Leviathan (2015)

Leviathan for baritone saxophone and percussion grew out of a collaboration between Howard and scapegoat, (saxophonist Joshua Hyde and percussionist Noam Bierstone) and conversations with mathematicians Lasse Rempe and Alexandre DeZotti at the University of Liverpool. Inspiration also came from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, and the baritone saxophone itself which, in Howard’s words, ‘looks rather like a sea monster’.

Leviathan explores elements at war with each other: the collision of opposites; the unpredictability of polarities; pure or split sound; dirty sound; the fundamental and partials of each instrument, serrated, grated, aggressive percussive noise. 

‘I wanted to create a meaningful language from the collision of the saxophone’s split tones and the cymbal’s multiphonics’. Emily Howard 

And so Leviathan embarks on a mysterious, undersea journey, in which disembodied shafts of sound flash and gleam through an aqueous gloom, rasping with the icy breath of two metallic monsters. 

Helen Wallace 2016