TTTCD001
Jack Sheen – Solo for Cello
The Trilogy Tapes’ first CD presents a studio recording of Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello, a 35’ work written for Anton Lukoszevieze, the cellist, artist, and Director of the group Apartment House, renowned for their recent recordings of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Jim O’Rourke, amongst many others.
Throughout the piece, the cello is microtonally retuned and prepared with a heavy metal mute, thinning out it’s sound by dampening the instrument’s natural resonance. The majority of the piece is played on harmonics, a technique where the cellist only lightly touches the strings with their finger rather than with the full pressure required to normally produce the rich tones associated with the instrument. Instead, the resulting sound is hollow and unstable, but bright and glistening.
Similarly, the bow is wielded with an extreme and abnormally delicate touch, shunning traditional cello playing technique to bring out the airy sounds of the bow’s hair whisping across the strings where it can balance as an equal with the pitches as they flicker in and out of focus.
Although informed by slow moving and long-form music associated with practices ranging from deep-listening to ambient and drone, Solo for Cello fills these spacious moulds with hyperactive, virtuosic, and relentless music. Dominated by rapidly descending arpeggios and splintered, pointillistic isorhythms – an early form an algorithmic composition originating from the 14th century – the piece presents panels of knotted rhythmic patterns that constantly expand and contract on an almost imperceptible level. Mechanical repetition is shunned in favour of imperfect reoccurrence, punctuated at times by temperamental dirges stretched out to near breaking point.
Rather than offering a gestural counterpoint to the cello’s material, the electronics provide a background wash to its Intensely kinetic activity: different shades of noise and heavily processed field recordings combine in a variety of fragile sonic blocks that subtly shift our perception of the acoustic sound, like suddenly placing the instrument in a series of different environments.
Solo for Cello is an intense but hypnotic listen, at once reaching out from the 17th century viol suites of Marin Marais, to the systematic rhythmic spasms of Mark Fell, and the radiant, unfurling journeys of Eliane Radique. Best listened to quietly on speakers placed as far away as possible.
Press
“Sheen’s Solo for Cello (and fixed audio) was the highlight, an extensive, ghostly work played by Apartment House’s indefatigable artistic director, Anton Lukoszevieze. Imagine a baroque dance suite – with the familiar figurations of arpeggios, quick finger work and string crossing – played muted and whispered a few galaxies away, and you get the idea.”
(The Observer, review of the Wigmore Hall performance by Fiona Maddocks)
“… an elegantly unassuming title for a piece that’s half an hour long and shifts your perception of the very fast and the very slow, and quite a lot of other dichotomies too… plunge into a beguiling and perception warping world [of] delirious energies so forensically but elementally produced.”
(Tom Service, BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show)
Programme note for the world premiere performance at London’s Wigmore Hall
“Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello and fixed audio is an extended exploration of the resonant body of the cello, but also a kind of flickering, glitchy and incessant ‘moto perpetuo’, of extreme intensity and a delicate beauty. The cello has a particular scordatura tuning, which creates an enigmatic harmonic ‘space’ to its sounding throughout the work. I am reminded of Horatio Radulescu’s sound icons, which are grand pianos laid on their sides and bowed, creating strange and ethereal webs of microtonal harmonic fields. As the cellist constantly bows the heavily muted cello with various arpeggiated freneticism’s, the instrument emits a particular halo of harmonic resonances creating a spectral and ghostly effect, deceptive and illusory. The work gradually morphs into different sections, each with their own particular motivic identity, at times accompanied by an audio playback of various densities. The latter sections of the work have a baroque-like lightness and ornamental quality, but do not allay the dramatic incisiveness of the the work, which ends with a final enigmatic spasm of sounds.”
(Anton Lukoszevieze, October 2022)
Biography
Jack Sheen is a composer and conductor from Manchester, England. His music spans orchestral works to performance and sound installations, regularly working with leading orchestras, ensembles, and spaces ranging from the Royal Opera House, London Symphony Orchestra, and BBC Philharmonic, to the Venice Biennale, V&A Museum, and Basel’s Schaulager gallery.
