This year's New Music Dublin programme features the world premiere of Cryptid by Bekah Simms, written during her time as Composer in Residence with Crash Ensemble and described by the composer as 'blurring the sonic relationship with the ensemble and its electronic doppelgangers to create a strange and surreal composite creature'. She traces the evolution of her piece below.
Cryptid is a work for ten players and electronics written during my time as artist-in-residence with Crash Ensemble. The residency period allowed an extremely thorough and generous period of creative research which saw over a year of workshopping, recording, sketching, composing, and revising.
Building off of my first work written for Crash, entitled metamold, Cryptid further blurs the sonic relationship with the ensemble and its electronic doppelgangers to create a strange and surreal composite creature: one with recognizable features captured in a hazy, uncertain photograph.
It is a substantial piece - approximately 32 minutes in 5 movements:
I wing
II spot
III maw, tongue
IV tooth
V hoof
Cryptid’s development started with inviting each member of Crash to bring a preferred sonic vocabulary with which to write: sounds and playing techniques that each performer found compelling to "play around" with, whether a composer had asked for it in a previous piece or not.
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Watch: Meet composer Bekah Simms
Each sound was then recorded during a workshop session, sometimes in isolation and sometimes in small groups playing off and imitating each other's brought sounds. These recordings are the source of both the acoustic performed parts of the piece as well as the processed electroacoustic elements in the speakers.
These self-selected sounds and gestures totally form the foundation of the work, allowing it to truly be for and about the members of Crash themselves and their particular musical inclinations: representative colours and skins stitched into a single beast, moving and sounding as one.
Especially highlighted is the relationship between the acoustic grand piano as played by Eliza McCarthy and her electronic just intonation counterpart – a solid, resonating body on stage and its phantom in the brush. The relationship between the live equal temperament piano and its microtonal electronic imitator was at the heart of the sonic interactions in metamold, and revealed itself as a musical space in which I was extremely keen to continue playing with in Cryptid.
As such, two of the five movements of the new work are short interludes for solo piano and electronics where the electronics present a distorted mirror image of the pianist’s shape back to her. Even when the ensemble reconvenes in the other movements, Eliza’s material and its alternate, "artificial" versions occupy a special and primary role in establishing the constructed environment. It isn’t a piano concerto, but the skeleton of the work certainly suggests a piano profile.
Throughout its duration, Cryptid navigates through a variety of deeply contrasting textures: bristles and skin and tongue that, in their entirety, create something imagined and organic, but with shades of the fantastical and surreal.
Changing States, featuring the world premiere of Cryptid by Bekah Simms, and the Irish premiere of Finnish composer Antti Auvinen's Boundary Bourrée, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on, as part of this year's New Music Dublin programme - find out more here.
