The Center for 21st Century music is
delighted to welcome PhD alumnus Aaron Cassidy for a guest lecture and
masterclass on Friday, February 16. Currently Professor of Composition at the
University of Huddersfield in England, Cassidy serves as Director of its Centre
for Research in New Music. After completing his PhD at UB in
2003 under the tutelage of David Felder, now artistic director of the Center
for 21st Century Music, Cassidy has gone on to notable successes not
only as composer, but also as a pedagogue and arts administrator.
His compositions have been performed, commissioned,
and recorded widely. Many of the world’s most highly regarded new music
specialist ensembles have performed his works: ELISION,
Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Musikfabrik, EXAUDI, Ictus Ensemble, ensemble recherche, Talea Ensemble, and Kairos,
Diotima, and JACK string quartets. Since his doctoral student days at UB,
Cassidy’s music has been presented and commissioned by prestigious cultural
institutions, most notably the Bludenz and Donaueschingen festivals and PRS
Foundation’s 20×12/London Cultural Olympiad 2012 project; the latter project
received mainstream press coverage reaching
far beyond the art music scene. Much of Cassidy’s output has been released on
CD, including on a portrait CD on NEOS, with additional works on the NMC, HCR,
and New Focus labels.
As Professor at the University of Huddersfield, Cassidy
has played a key role in building its Centre for Research in New Music
(CeReNeM), of which he is now Director, succeeding Liza Lim in 2017. From its
beginnings in 2006, the Centre has grown to be a major presence in the international
new music scene, including running its own record label, a peer-reviewed journal, and an international research network. Cassidy has
played a crucial role here, for instance in curating a concert series with
guest artists and ensembles in residence, running the post-graduate seminar and
lecture series, organizing symposia, and cultivating partnerships with
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Electric Spring, and universities
across the globe. The video below gives a brief impression of CeReNeM’s
activities.
Over the past two decades, Cassidy’s music has methodically
and exhaustively explored what it means to make music when:
1. The
primary content of musical sound is closely bound up with the physical process
of producing that sound (“the way in which a sound is made, and the sound it
makes, are fundamentally intertwined”).
2. The
physical process of making a sound (bowing, fingering, embouchure, etc.) is fragmented
into its component parts, which are “decoupled,” or treated temporally and
morphologically independently of each other.
In this music, the notated score does not codify a
sound object as much as it initiates unpredictable collisions between independent
layers of instrumental or vocal sound production.
This is music that takes delight in the embodied, live
nature of musical performance; it is written as much for the performer as the
listener.
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| Cassidy's The Crutch of Memory for solo bowed string instrument |
In this project, a key challenge for the composer is how
to best communicate musical substance to the performer. Over the past two
decades, Cassidy has refined his approach to notation in a variety of ways,
above all by seeking out a notational image that prioritizes the physicality of
performance.
In early works, Cassidy strove to move beyond
descriptive notations—conventional Western notations describing an ideal
sounding result—towards prescriptive notations (AKA tablature) specifying
physical actions. While his 2002 UB PhD dissertation String Quartet notates fingering in traditional Western pitch
notation, his 2004 work The Crutch of
Memory created a prescriptive tablature notation diagramming hand position,
finger spacing, and fingerings independently. In the latter piece, pitch
results from interaction between these autonomous physical phenomena; as such,
it could not be notated in another way.
Having more overtly foregrounded music’s physical
process of production, Cassidy then moved to simplify the visual layout of his
scores. While most of his early works notated different layers of physical
motion on separate staves, the composer writes
that “in the Second String Quartet these movements
are compressed onto a single, multi-coloured stave…My goal with the notation of
Second String Quartet was to maintain the same level of gestural independence
in the physical, choreographic, sound-production component of the work while
developing a much more unified, integrated approach to the notation of that
physical material.” As a solution, Cassidy arrived at “a multi-coloured stave
that indicated the complete length of the string…[with] all indications of
movements of both left and right hands are given graphically.” Color is used to
distinguish between left (black) and right (red) hands; other parameters like
bow pressure and finger pressure are shown graphically via line thickness and
line darkness, respectively.
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| Cassidy, Second String Quartet, excerpt from second violin part |
At this point, Cassidy had discarded conventional descriptive
notations for pitch and volume; in the quartet, pitch is a resultant of hand
position, finger spacing, and fingering, while volume is a byproduct of bow
pressure and movement. However, in the domain of rhythm, the Second String Quartet’s notation was
more conventional, with its basis in sequences of regular impulses, albeit whose
speed changes frequently.
Frustrated by the limitations of this approach to notation,
Cassidy began to investigate alternatives. A recent talk
unpacks his process of arriving at what he calls a “non-geometrical rhythm,” a
rhythm based not on regularity, but upon tactile physicality of gesture:
In my rethinking of my
rhythmic language over the last few months and years, I’ve tried to force
myself to really return to first principles, to thoroughly interrogate what the
most fundamental characteristics and properties of rhythm actually are. For me,
‘beat’—and, even more so the repetition of beats through ‘pulse’—is actually
only a fairly small subcomponent of rhythm. It is true that rhythm is about
pattern, repetition, and regularity, but it’s also about speed and slowness,
and compression and dilation, about waves and clouds, about stasis and absence,
and about vibration and dissipation.
The research is still in its early stages, but these
inquiries may turn out to be hugely consequential for the entire field of
notated music, opening up entirely new avenues of compositional research. Throughout
the 20th and 21st centuries, composers have sought out
meaningful notational representations of non-geometrical rhythms, but with
highly limited success; as his talk outlines, Cassidy’s attempt to build a rhythmic
language from first principles steers clear of many of the pitfalls of earlier
notational methods.
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| Cassidy, The Wreck of Former Boundaries, excerpt from clarinet and electric lap steel guitar parts |
These rhythmic researches bore fruit in his recent
work The Wreck of Former Boundaries
for ensemble and electronics, commissioned and premiered by his long-time
collaborators ELISION. This 35-minute work—two years in the making—will be the
subject of Cassidy’s artist talk at the Center. Interweaving electronics and
instruments, notation and improvisation (the astonishing improvising trumpeter Peter Evans
joined ELISION for the project), the work both extends lines of inquiry opened
two decades ago and opens new possibilities. At the Center, we greatly look
forward to hearing about Cassidy’s exciting latest work.
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