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Lola Perrin catalogue of works |
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Ensemble works include:
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2008 Piano Suite VI: Theory of K (duration 32 mins) The pieces were written specifically for Music, Science and The Brain, Plymouth (Sept 08). Dr Martin Coath, a scientist presenting a paper at the symposium (who also happened to be one of the conference organisers) kindly corresponded with me while I was composing the new works. That correspondence was one of my main sources for this composition; specifically about the speed of synapses throughout the brain. This chain of events 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 happen very fast, sometimes at more than 100 miles an hour. I started to see these charges like the batons in a relay race; so I 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 an exploratory 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. Together they devised a formula where our future salvation could be 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 Interpretation of “My Continuum?” by Alexis Kirke (duration 5 mins) |
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2007 Piano Suite V: The Silver Suite (2007) 20 minutes THE SILVER SUITE PRESS RELEASE: 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 Hoeller's new work, a Unilever Commission due at Tate Modern. The day the exhibition opened my heart hit my shoes. I was looking at Hoeller's "Test Site"; five slides in a museum and wondering why I'd got myself into this "situation". I'd already been booked by The South Bank 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 the work 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 my thinking 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 (Hoeller 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. Staring at photographs of the slides up on the wall in front the piano, from one position a slide looks like a giant trumpet – so what sound is 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 Hoeller'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. (Lola Perrin February 2007) |
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| G Mass: for two pianos (2007) 10 minutes Taking haunting themes from Janacek's 1926 masterpiece, Glagolitic Mass, and transplanting them to a virgin territory where minimalism meets jazz improvisation. |
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| Sixty (2007) piano commission for a 2007 Boosey & Hawkes publication | |
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Piano Suite IV Music from Fragile Light Spaces 23 minutes Photography: Nazarin Montag & Roberto Battista The starting point for this work was artist Rachel Whiteread's sculpture piece 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 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) |
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| Piano Suite I Early One Sunday Morning 11 minutes After Hopper's painting 'Early Sunday Morning'. "In this work I imagine the lives and dreams of people behind the curtains in this quiet row of houses at dawn. There are 7 sections in all, the first and the last are the same (although played differently) – they represent the ends of terrace". "In dieser Arbeit beschäftige ich mich mit dem Leben und den Träumen der Menschen hinter den Vorhängen der ruhigen Reihenhäuser zur Morgendämmerung. Es sind 7 Stücke. Das erste und das letzte Stück sind gleich. Sie werden aber unterschiedlich gespielt und stehen damit auch für den Anfang und das Ende der Häuserzeile". |
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| Piano Suite III Perpetual Motion 29 minutes "This 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." "Ich hatte sehr kleine Kinder beobachtet, welche sich gedankenlos und unbeschwerlich mit der Tastatur beschäftigten (explorierten). Davon stammte meine Idee meinen musikalischen Gedanken freien Lauf zu lassen und mich in tiefer, fantasievoller Poesie zu verlieren: diese Idee formte das Rückgrat meiner Arbeit. DerFilmemacher Thomas Gray produzierte Filmbegleitung für meine Klavier Suite, welche während meiner Vorstellung gezeigt wird." |
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| Piano Suite II 9 Images for Piano 38 minutes About the world of Ansel Adam
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SINGLE PIANO PIECES |
Kalahari Flower - version I - 8 minutes Weather Girls (2006) 6 minutes
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ADAPTATIONS FOR SOLO PIANO |
Forced to choose (Brian Eno) 6 minutes |
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