Christopher Fox's Playlist
Christopher Fox is a composer who sometimes writes about music too. He has chosen to based his compositional career around close collaborations with a number of performers, including the instrumental groups the Ives Ensemble and Apartment House, and the vocal ensembles The Clerks and EXAUDI. His work regularly extends beyond the conventional boundaries of the concert hall and includes the evening-long ensemble installation, Everything You Need To Know (2000-1), and the music-theatre documentary Widerstehen (2012). He lives in London and is Professor of Music at Brunel University.
photo © Carole Evans
Linda Buckley, Chiyo. One of the great pleasures of putting this playlist together was discovering works I didn’t know by composers whose music I love. Because I needed to find music that was just a click away, and also more than an excerpt, I chose this orchestral piece rather than other Buckley favourites, but it is typical of what she does. I love the informality, in the sense of an absence of rhetoric, in this unostentatiously beautiful music.
John Cage, String Quartet in four parts. When I was a postgraduate at Southampton University one of the other postgraduates gave (sold? can’t remember) me this recording of the La Salle Quartet. The LP had the Lutoslawski Quartet on the other side but someone we’ll call ‘Michael’ (for that was his name) so disliked the Cage Quartet that he couldn’t bear to keep it. For me, on the other hand, it was life-changing and this is still the best performance I’ve ever heard because the La Salle players don’t attempt to do anything with the music apart from playing it completely faithfully, which is exactly what it needs.
Michael Finnissy, ‘Etched bright with sunlight’. This is the last part of Michael’s epic History of Photography in Sound and is full of lots of the things that he does so brilliantly – the dazzling multi-layered textures, the way things go in and out of focus suddenly opening up quite unexpected vistas, the refusal to recognise that the melody at about 12’00” has no business following what’s preceded it.
Cassandra Miller, bel canto. Cassandra has been working with different approaches to transcription for a few years – the most recent example is her glorious Cello Concerto which can be downloaded from the 5:4 website – but this is one of the earlier examples. It’s mesmerising, intense, performing a sort of alchemy on its source material.
https://cassandramiller.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/bel-canto/
Joni Mitchell, ‘A Case of You’. This is the later recording of the song on the Both Sides Now album; the original was on Blue. The older Joni can’t do the flip into the head register which was such of a feature of her younger work but somehow that makes this performance so poignant. I love the arrangement; Wayne Shorter’s guest appearance in the latter stages tugs at the heart strings most affectingly, even though he’s not really in tune with the band (how did that happen? was he in the same studio, on the same continent?).
Prince, ‘The Holy River’. Prince’s ability to write one great song after another is one of the wonders of the musical world. This is characteristically extraordinary – a song which starts out as a sort of Stabat Mater and turns into a hymn to married love – although this video doesn’t have the blazing guitar solo which closes the album track. It’s on Emancipation where this song is buried in the midst of the second of a three CD set.
Georgia Rodgers, Partial Filter. One of the things good music can make you do is to hear instruments in new ways and Georgia Rodgers has an uncanny knack for doing this. The slow reveal in this piece – starting from just about as far away from conventional tuba sound as can be imagined while still playing the instrument – is marvellously well paced, so that when the tuba finally becomes a generator of pitched tones our ears can fully savour its acoustic architecture in all its glory.
Linda Catlin Smith, Ballad. Again this is a YouTube revelation – I didn’t know this piece, nor these performers (who play beautifully). Linda Smith has the ability to strip things back to the point where the life of the music depends on the choice of every new note being exactly right – not something that one can say about all music, including my own.
Stravinsky, Mass: ‘Gloria’. Pretty much anything that Stravinsky wrote is my favourite Stravinsky piece for as long as I’m listening to it, but this might be best of all, and this old recording by Bernstein is particularly beautiful; a perfectly paced series of diamond-sharp musical images, the duet at 2’06” always cutting deepest.
Website: https://foxedition.wordpress.com
Twitter: @fantasticdrfox