Denis Smalley

Portail brings together two eight-channel works that Denis Smalley composed between 2014 and 2016 in his studios in Fabrezan, in the south of France, and London, and an early piece from 1978. The two recent works are heard in stereophonic Ambisonic recordings produced by Jonty Harrison in Birmingham in 2018. Both turn to French music of the past as a starting point.

Fabrezan Preludes, commissioned by the University of Kent and premiered at a concert for Smalley’s 70th birthday, is in three parts. In Portal the listener crosses into a cathedral nave. Debussy’s Cathedral transforms a pair of resonant chords from Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie, with its legend of bells heard from the sunken city of Ys, into undulating textures and strands of bell partials. The Voices of Circius takes its name from the Roman god of the Cers, the northwest wind that crosses the plains towards the Mediterranean.

Sommeil de Rameau, written for the 250th anniversary of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s death and commissioned by the Sonorities Festival in Belfast, draws on the sleep scenes of French Baroque opera. Its refrain comes from a pair of chords rocking over a pedal in the sleep scene of Dardanus, and its episodes recompose passages of Rameau into what Smalley calls a “spectral tonality”. The Pulses of Time, now dedicated to the memory of Barry Anderson, who commissioned it, explores pulse at every scale, from metre to the grains inside textures, setting improvised clavichord gestures against an EMS Synthi 100 and dance-like sequences.

Born in Nelson, New Zealand, in 1946, Denis Smalley studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and at the GRM, then taught at the University of East Anglia and headed the music department at City University, London. He developed the notion of spectromorphology and received the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 1988.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 20168, 2020.