Cassandra Voices

Tag: Garrett Sholdice

  • Musician of the Month: Caterina Schembri

    On November 14th I am releasing my debut album Sea Salt & Turpentine on the Ergodos label with a launch concert at the National Concert Hall. The album is a collection of chamber and vocal works I composed over the past two and a half years for Ficino Ensemble and Michelle O’Rourke in rotating subsets. It also features original lyrics and text written by me.

    The music is an intimate portrait of my inner landscapes and explores some of my main creative interests: a focus on colour and nuance, rich soundscapes, naturalistic imagery, obnubilated symbols, connections with the written word, and literary allusions translated into music. With this music, I want to create a sense of suspension, spaciousness, and introspection.

    And with water printed unto my bones
    I break asunder from the flock…

    Out of this light,
    Into this dusk.

    The title piece, Sea salt and turpentine, plays last and it carries the soul of the album. Written for string quartet and two voices, Sea salt and turpentine is about finding a sense of refuge in nature and creativity. It is mapped as a ritual of individual affirmation and sensorial connectivity with the landscape. I find solace and moments of deep reflection and stimulation in proximity to the ocean; this piece condenses in one moment a constellation of rebirths. Its germinal idea alludes to Virginia Woolf’s poetic novel The Waves, a work that has been very influential to my creative work and perception of the world.

    I decided to open the album with a solo viola piece for Nathan Sherman, creative director of the ensemble and key collaborator in this project. Soft charcoal over moonstone is the opening gate to the sound universe of the album. It explores the idea of chiaroscuro through the viola, contrasting light versus shade and all possibilities in-between. The title establishes a visual reference, the charcoal as a dark drawing tool over a shiny luminous material, the moonstone. These two opposing forces emerge in many shades providing the palette and arc of the piece.

    Nathan Sherman recording Soft charcoal over moonstone.

    When light bleeds out of the day.
    To see your gestures blur,
    Deform,
    Wolfsbane blue, underwater
    Screams cross a long distance
    Embellishing themselves.

    These eyes, these hips, these hands
    Clothes spread wide and mermaid-like
    Let the light flicker mercurial…
    Let the light flicker and fade.

    There is a willow for voice, viola clarinet, and harp is the first piece I composed in this collection, written in 2022 as part of the Ficino Ensemble Composers Workshop it was also my first link to Ficino Ensemble. Depicting Ophelia’s death, the text of There is a willow opens with a quote from Hamlet and then evolves into original text. I wanted to explore her experience first-hand, things her eyes might have seen, but also thoughts that could have crossed her mind. I am fascinated by the timelessness of this character and her representation of the feeling of surrendered disembodiment that a first heartbreak can generate. The text is scattered with images of flowers that carry a symbolic meaning, a secret message.

    This idea of floriography (the meanings of flowers) was the main inspiration for the visual aspect of the album, flowers and trees that carry a symbolic meaning are found in the lyrics of three of the pieces. To create the cover, I made cyanotypes using flowers I collected around Dublin, the dry flowers were then organised on top of the finished cyanotype and beautifully captured in photo by my dear friend Néstor Romero Clemente.

    Sea salt & Turpentine – album cover.

    Cold storm pines tangle and expand
    Tracing maps of empty cities,
    Empty palms.

    My fingers follow scarlet roads
    Of chins, of ears,
    Of mouths that turn to stone

    If I wake up slowly,
    I’m off the shore.

    The third track of the album, I wake up in the night when I dream in black and white explores the elusive nature of dreams and the arrested rhythms of broken expectations. The musical gestures trace blooming lines that crest and die out traversing the liminal space between reality and dream, disclosing fragments of the darker corners of the mind often ignored during daytime. The visual idea of an unknown silhouette coming in and out of focus without fully revealing itself, beautiful and slightly unsettling.

    This piece was written for String Quartet and speaker, it features a segment of spoken word. I loved working on this element as it was the first time I wrote a piece of standalone text in this context. The text was brewing in my head for a while and came together on a winter afternoon in Paris.

    This piece is one of three in the album that include vocal elements, I was very lucky to work with vocalist Michelle O’Rourke on all three of them. Her care for nuance, her versatility, and her understanding of intention and meaning elevate the text and the music.

    Paris, winter, 2023.

    The full instrumental ensemble comes together for It was only half as far.

    In the twenty-first poem of Pictures of the Gone World (1955), Lawrence Ferlinghetti opens up with the line: ‘Heaven // was only half as far that night // at the poetry recital…’ and proceeds to describe a scene that to distant eyes could seem simple or mundane, but that encapsulates an instant of bliss to him. I always loved this image of the wide distance to the ether shrinking, a vivid and clear representation of those moments of fleeting elation that often come unexpectedly, in ordinary scenarios, leaving deep imprints behind. It was only half as far echoes the times in which this sentiment shone a light on me.

    This album is the result of a collective effort, it has been a great joy to work with a team of exceptional musicians; Ficino Ensemble and Michelle O’Rourke gave the richest and most soulful performances I could have wished for. The care and artistry in the capture and production of the record are all in the hands of co-producer Garrett Sholdice and sound engineer Edu Prado, with the final touch from mastering engineer Christoph Stickel.

    Sea salt & Turpentine found its perfect home in Ergodos. The label, founded by composers Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and Garrett Sholdice is a beautiful ecosystem of careful curation for music projects that I have long admired and that has been a very active part of my creative life. I am proud to see my music there and always grateful to the two powerhouses in this operation Garrett and Benedict.

    Link to Album Launch at the National Concert Hall on Thursday November 14th.

    Feature Image: Néstor Romero Clemente

  • Musician of the Month: Garrett Sholdice

    Earlier this month I released The Blue Light, a selection of solo piano and chamber pieces spanning the last decade, performed by pianist Michael McHale and musicians from Crash Ensemble. The album offers a range of sound-worlds, and I like to think that I am open to the possibility of my music changing, but I realise that there seem to be some constants in what I am doing: I want to create highly concentrated, meditative – even ritualistic – experiences. Maybe I always will.

    In 2006, I co-founded a record label and music production company called Ergodos with composer Benedict Schlepper-Connolly. We have co-curated dozens of projects together, and my work as a composer has often involved composing for specific contexts (such as, e.g., the Ergodos Musicians project I Call to You). For The Blue Light, my first solo album, I wanted to try to keep a sense of curated “coherence” across the record, even though the album is essentially a compilation.

    The album opens with a solo piano piece composed last year: Und weinen, und lächeln. This short toccata takes its inspiration from “Des Fischers Liebesglück”, a song by Franz Schubert with words by Karl Gottfried von Leitner. The final stanza reads: “Und weinen / Und lächeln, / Und meinen, / Enthoben / Der Erde, / Schon oben, / Schon drüben zu sein.” An English translation: “Weeping, / smiling, / we think / we are relieved of the earth, / and are already up above, / in another place.”

    Audio embed: use code below to embed “Des Fischers Liebesglück” by Franz Schubert from Spotify

    Audio embed: use code below to embed Und weinen, und lächeln by Garrett Sholdice from Bandcamp

    St Dunstan-in-the-East for piano, two violins, viola & cello was also composed last year, although the idea for the piece was sparked several years ago, whilst visiting London. St Dunstan-in-the-East was a church on St Dunstan’s hill in the City of London. It was mostly destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. After the war, the decision was taken to turn the ruins into a public garden. The space is unassuming and beautiful.

    St Dunstan in the East, City of London.

    My piece St Dunstan-in-the-East represents an attempt to create meaning out of fragmentary materials, perhaps in a way that is resonant with the idea of transforming a ruined building into a public urban space. Looking back over the notebook I used whilst sketching the piece, I noticed the following entry: “where is it going / what is it made from / why is it here / thick / thin / husks / the beauty of damaged, fragmentary things…”

    Sketches for St Dunstan-in-the-East, from the composer’s notebook, 2022.

    The next work on the album, Das blaue Licht for two violins, viola & cello dates from 2013, when I was based in Berlin. The title (which means “the blue light” in German) refers to the luminous blue of the sky above Danziger Strasse in northeast Berlin, during the hot July weeks in which I wrote the piece. The first part of Das blaue Licht features intricate pizzicato “hocketing”: a brief (ec)static dance. In the second part a series of chordal “breaths” eventually lead to a gentle song inspired by Javanese gamelan.

    Berlin, Danziger Straße.

     

    Often, at the ends of my pieces, melodies emerge as if finally remembered or unearthed. (This can be heard in the second part of Das blaue Licht.) I think this comes from my earliest musical experiences as a boy chorister in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, where sung melody was a daily experience. It was here that I first got to know choral music of the late Renaissance, such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. The weaving of melodic lines in this music always seems somehow miraculous to me.

    At the beginning of the Tallis excerpt above, the soprano part (“S. P.” = “sexta pars”) and alto part (“Sup.” = “superius”) are both “divided” into two, a technique known as “gymel” in Medieval and Renaissance vocal music. This technique was the inspiration for my viola and cello duet, Gymel, composed in 2018. In my piece, the cello and viola begin in unison, singing as one. This unison line then bifurcates, and the individual personalities of the two instruments emerge.

    The album closes, as it opens, with a solo piano piece: Prelude No. 12, composed in 2017. This is a soliloquy: just me, spinning out a single unbroken melodic line. The American poet Frank O’Hara talked about writing “personal poems”; this is maybe a “personal piece”. When I wrote it, I prefaced the score with these lines from his poem, “To Gottfried Benn”: “Poetry is not instruments / that work at times / then walk out on you / laugh at you old / get drunk on you young / poetry’s part of yourself”.

    For me, as a composer working with notation in the classical tradition, the score is not the music – only the performers can create this. It has been my good fortune to work with such extraordinary performers for this record: pianist Michael McHale, and musicians from Crash Ensemble – violinists Diamanda La Berge Dramm and Larissa O’Grady, violist Ed Creedon and cellist Kate Ellis. The sensitivity with which they interpreted these scores was more than I could hope for.

    Similarly, I am in indebted to the most diligent and incisive audio team: assistant producer Caterina Schembri, recording and post-production engineer Eduardo Prado, and mastering engineer Christoph Stickel. Often, for my music, the challenge is to somehow translate the atmosphere of a live acoustic performance experience into a digital recording. Thanks to this team, the intimacy and ritual of live performance comes across on this record.

    Album cover for The Blue Light by Garrett Sholdice, featuring a watercolour by Neil Sholdice. (Cábán i n-aice na coille, Loch Coirib, 2019)

    Garrett Sholdice is a composer and a co-director of the Dublin-based record label and music production company Ergodos. See https://soundcloud.com/garrett-sholdice and https://ergodos.ie. His album The Blue Light is available to purchase (download / CD) from https://ergodos.bandcamp.com/album/the-blue-light.

    Feature Image: Néstor Romero Clemente)