![]() |
Lola Perrin sheet music |
|
|
|
|
[ Home ][ Audio ][ Video ][ Reviews ][ Shows ][ LolaSpace ][ Gallery & links ][ List of Works ][ Buy CDs ][ Buy Scores ] |
|
SOLO PIANO |
ORDER DIRECTLY FROM THE ARTIST |
|
Piano Suite I: 'Early one Sunday morning 1992 £20 After Edward Hopper's 'Early Sunday Morning' In this work I have imagined the lives and dreams of people we don't see, yet whose presence we can sense in this painting of a quiet row of houses at dawn. There are seven sections in the suite; I went from house to house to write the pieces. The first and the last sections represent the ends of terrace. Parts 1 - 7 |
![]() |
Piano Suite II: '9 Images for Piano' 1999 £20 This suite was written from memories of the atmospheres in Ansel Adams' photographs. Rather than work directly from any single image, I recalled how his pictures had made me feel in the past and tried to capture those feelings in the compositions. In some pieces I was led to short, imagined stories in black and white, in the style of Adams photography. 'The man in the black hat below is probably sleeping' is one such story. Its location is a small town in America at the height of summer sometime in the 1800's; a man, probably drunk and passed out, is sprawled out on the ground in the noon sun, a large hat obscuring his undoubtedly handsome face. But a fly is at work on him and as its activities increase, a more ominous explanation for why the man is motionless begins to dawn on the passers by. 'Going on bird speed' is an homage to my grandparents and imagines their thoughts while they watched birds circling their ship as they sailed towards a new life in America early in the 1900's. Eighty years later and 'Softer green sleeping' is a portrait of two of their great grandchildren, sun baked and sleeping in their room after a long afternoon in summer-heat-park. Part 1 Canyon Dusk |
![]() |
III Perpetual Motion 2003 £20 Suite III Perpetual Motion was written after observing very young children exploring the piano keyboard without inhibitions. In copying their approach I freed musical ideas from deep in my When I started writing these pieces I didn't want my work to disturb my neighbour upstairs. So I played softly, and quiet compositions began to emerge. After the first couple of pieces I took a break. By the time I went back to the project my neighbour had become hard of hearing and was playing her television set so loudly I could hear the programmes she was watching. So I started playing louder, and the next pieces used more contrasted dynamics. A repeated motif, which had previously stayed buried, leapt from the textures to knock on my ceiling in a fruitless fight against the television set. One day I saw my neighbour in the hallway. I asked if she would consider listening to her television on headphones. She replied that in the thirty years she'd lived there no-one had ever asked her such a distressing question. I closed my door, went back to my compositions and she went back to her television. The contrasted dynamics persevered through the final pieces and the repeated motif spread like a contagion through my revisions. Part 1 Whole Numbers |
![]() |
Piano Suite IV Music from Fragile Light Spaces 2005 £20 The starting point for this work was artist Rachel Whiteread's sculpture where she'd cast into plaster the shape of the space underneath a bed. I set out to try something similar in composition; at the time Whiteread was working in the Arctic so I began to think about the shapes of spaces within icebergs and to allow these imagined cavities define peaks, troughs and edges of the music. Later on, I sought extra visual input so I collaborated with two photographers also preoccupied with the depiction of spaces. I used a sequence of light drawings by Nazarin Montag to complete the first six pieces in the suite: "Using the camera as a 'drawing tool' I sketched the transfer lounge of Newark Airport Terminal NYC; a transient space through which motion is defined by its architecture. As I passed through I drew traces of artificial light on the surface of the film and discovered a hidden world that lies within." (Nazarin Montag, 2005) Photographs by Roberto Battista enabled the completion of the suite's final piece, Cloud Sky Fade; "Because of my habit of staring at the sky I've often hurt myself. At the same time, I've read so many stories in the passing clouds that travel around the world witnessing the lives of countless people that I don't regret a few bruises." (Roberto Battista, 2005) Part 1 Newark Airport 1 |
![]() |
V The Silver Suite 2007 £20 I look for inspiration from visual artists when I start my compositions. The habit started after some bleak experiences on a London road that looked like the street in Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning" - so I was somehow led to compose music about this painting. In my next project, Ansel Adams' photographs motivated me to create a second piano suite. Then Rachel Whiteread's casting of physical spaces gave me the idea to look for a similar method in music composition. Nazarin Montag's photographic light drawings revealing a hidden world in an airport enabled me to find a completely new sound in my work. Roberto Battista's cloud photographs and their layout on his website also inspired me. During 2006 I felt I wanted to work with an iconic piece by a visual artist of my generation. It seemed obvious to look to Carsten Höller's new work, a Unilever Commission due at Tate Modern. The day the exhibition opened my heart hit my shoes. I was looking at Höller's "Test Site"; five silver "playground" slides in a museum and wondering why I'd got myself into this situation. I'd already been booked by the Southbank to premier a forthcoming composition that would be inspired by this art piece, so I couldn't really get out of the project…which was my idea anyway…but I was really scared. Making a piano suite from five slides? I got a plan; if I couldn't get inspiration, then I'd document the effect of Test Site on its audience and proceed from there. But it turned out that I didn't need to do this. Inspiration did come from "Test Site" just as it had in the past from Hopper et al. I corresponded with a couple of artists who helped direct me during the composing. Paul Hearn wrote to me about "abandoning yourself to the laws of gravity, fear and exhilaration". For the first piece in the suite, I took Hearn's sense of abandon and inverted it (Höller is known for his interest in inversion), so rather than being abandoned to gravity and speed; instead being turned slow-motion upwards, as if flying off a spring board in zero gravity; Part 1: Abandon. Staring at photographs of the slides up on the wall in front the piano, from one position a slide looked like a giant trumpet – so what sound was it making? The beautiful, clear, bright, smooth, silver shape making music - the second piece is called The Sound of Silver. The artist Julia Warr wrote to me with her "candle-lit Test Site", where greased bodies "sliver out together like maggots or new born babies, three or four at a time", and the music of a boys choir without the singing. I took the left hand part of a chordal section I'd been working on – and relocated it to within the right hand so that my ten fingers were meshed together and all the notes were placed within the range of her boys choir. A new vision of both "Test Site" and my composition emerged – leading to the third piece, Julia's Chorus. The last piece is Descent Into. I tried to write an opera once, the libretto was about a town unwittingly wrapped in razor wire; no one realised. To me, Carsten Höller 's slides are a real metaphor for our time; our civilisation descending. The Descent of Man. And all the while, there's a party going on. Part 1 Abandon |
![]() |
Piano Suite VI: Theory of K 2008 £20 When I set about composing the pieces for the symposium I corresponded with Dr Martin Coath, a scientist presenting a paper at the same event. The correspondence was about the speed of synapses throughout the brain and became a main source for the music. The chain of events in the brain where electrical impulses turn into chemical events and then pass from a nerve cell ending to leap over a space onto the beginning of the next nerve cell…this chain of events can happen very fast. Like many people, I prefer to travel slowly; life feels more comfortable when you know that the car you're in can stop in time. So, to think that there are chains of events happening at more than 100 miles an hour inside our very heads...I took the information Dr Coath sent me and let it drive me to new music. I started to perceive the electrical charges as if batons in a relay race, so began passing ideas along the chain of pieces like batons being passed along the chain of runners. In Part 5 "Drama at the axon terminal" I condensed the process - passing connections note on note, bar on bar. At the time I was writing the music, a friend told me how her husband had woken from a brain operation with a vision in which he saw our civilisation as two humanities separated by a horizontal line he called K where K = Kindness. In the recovery room they devised a formula where salvation is defined by those who are above the line of Kindness pulling up those who are below it. Thus they developed their "Theory of K" after which my new suite is named. Part 1 Defrag |
![]() |
Piano Suite VII: Collection 2009 £20 During the spring of 2009 the Design Museum in London, organised a debate at Shoreditch Town Hall hosted by Cypriot-born designer/artist Hussein Chalayan to explore what makes London such a magnet for the artistic community throughout the world. I had been invited by the museum to create music performance inspired by Chalayan who was on exhibition at the time. Taking his interest in the issues of cultural migration and displacement as my starting point I ran a questionnaire at the debate to capture the family histories of Hussein Chalayan's audience. 190 questionnaires were returned, and these created 190 unique family tales, each spanning three generations across a hundred years. The people poetry I collected through from the questionnaire allowed me to roam through a borderless sound-territory creating music that would otherwise not have been found but for the lavishly diverse family histories I was lucky enough to bask in. I also commissioned artist John Kennedy to create drawings from the tales which I looked at while composing. Kennedy's final drawing for the project; "The Sea of Names", is on the cover of this booklet. After writing the music for the live performance, I had one final process to go through. I extracted four narrative passages, in the style of radio news reports from the 190 tales. The narrations were read aloud in between the piano pieces by the correspondent, Mihir Bose - whose voice I have admired from afar for many years. And so "Suite VII: Collection" was performed in the style of a live radio show. The narrations are included. The complete tales, with John Kennedy's "The Sea of Names", are held in the Design Museum library. Part 1 London is a rhythm |
![]() |
STANDING ALONE £20 1. Frailty 2 – 4 Three Studies
5. Iris 6. Light Trails 7. Interpretation of Alexis Kirke's "My Continuum?" 8. Weather Girls Fantasia 9. There's someone for everyone |
| MULTIPLE PIANO |
G Mass for two pianos 9 (10 mins) £30 |
| SMALL ENSEMBLE | Dear Aunt Eva: (23 mins) string quartet and saxophone £40 |
| FORTHCOMING | "Hanif Kureishi's The Flies": opera-in-progress |
| ORDER DIRECTLY FROM THE ARTIST | |
[ Home ][ Audio ][ Video ][ Reviews ][ Shows ][ LolaSpace ][ Gallery & links ][ List of Works ][ Buy CDs ][ Buy Scores ] |
|