A Closer Listen
With Stills 03, London’s Strings and Tins collective completes its Tate Britain trilogy, in which each track imagines a painting as a film still in search of a score. Artists were given carte blanche to wander around the London gallery and to choose their own subjects, which makes each piece a labor of love. Together, the EPs are long enough to form an album, which we hope will be produced and sold in the lobby, perhaps with an eleventh track inspired by the cover art of Camille Rousseau.
Briton Rivière had never been to the Arctic, but was fascinated by the exploits of the explorers. “Beyond Man’s Footsteps” is nearly surrealistic, as befits the product of a keen imagination; glacial structures jut and curl as a red sun sets against a violet background beneath an amber sky. The lone polar bear sets the template for “The Lion King”s famous image, which would arrive a century later. Ironically, the bear is based on one seen at the London Zoo.
By adapting the scene, Will Cohen underlines the leaps taken by the Stills series. Just as Rivière speculates about the landscape, Cohen speculates about Rivière and his creation. The track starts in synthetic isolation, as dark ambient drippings precede the entrance of majestic strings. First arrives a swiftness, and then a slowness. While the colder sounds return; the other instruments are never again as ebullient, coalescing into a somber elegy. Rivière “looks” at the Arctic for its beauty; Cohen imagines its demise. And what do we feel when we hear the musician, looking at the art, from an artist who imagined his scene?
“The Soul of a Soulless City” (which was originally titled “New York – an Abstraction”) heads in the opposite temporal direction. In 1920, the prophetic Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson imagined a jam-packed city, in which the skyline was barely visible. The rising railway, which seems to curve directly into a building, is an emblem of progress, the Futurist design a sign of its times. Nevinson would later grow disenchanted with the city, and Jim Stewart seeks to capture this dichotomy of hope and disappointment. The words “last stop on this train” are repeated, first robotic, then human, then stuttered, a blur of presentations that may represent the turning of technology. The music shifts from jazz to modern composition. The tone grows warm, then cools again. In the warm section, even the words become welcoming: “All aboard!” In the third minute, ev-ery-thing-slows: the train, the track, the progress. The early words return. A piano cries. New York City is many things to many people; as Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five rap, “New York, New York, big city of dreams, but everything in New York ain’t always what it seems.” Stewart never regained his enchantment, but Stewart restores it in a kind, posthumous manner.
Paul Feiler’s “Morvah” (1958) may suggest disconnected piano keys or birch trees in winter, but is inspired by “the sea and the rocks seen from a great height.” Simon Whiteside‘s interpretation is the most cinematic of the entire series, the right note on which to close. The dramatic, propulsive music begins like a frigate chase and turns into a battle on a raging sea. Wild strings dance among caffeinated brass until a mid-piece crash reveals a harp, chimes, a romantic sub-theme like a stolen kiss between conflicts. Feiler looks at the sea and sees lines; Whiteside looks at the lines and hears crescendos; we hear the crescendos and think of movies. The music has accomplished what it set out to do, turning paintings into stills, then pressing Play. (Richard Allen)
Fri Jun 23 00:01:18 GMT 2023