Almost directly beneath the composer Patricia Alessandriniâs feet, in a basement performance space, lurks a sheet of steel. We are sitting in the garden of a cafĂ© next to Goldsmiths College, London, where she lectures in sonic arts, and after our conversation she invites me to have a look. Large enough to bend slightly under its own weight, the steel practically drapes itself over a pair of speakers lying on their backs on the floor. But for the spools of cable connecting it to a nearby laptop and mixer it could be a sculpture, or a piece of designer furniture.
In fact it is for an improvised performance due to take place the following day with clarinetist Heather Roche. Using contact microphones, Alessandrini is able to excite the plate with feedback, which the metal transforms into eerie hums and spectral tones. (If you pinch the plate in the right way, she shows me, you can filter its noise to draw out different partials. The steel buzzes between your fingertips.) Sitting to one side with her contrabass clarinet, Roche is able to blend with, augment, and disrupt these sounds.
A few days earlier, in the much larger space of Goldsmithsâ Great Hall, I heard a very different piece: Alessandriniâs 2007 string quartet âDe profundis clamavi [hommage Ă Alban Berg],â played by the Riot Ensemble. (Disclosure: I am a member of Riotâs artistic board.) Some discrete electronics, but no heavy ironmongery this time. Four players on a stage, the audience facing them. A 10-minute piece played from printed notation. How, I wondered, have we got from one to the other?
Articles like this, straight to your inbox
A student of Ivan Fedele, Paul Koonce, Tristan Murail, and Thea Musgrave, the New York-born Alessandrini holds PhDs from Princeton and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast, and has studied in Bologna and Strasbourg, and at IRCAM. Before coming to Goldsmiths in 2013 she had taught at Bangor University in Wales, and at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese in Italy. She might appear a model of the institutionalized academic composer, except that her music has a physical and expressive immediacy that refutes such unkind stereotypes. Her career has been shaped by encounters with composers with unusual relationships to new musicâs institutional structures. From all of them, Alessandrini has taken a greater sense of freedom.
Upstairs in the sun-trap garden, I ask her about her first inspirations and she recounts an early encounter with Sofia Gubaidulina. âWhen I was first looking at contemporary music, she was one of the first,â she says, telling me how she fell in love with her scores after discovering them by accident in a public library. âWhen I met her later, I talked to her about some scores of hers I had studied,â Alessandrini continues. âAnd being a composer nerd meeting my hero I wanted to talk to her about pitches and what was happening. And she said: âYou know, itâs like Bach. I have certain parameters that I always control, and then everything else is intuitive.ââ
For several years now Alessandrini has started her pieces analytically. She begins with a pre-existing work, usually something canonic; examples include Purcellâs âMusic for the Funeral of Queen Mary,â Mozartâs âDissonanceâ String Quartet K.465, and Schoenbergâs âVerklĂ€rte Nacht.â Then she collects recordings of the pieces and superimposes them, digitally adjusting the files so that even though the originals are all played at different speeds, in her composite version everything lines up. This preliminary model is then re-transcribedâselectively and creativelyâto create the score. In the case of âDe profundis clamavi,â the model is the last movement of Bergâs âLyric Suiteâ (itself a creative transcription of the Baudelaire poem from which Alessandrini takes her title). Alessandrini stretched and attenuated the original to leave a scarred after-image that recalls Gerhard Richterâs over-painted photographs.

Alessandrini calls her preliminary models maquettes, and sends me some of them to listen to. Itâs a little like seeing photographs of a place, from the same spot but at different moments in history, stacked up and backlit so that they can all be seen at once. As every photo flattens into the same plane it become impossible to tell what is older or newer.
The effects in Alessadriniâs maquettes are striking. Because of the time-adjustment, the end result is not as chaotic as I was expecting. At times the maquette of Schoenbergâs string sextet âVerklĂ€rte Nacht,â the source for her own string quartet âForklaret Nat,â sounds plausibly like a realization for large orchestra. The overall effect isâjustâconvincingly ânormal.â But itâs the details that are strange. Various artifacts litter the sound, including dramatic moments of microtonality when Schoenbergâs late-Romantic chromaticism stretches interpretative conventions to their fullest and the consequence of multiple attempts at âcorrectâ intonation smear into an undisciplined blur.
Purcellâs âFuneral Musicâ is stranger still. Although the basic chords of the famous brass chorale are recognizable, they are radically distorted by the overlaying of multiple different tunings from the various recordings. Greatly time-stretched as well, each chord now sounds like a miniature Phill Niblock piece, all beating patterns and acoustic phantoms.
It is consequences such as these to which Alessandrini is drawn; not only tuning discrepancies, but all the differences in expression that are highlighted when comparisons are made so starkly. The fact that she is working with recordingsâthe evolving, living trace of a musical work, rather than the static scoreâis significant. Different echoes of history are captured in the maquette, and these become a feature. âFor me the identity of the piece doesnât reside in the score, it resides in the life of the piece,â she says. However, although her sources tend to be well known, she insists she is not playing a recognition game. âYou donât have to know the original. You have a different experience if you do, but you donât have to know it. Something is not necessarily lost, itâs just interpreted differently.â
In 2009, Alessandrini met the Australian composer and BIFEM festival director David Chisholm while in residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Here was someone else working outside the norm: âI noticed that he would write for any ensemble he wanted; he made his own projects, basically. And I was completely the opposite at this point.â Until then, she had written according to the commissions and invitations that came her way, and almost exclusively for ensembles with electronics. Chisholmâs example inspired her to think differently, and in 2010 she started to create much larger projects that she had instigated herselfââto take more control of the process,â she says.
One of the first of these was the kinetic installation âAdagio sans quatuor,â which has become something of a signature work. Now the metal plates enter with a vengeance: four in total, plus two metal instruments made by the sound designer and inventor Paul Stapleton. The musical material is Mozart: the maquette here derives from the opening minute and a half of the âDissonanceâ quartet, radically slowed down to more than 20 minutes and dropping two octaves lower. For the transcription, in a sense the plates decide what to play, according to their physical properties. (They are also bent in real time, further altering their sound.) âI spent a lot of time with the plates just finding out what frequencies gave interesting results,â Alessandrini says. âJust as you would write for an instrument and you would write things that are idiomatic, imagine that you have an instrument that hasnât been definedâitâs defining itself.â The resultâa conversation in deeply booming harmonics between the instrumentsâis almost science fiction, so distant is it from the original, like dust from another star.
It was while working on âAdagioâ that she met a third important influence, the composer Nicolas Collins, known for his work with hacked and homemade electronics. She first approached him with technical questions about her piece and he quickly became an important mentor. âAll this time, since the early 2000s, I had had affiliations with IRCAM,â says Alessandrini. âBut Nic is coming from a less scored music approach.â
It was at this time, and inspired by Collinsâ approach, that Alessandriniâs interest in embodiment began. âNot just digital sound coming out of the speakersânot taking the speakers for grantedâbut getting into the medium and how it works on the analogue side,â she told me. âAgain, stepping back and saying, âHereâs a dispositif that Iâve been using a lot; letâs break that down.ââ Contrary, perhaps, to much of the ethos at IRCAM, she has âcompletely lost faithâ in the idea that âI make sound and I put it out of speakers, and that I have this absolute belief that no matter the space or speakers itâs going to be more or less like this.â
The most extreme example of her approach so far may be the piece for solo cello and electronics she wrote in 2013 for Seth Woods, âBodied Chambers.â Here there are no speakers at all; the player wears a pair of transducers and transmits electronic sounds into the cello through physical contact with the instrument. Sheets of metal are replaced with bodies of flesh and wood. Working collaboratively with the player, Alessandrini makes composition itself an action of the body (steel plates buzzing between fingers), and extends this image even into her method of recording transcription: âIâm performing the pieces as I compose.â
Bodies may be written into historyâas both âBodied Chambers,â and the recorded archives of Mozart, Berg, and Purcell show us. But they may also be written out of it. Alessandrini is sensitive to the political implications of her work, and on an earlier occasion told me that in spite of her reuse of the historical canon she feels her own relationship to the concert-music repertory to be âtenuousâ because âas a woman I donât really see myself in the concert repertory very often.â A forthcoming project with Ensemble Argento in New York throws this into stark relief: a piece based on the work of Alma Mahler, a composer almost completely erased from music history, and of whose music very few recordings exist. âItâs also going to be about the music that she didnât write,â Alessandrini says. âWhen I used Mozart as a model, the remarkable thing is the incredible number of recordings. And thatâs why I work with canonical pieces usually, because itâs also about the canonicity and the life that theyâve lived and our relationship to them. So picking Alma Mahler is really going to be about what I canât find, and the frustration of that. And I donât know yet how thatâs going to manifest itself.â ¶
Subscribers keep VAN running!
VAN is proud to be an independent classical music magazine thanks to our subscribers. For just over 10 cents a day, you can enjoy unlimited access to over 650 articles in our archivesâand get new ones delivered straight to your inbox each week.
Not ready to commit to a full year?
You can test-drive VAN for one month for the price of a coffee.