Music Space Reflection (2006)

The music, too, is a collection of shards, vertical fragments (derived from a cycle of 12-note chords) that Bainbridge compares to the differently angled “mental snapshots” one takes on entering a new space, and that gradually reveal a unified structure. Just as the museum shards form a building that stands up despite seeming to fly apart, so the musical ones are held firmly in place, yet their fragmentariness is never remotely disguised. Silences, often long, punctuate them. The continuity is an elemental, stop-start ritual, governed by the geometry of the Golden Section. What creates the beauty of the piece, which Bainbridge regards essentially as a live sound installation, is the ultra-refined instrumental coloration obtained from four identical sextets (flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin and cello), disposed in a circle around the room, the conductor in the centre, and modified and diffused by the ultra-sophisticated real-time electronics of Sound Intermedia.

...my memory of the première (followed almost immediately by the deuxième) will be one of rare poetic austerity.

The main attraction was the first London performance of a new work by Simon Bainbridge, Music Space Reflection - Manchester. Attracted by the spatial effects achieved by the architect Daniel Liebeskind, he tries in this piece to marry music and architecture. Much of the score is silent, just as a building is filled with empty space, and the music takes the form of fragments of sound, sometimes echoing round the hall as live electronics.

Realising that, when absorbing a new space, the eye takes many mental "snapshots" from a range of vantage points, Bainbridge attempts to translate this process sonically, into a series of harmonically ambivalent musical fragments which, like a kaleidoscope, gradually accumulate and impose themselves on the ear.

Music Space Reflection - Manchester remained a coolly ambiguous though fascinating experience.

The orchestra played in four equally balanced blocks across the platform, amplified sensitively by microphones and speakers in unusual formations, such as above and behind the audience. The resonances were quite bizarre, genuinely imparting a sense that sound was coming from four dimensions, and adding a low, rumble giving a depth of sound not otherwise possible from conventional instruments. It felt as though we were hearing the very pulse of the earth. Sounds Intermedia, led by David Shephard, were playing electronics as an instrument, integral to the growth of the music. They expanded and deepened what the orchestra played. This was far more interesting than devices like adding pre-recorded sound.

The music unfolds against this deep reverberation, moving swiftly in different directions, sometimes creating angular dissonances, sometimes rotating in whimsical flurries. Sometimes the sounds turn on a sudden pivot, changing direction as if they were rounding corners. You don’t need visual clues, but you can “feel” glass and metal in the clear, sharp textures, solid forms against transparent. This is very expressive music, though not at all “programmatic”: it’s far too imaginative and quirky. Just as architecture is a means of giving shape to “empty” space, even silence is part of Bainbridge’s concept. At the end, Masson conducts bars where sounds gradually dissipate, but even then, there’s a structure to the way they fade into the computer-enhanced hum, so understated that only sensitive ears can pick it up. In nature, too, there are many sounds almost imperceptible to human ears, but they are there, nonetheless, and affect us subliminally.

Anyone who has stood in the blank darkness of Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin will understand why a composer might strive to express its austere mood in music. This was not the only building that inspired Simon Bainbridge's Music Space Reflection. Another was Liebeskind's Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, where the work was premiered. [...] The full range of aural possibilities promised by the composer before the performance, such as echoes tossed electronically around the hall was (...) exquisitely played by the London Sinfonietta.

The piece is strikingly different from anything Bainbridge has composed before. Much of his music is linear, deriving its weight and complexity from the layering of instrumental lines. But the emphasis in Music Space Reflection is on the vertical, as if to establish an aural point of reference within the dizzying geometries of Liebeskind's buildings. Music Space Reflection is a restrained, bleak processional, whose mood, as Bainbridge revealed here in a platform interview, was influenced by the sombre purposes of so many of the architect's buildings.

What begins as a halting series of chords, shared between the four spatially separated sextets of instrumentalists (all identical, with pairs of woodwind, brass and strings), gradually thaws into some of Bainbridge's typically busy filigree. Yet the music remains static and meditative, though there is a brief climax, coloured by electronic bell sounds and brass, before the piece relapses into a final silence. Among the War Museum's display cases and icons of war - a field gun, a tank, a fire tender - it made a curious, rather plaintive statement.