Tessellatum (2015)

Related works:
   Tessellatum
   Tessellatum (Version II)

Combination A
4 live viols + 7 recorded viols + 3 recorded violas

Combination B
As many live lines as one can get + remainder recorded

Combination C
1 live viol + remainder recorded

The recorded backing multi-track was completed by Nadia Sirota and Liam Byrne in Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, Iceland in December 2015, supervised by the composer and Paul Evans, engineer.

The multi-track for Combination A is available from the publisher. Please contact Wise Music if you wish to perform Combination B or C, for further details. Listen to Tessellatum on the Q2 stream, beginning at 00:44:45
Listen to Nadia Sirota and Donnacha Dennehy discuss Tessellatum, beginning at 00:41:35

Composer Note:

I composed Tessellatum in various stages. Originally I was supposed to complete it by the summer of 2015 for a recording session in Iceland at the end of August, but I became hopelessly delayed by all the complications involved in rehearsing and fine-tuning my first opera The Last Hotel in time for its premiere in Edinburgh in August 2015, that by the time I got to Reykjavik at the end of the month, I'd say that Tessellatum was only about a third done. We had been due to record the piece in its entirety then! Thanks to the benevolent support however of Greenhouse Studios, Nadia Sirota and Liam Byrne, we decided to come back at the end of December to finish the recording of what would then be the complete piece. Never did an unforessen, and not absolutely ideal, turn of events work out so well for the resulting piece, as during the recording session in August, I hit upon an idea that would transform the way I thought of the piece: to put everything I'd written in canon so as to produce a massive wall of counterpoint that veered between being finely detailed and singularly overwhelming simultaneously. My long-held dream of doing something approaching Spem in Alium (the wonderful 40-part motet by Tallis) suddenly had a chance of being realized! To begin with, I just did this in a very rough way. I asked Paul Evans, the consistently obliging sound engineer, if we could try out how a delayed imitation of everything might sound in ProTools. I was giddy with the result, and went away after that summer session to render this rough idea elegant, by writing for 4 violas and 11 viols in full score. By the way, in that instant, when I tried out this hunch in ProTools, I had a flash of what it must have been like to do a rock album in the good old studio days - the way that the studio experience could transform initial ideas in a seriously creative fashion. In a way, it's not far fetched to think that I wrote this piece the way bands create an album in the studio.

 All the same, between August and December, the notation for Tessellatum became enormously involved, and it meant that the 5-day recording session at the end of the year bordered on being absolutely exhausting, as all 15 parts were done by just two players: Nadia on viola, and Liam on viol. One result of the new approach meant that I could explore in much greater depth the overtone-based harmony that I was using. I often think of harmonies as bleeding into timbre, and vice versa, as timbres coagulating into harmonies, as I think of both in relation to the same phenomenon, the natural overtone series. I had followed an 'overtone' approach right at the start, but it became so much more extreme because of the added voices that at some stages I make use of naturally played overtones up to the 32nd partial. Of course, this added an extra edge of concentration to our recording sessions! Liam even made a series of pictures which he posted on Instagram showing the various contortions he was making with his frets in order to get the desired tuning on his viol. Moreover, he often retuned his viol, with alacrity I might add, to a different fundamental in order to capture everything we needed. In the recording studio, because we had the option of making different takes, I could be as utopian as I liked in my desire for exact overtone tunings but when it came to preparing the version for the first live performance of the piece at Symphony Space in New York in February 2016, I was obliged to make practical parts for live violists. This involved a level of mathematical/strategic thinking to which I am not normally accustomed, but I was very lucky to have a generous and unstinting advisor in Liam Byrne! Eventually, with Liam's assistance, I hit on the solution of having three of the viols tuned down to A 392 Hz, and one tuned at A 440hz. One great virtue of the viol is the fact that you can easily shift and add frets, so in order to present as much of the microtonal flavor of the piece live, each player has a number of frets added which enable them to achieve the very precise pitches that I was looking for. The combination of different tunings and the added frets actually allowed a very wide palette of the overtone-inflected pitches to be achieved.

 Some 'seeds' from Renaissance music influenced my approach in this piece, not least in this choice of a kind of super 'viol consort'. There are small references to Ockeghem's 40-part motet Deo Gratias, and to a rhythmic layering used by Picforth in a surprisingly prescient little piece for five parts. Alfred Schnittke used to talk of his identifiable musical objects rusting. I love that metaphor. I think of these little gems rusting too in surprising ways in this context that reveal a new kind of luminosity not evident in the original setting. Of course, Schnittke was much more concerned with a kind of polystylistic irony, whereas I'm more concerned with a kind of luminosity. In fact I am obsessed with luminosity in music. It influences most of my decisions: about harmony and timbre, process and even form. An abiding influence on the way I thought about light in this piece comes from the way the light changes radically through the seasons in Ireland. Despite living with this perennially until quite recently, this never ceased to fascinate me.