Lola Perrin

catalogue of works

 

Ensemble works include:

• “Hanif Kureishi’s The Flies”: opera-in-progress
• Dear Aunt Eva: string quartet and saxophone (26 mins)
• Sapphire Star: ensemble piece (5 mins)
• Mechanic: piano ensemble piece (11 mins)
• The March of Wonth: orchestral (14 mins)
• (Songs from The Zodiac #1: This Scorpio Thing Commissioned by London Jazz Festival/spnm (12 mins)
• (Songs from The Zodiac #2: Aquarius: for voice, strings and piano (7 mins)
• An ear movie for a minute or so (4 mins)
• The March of Wonth: orchestral (14 mins)

 

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)

 

2007

Piano Suite V: The Silver Suite (2007) 20 minutes
Part 1 Abandon
Part 2 The Sound of Silver
Part 3 Julia's Chorus
Part 4 Descent Into

THE SILVER SUITE PRESS RELEASE:
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 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)

  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.
  Sixty (2007) piano commission for a 2007 Boosey & Hawkes publication

from the series "light drawings"
by Nazarin Montag


from Cloud Sky Fade
by Roberto Battista
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)
  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".
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."


Piano Suite II 9 Images for Piano 38 minutes

About the world of Ansel Adam

  • Canyon Dusk
  • The man in the black hat above is probably sleeping
  • Going on Bird Speed
  • The bridge, the brook
  • One step at a time
  • One step, strolling
  • One step, nearly skipping
  • Fireflies and Ice
  • Softer green sleeping

SINGLE PIANO PIECES

Kalahari Flower - version I - 8 minutes

The power in the earth holds a delicate savannah flower until the floods relinquish
life to stardust.

Die Kraft der Erde haltet eine zarte Wüstenblume solange bis die Fluten das Leben
zu Sternstaub (stardust) verringern.

Light Trails 8 minutes

For Eberhard Weber on his 65th birthday

"In composing this piece, I had the sensation of becoming aware of a circle of bright
lights surrounding the town, shining in our eyes, so preventing us from seeing the
source of the light, obscuring our prospects"

Für Eberhard Weber zu seinem 65. Geburtstag

Als ich dieses Stück komponierte, überkam mich das Gefühl als ob ein heller Lichtring
die Stadt umgab, welcher in unsere Augen schien und wir konnten den Ursprung der
Lichtquelle nicht erkennen - unsere Zukunft trübend 

Weather Girls (2006) 6 minutes

Magma (2006) 10 minutes

The wind is older than the world (2006) 18 minutes

Frailty (2006) 6 minutes


ADAPTATIONS FOR SOLO PIANO

Forced to choose (Brian Eno) 6 minutes
(Lola Perrin has been credited on Brian Eno's release 'Another Day On Earth')

Scarboro Fair (trad.) 8 minutes

To a Wild Rose (MacDowell) 4 minutes