Lola Perrin

sheet music

Piano Suite II: '9 Images for Piano' 1999 £20
After Ansel Adams

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
Part 2 The man in the black hat below is probably sleeping
Part 3 Going on bird speed
Part 4 The bridge, the brook
Part 5 One step at a time
Part 6 One step, strolling
Part 7 One step, nearly skipping
Part 8 Fireflies and Ice
Part 9 Softer green sleeping

III Perpetual Motion 2003 £20
After children set free at the piano

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
imagination; these ideas formed the backbone of work.

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
Part 2 Perpetual Motion
Part 3 Unravelling
Part 4 Pulse
Part 5 Island
Part 6 Ripple
Part 7 Butterflies

Piano Suite IV Music from Fragile Light Spaces 2005 £20
After Rachel Whiteread, Nazarin Montag and Roberto Battista

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
Part 2 Newark Airport 2
Part 3 Newark Airport 3
Part 4 Newark Airport 4
Part 5 Newark Airport 5
Part 6 Newark Airport 6
Part 7 Cloud Sky Fade

V The Silver Suite 2007 £20
After Carsten Höller

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
Part 2 The Sound of Silver
Part 3 Julia's Chorus
Part 4 Descent Into

Piano Suite VI: Theory of K 2008 £20
Written for Music, Science and the Brain, an open symposium, Plymouth, Sept '08.

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
Part 2 Theory of K
Part 3 Thoughtfall
Part 4 Drama at the axon terminal
Part 5 Where is "me"?

Piano Suite VII: Collection 2009 £20
After Hussein Chalayan

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
Part 2 First memory
Part 3 The Sea of Names
Part 4 Across one hundred years

STANDING ALONE £20
9 miscellaneous piano pieces

1. Frailty
We turned up at school one morning to see a note on the gate. A girl needed a bone marrow transplant; her frailty immediately moved an entire community. A match was found, the girl was treated and she recovered. A while later Phil Maxwell & Hazuan Hashim offered me their tender film, "East End I". I went back to the music I'd written from the girl's story and in adapting it to the film, created the final version of the piece.

2 – 4 Three Studies
after Hanif Kureishi

No. 1 The Dogs
No. 2 "By Peculiar Grace"
No. 3 "Long ago yesterday"

5. Iris
After John Bayley's telling of Iris Murdoch's latter years

6. Light Trails
For composer and bassist Eberhard Weber on his 65th birthday.

7. Interpretation of Alexis Kirke's "My Continuum?"
An email arrived from Alexis Kirke asking if I could try playing one of his new piano works.
The piece was too fast for me to play, but I liked the harmonic language and felt like playing it nonetheless. The obvious thing was to write an interpretation so I asked for the score and took it from there.
Kirke composed "My Continuum?" with PerCom, an artificial composition and performance agent that attempts to extract emotional information from EEG brainwave data. Ten minutes of recordings of Alexis' brain listening to hardcore rock, ambient music and silence are represented in his piece.

8. Weather Girls Fantasia
Reporting on regional broken romance systems and local storms of the heart.

9. There's someone for everyone
Inspired (or not) by internet dating sites

G Mass for two pianos 9 (10 mins) £30
G Mass piano duet version (10 mins) £30
Barcelona for six pianos (7 mins) £40

Dear Aunt Eva: (23 mins) string quartet and saxophone £40
Songs from The Zodiac #1: This Scorpio Thing: voice & piano ensemble (10 mins) £15
Commissioned by London Jazz Festival/spnm
Songs from The Zodiac #2: Aquarius: (10 mins) voice & piano ensemble £15
An ear movie for a minute or so: (4 mins) piano& string quartet £15

"Hanif Kureishi's The Flies": opera-in-progress

Sapphire Star: orchestral

The March of Wonth: orchestral

Mechanic: piano ensemble

The Visitor: solo flute and string orchestra

Julius: piano
A portrait of a boy

Kalahari Flower: piano
A text arrived from a Finnish wanderer; "I am in Liverpool Street Station and the Kalahari is blooming". I was led into a garden of thousands of kilometers where the power in the earth holds a delicate savannah flower until the floods relinquish life to stardust.

Hommage to Jaros: piano
A portrait of Jaros, the Czech soldier, poet, president's speech writer and state prisoner

Magma: piano
Commenced as a dedication to lust, it soon became a dedication to lust-gone-sour; the object of the lust having done a runner during the composing of the work...feelings left behind to boil in a pit of hot lava.

The wind is older than the world: piano
Soundtrack from a collaboration with Mahesh Mathai, a filmmaker based in Mumbai and London.

To a wild rose (Edward McDowell, arr. Lola Perrin): piano
I remember hearing an arrangement of "To a wild rose" for unaccompanied choir when I was 11 years old. We were on the opposite river bank to where the singers were positioned, it was on the year's most perfect summer day and both my parents were there with me. My arrangement of this piece, surely one of the most beautiful tunes ever written, recalls the nostalgia of the moment and the drifting of the voices across the water.