Programme notes: Riot Ensemble Perform Rzewski and Martland

The music of Steve Martland was always positioned somewhere between John Dunstable and the Hacienda: funky, propulsive and dance-inspired, but with an ear cocked to the economy and precision of the Renaissance English tradition that faintly echoed within it. Like much of what he wrote, Dance Works was composed for his own Steve Martland Band – a jazz-like line-up heavy on saxes and rhythm instruments that owed much to the Dutch ensembles Orkest de Volharding and Hoketus founded by his teacher, Louis Andriessen. It was written to a commission from London Contemporary Dance Theatre; Aletta Collins’ original choreography was constructed around the attempts of an individual to become part of a group. The four dances of Dance Works are not shaped to an obvious narrative, but a resolution to Collins’ dramatic scenario can be heard in the way its nine instruments interlock in tightly engineered grooves without ever losing sight of their individual identities.

Perhaps no situation confronts the individual with such a loss of self – while at the same time leaving them with little but themselves to rely on – as prison. This is one of the images underpinning Frederic Rzewski’s harrowing minimalist classic, Coming Together, and its partner piece, Attica (also known as Coming Together, Part Two). In 1971, Attica Prison became the site of America’s bloodiest prison uprising, taking the lives of at least forty three people, including thirty-three inmates. One of those killed was Sam Melville, an anti-apartheid radical who was shot while seemingly holding his hands up in surrender. A volume of Melville’s letters from prison was published after his death, and, reading one of these, Rzewski was struck by ‘both the poetic quality of the text and by its cryptic irony’, deciding he had to set it to music. In the lines Rzewski chose for Coming Together, Melville writes of the mental and physical travails of prison, and the means by which he overcomes them, finds validation and secures meaning for his situation. It is a text about isolation and self-determinism, but it is also one written by a Civil Rights campaigner, a man who went to jail (where he was killed) for his beliefs in the equality and community of man. Sympathetic to Melville’s politics, if not necessarily to his methods, Rzewski gives his words a setting that, in the approachability of its four-to-the-floor rhythm, its pentatonic scales and its cresting, accumulating waves of instrumentation – to say nothing of the mantra-like, self-affirming delivery of the vocalist – expresses the collectivity and empowerment that Melville sought. The shorter Attica, setting a few words by another prisoner – Nation of Islam member and one of the uprising’s leaders, Richard X. Clark – offers a calmer, though still unsettling coda.

Between these two explosive studies in collective and individual responsibility lies Falter, by the Swedish composer Lisa Streich. Written for solo violin, it asks its player to become like a solitary insect. ‘Be a lepidoptera’, invites a note at the top of the score, below which Streich composes a choreography of the right arm and bow like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing. As it brushes over the violin’s strings, the bow leaves a trail of sound as fragile and delicate as a butterfly itself: a creature with no responsibilities beyond itself, but one in need, perhaps, of close, collective attention.

© Tim Rutherford-Johnson