See One, Do One, Teach One – the debut album from Deep Tide Quartet – comes out on Discus on August 1st and we’re playing at the Verdict in Brighton tonight. I absolutely love being part of this band and Arundel is one of the pieces I wrote for the album…
Arundel is a piece of music based on the idea of gaps. It was the result of a kind of triangle of inspiration; Phillipe Sands’ book East West Street, the work of Anne Truitt & a discussion I had during psychotherapy about the reason for nightmares & dreaming.
The title of the piece comes from a series of Anne Truitt paintings of the same name. A major theme in her work, both on canvas and through sculpture, is the use of straight lines and blocks of solid colour. I was drawn to her work because I find it soothing; there’s something settling and calming that makes me want to be in their presence. In her journal, Daybook, Truitt recounts a conversation she had about conveying meaning and intent in art forms without words. She asked – what if someone who spoke no English and knew nothing about you came to view one of your exhibitions. The descriptions hung next to the works would be of no use; what would you expect that person to get out of work?
I replied that I did not expect, I hope. What I hoped was that something in their experience would, in some unpredictable way, rise to meet the work. We then agreed that, faced with the fascinating problem of translating what we know with the just accessible parts of ourselves into the available physical terms, we simply do our best, leaving all result aside.
That phrase, ‘rise to meet the work’ struck me. It felt as if I was reading someone far more eloquent than I put words to my thoughts about composing music for improvising musicians – with the music I write, I hope that something within the musicians rise to meet the work and create something far beyond the written (or drawn) material.
Around the time of the recording session (which took place at the beautiful Chairworks Studios back in May), I was reading Philippe Sands’ East West Street. This non-fiction book recounts the events that led to the inclusion of the terms ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ in the Nuremberg Trials and the stories of the two lawyers who created them – Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin. Sands references a Nicolas Abrahams quote –
What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.
My therapist had a really good way to describe the function of dreams, especially when related to PTSD. When a trauma occurs, she said, it is so different from all your other experiences and memories up until that point that your brain doesn’t know where to file it. Furthermore, the details of the traumatic experience are too difficult to process so it remains an incomplete file as it were. It can’t be stored until it’s complete so the brain attempts to fill in the gaps with guesses and imaginings and dreams are the result.
Here is a little extract from my journal on 3rd May 2017.
I have come to realise that to ignore a gap simply increases it power. The darkness grows and seeps into other parts of the mind. So, one must acknowledge the gap and endeavour to fill it, which can often be done, or accept that it cannot be filled, which is sometimes inevitable. By filling it or accepting it, you remove its power. Either shine a light in the hole to confirm that no monster lurks there, or else build a bridge so you can walk safely across.
SO.
Arundel is the product of all of these thoughts. The score is contains 11 blocks, made up of black and white sections. Players read down from the 1st to the 11th in order. They are provided with the score, the Nicolas Abrahams quote and the instruction that each block is a combination of gaps and non-gaps. How that is interpreted is up to them.
LINK DUMP
Phillipe Sands – East West Street
Anne Truitt’s sculptures & paintings
Chairworks Studios, Castleford
See One, Do One, Teach One – Deep Tide Quartet (Discus Music Website)
The Verdict, Brighton
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