.
Frances:
Nick, what you've sent is quite cool so far. I laughed (in a good way), as I've been watching some (rubbish) Korean horror films in the last two days, and the soft, lullaby-ish sounds creeping through Nick's fragment featured, in a similar way, is in these films. It was one of the aspects of the films that actually worked well. Incidentally (!), I had tried to use some film-ish "technique" in the repeated descriptions of the mysterious "is filmed..." river murder in the text. Ha. I've decided to write about murders and film.
The text’s theme, for better or worse, set a tighter frame for the project. Visual cues became important for developing sounds and for extending what was a disastrous clutter of words into a quasi-narrative that traced the poem’s corruption of cupcakes in a beige, “normal” house into vomit, into being dragged away, and into drowning: the bleakness of Mark Rothko’s paintings, the chaos and grotesque of Hieronymous Bosch, the apparent kitsch but nevertheless frightening beauty of Nosferatu, the coldness of 2001 A Space Odyssey, the gore, humour, and destruction of bourgeois characters in zombie flicks - these further characterized what was happening inside this frame. Were we making a painting? A film, or a film soundtrack? Not quite, but there was potential here for setting a jagged narrative alongside and within an aural landscape that was also visible. Thus the interaction of text and music in our collaboration was mediated by what we could see or imagine seeing, and not only what we could hear or want to hear.
I completed a poetic variation on the theme of the fateful events that disrupted the “beige house” of the text - five poems that circled around a movement from the pleasantness of cupcakes to the sickness of cupcakes, a gradual nausea and confusing of ending up in the simultaneous chaos and silence of the forest, and an eventual disappearance into water, all without the present of definable characters or specific details. The variations in the poem were based on experiments with verbal sounds and rhythms, combination and recombination of assonants and consonants that I imagined would be useful in the scoring of actual music and its performance. Proposing a film cum composition and discussion night with Nick and Lucy - I was hideously late and we never got around to the films - I arrived to find that the two of them had already committed the perfect murder by butchering my variations and reshaping them into one page of text. Their poem was superior, and we used this script to establish the foundations of the score Nick was to compose. Then it was straight to the piano to start the music and to begin outlining the musical score alongside the now-established lyrical score.
For example, we discussed which words would require more stress, or which should ultimately be eliminated. How much literal silence should occur at the poem’s ambiguous still moment in the woods? Did Lucy want to speak parts of the narrative? How much should the music mirror the text and vice versa? Perhaps the music needed to carry the surge of uncomfortable sensations via bright and dark sounds - including through the choice of instruments, viz. the extremes of pitch to give an illusion of supposed brightness and darkness. We then agreed that the contrast between “the pink of sick” and “the pink of cupcakes” needed special attention, and that a very subtle, unsavoury and off-key vocal slip would be most appropriate for the shift from one to the other. This was a moment where literal musical enactment of words entered as an almost cliché component, yet the result of Nick’s final composition muddled this by maintaining sweetness and creeping, swirly lower pitches in the instrumentation below Lucy’s vocal lines. Lucy and I suggested areas in which volume would be manipulated in the music, or where and how climactic moments might be achieved in accordance with the action of the text. Nick would play chords and possibilities on the piano - Lucy and I would applaud or boo.
The entire collaboration occurred with a conscious effort to come to consensus by pulling ourselves out of our respective roles as composer, poet, and singer. We each took on active roles in slashing text, sounds, ideas, etc., recognizing and pointing what worked and what didn’t in each others’ contributions and concepts. The text on its own is obscure enough to be a narrative of someone having had too many drinks at a birthday party, but as a group we tried to engineer it further so that something would be off-kilter just enough to turn the reception of the poem into one of unease. Something sour. The music then thickens that sensation, canceling the potential humour of the poem with its cinematic elements, driving forward from initial fragmentary song and melody into a tangle of branches, grass, and sharp stabs of dark sound that shadows the test. We strove to participate and discover each other’s methods of practice and perception rather than simply responding to individual efforts, even though the difficulties of coordinating meetings resulted in a fair amount of individual production and responses that we had hoped to avoid, and the ultimate execution of each part remained an individual process. Perhaps this is due to the solitary nature of writing, whether composing music or composing text - even the rehearsal of vocal technique is based on individual labour. A collaborative process bent on eliminating these divided roles is in many ways an ideal means of producing a project, but I think that our approach of sharing and partially exchanging roles and subjective perceptions of a wide variety of artistic media has made our project successful, both as a collaborative act and as a completed work.
It was our initial appreciation of and interest in juxtapositions, and what can develop as a result of opposites smashed together - like an irreversible chemical reaction - that provided the initial model and theme for our project. We were fortunate to have this agreement about disagreements being fascinating in advance; it allowed us to work within areas we were already somewhat familiar with as individuals, and allowed for our quick establishment of a general theme of discomfort and disturbance for the project.
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