An extraordinary but delicate chill
descends at the opening of the Bekova
Sisters' (before they were famous) disc
of Plymouth-born Barry Mills' music.
This is partly due to the sonics which
are supremely caught by engineer Colin
Attwell in each of the four discs in
1993 (only the last disc is unclear
about when). Imagine a Webern space
with touches of atonality; and modality,
different types of modes rather like
Messiaen - especially the octatonic
scale. The pieces themselves are usually
no more than seven or eight minutes,
quite often only four or five minutes
or in the form of tiny triptychs. Then
scrub out some of the maximalism, insert
a Feldman-scaled sound-world, sounding
timeless and unwinding unhurriedly,
but somewhat more compressed - a lot
more in fact. Then the melodic figurations,
often with a kind of jewel-watch precision
and turning; recalling tiny winding-up
motifs: Ligeti, perhaps Donatoni or
Dusapin. Rhythmically Mills is insidious,
unwinding over apparently unhurried
paragraphs until you realise that a
good deal of notes have been expended
in a small space without seeming to
be. That's the Feldman feel to these
remarkable, microcosmic works. Taking
another tack, when you look at a municipal
gardener clearing leaves in Brighton
Pavilion, imagine him writing a Ligeti-esque
piece etude 'Pavilion Gardens' both
of which, of course Mills did.
Barry Mills was born
13 November 1949. After reading Bio-Chemistry
at Sussex 1968-71, and taking an MA
in music there in 1976-77, studying
with Colin Matthews and Ann Boyd, and
analysis with Dayid Osmond-Smith and
David Roberts. Mills first worked for
the Brighton Corporation, then when
it was nationalised, from 1990 as a
Postman, to give him time to compose
in the afternoons.
The opening CD is a
rich, remarkable exploration of piano/strings
combinations. The Piano Trio, more chordally
assertive and pianistically harder-edged
than other works, recalls a distant
forefather in its haunted chill, Bridge's
Piano Trio No. 2 of 1929. They could
be profitably programmed together, where
Mills's more compressed world asserts
itself over seven minutes in a soaring
set of solos. He rarely writes much
in the way of pure tuttis, preferring
to skein out the instrumentation and
language, some tangle of melody, some
shifting thread of tonal logic; a centre
revolved round, for instance a frequent
use of minor thirds, or an ostinato
pattern. The importance of each musical
gesture and colour, a harmonic tension
suggestive of atmosphere, light and
shade links to Webern and Debussy.
The Piano Quintet is
a more rounded beast, making ampler
claims in a single movement of 8'09"
- unlike the delicate programme titles
of the Trio, something Mills employs
frequently and Darmstadt-shamelessly The
Quintet too unravels a softer grained
piano against a dialogue of more massed
writing, for Mills. More reminiscences
of a Ligeti sound-world suggest themselves.
Despite its brevity, the Quintet like
the Trio is enormously satisfying, quite
solidly realised and memorable in its
melodic contours.
Other pieces for solo
violin and violin or cello with piano,
or for violin and cello (neatly counterpointing
the whole world of Ravel), each contribute
to Mills' two kinds of sound-world.
Both are related under the foregoing
remarks, but solo pieces tend to soar
in a more angular way, breathe with
an ardent-edged lyricism that one can
recognise as part of the clear modernist
tradition. There's a paradox in this
too, since Mills when confronted with
the most melodically recalcitrant of
instruments, the guitar, writes nearest
to his edge of atonality, especially
in the Duo for mandolin and guitar on
the third disc. And this just when you'd
expect a mushy film track or at least
a diatonic pliancy in ensemble work.
Solo cello pieces on this first disc,
or the solo double bass in the next,
are like everything else beautifully
executed and caught. They point at a
bass-heavy language that Mills explores,
for instance, in Tartano,
for piano and orchestra. But given
his instrumental timbres here, they
of course get only the piano for support;
a support Mills only feels drawn to
occasionally, the way a painter doesn't
use black for shadow.
Mills' use of the mezzo
voice is, however, far more angular
- and haunted. The Eight Haiku -
seven by Basho, one by Muira Chora,
and the Chief Seattle Fragments,
are remarkable in understanding the
true proviso that really only fragments
of words can truly be set: that to really
set a poem you have to destroy it, as
in Pli SeIon Pli. Mills more
compassionately sets haiku and lets
these float over the voice, so again
the atmosphere can both hyperventilate
in its intensity, and release itself.
The melismas of the setting are more
important in their nuance than their
individual word: a paradox since Mills
possesses a jewel-like technique and
is never blurred. The truth is that
the haiku as a form sets up a final
line as release mechanism, and isn't
about word painting or articulating
imagined worlds in quite the way other
longer pieces are. Much of the intensity
can be subsumed in an inflection, a
kind of pay-off in music.
The second disc features
a masterly String Quartet, which spins
away from quartet textures in a teasing
and enchanting manner, but with a gritty
quality at times that leaves you in
no doubt as to its abstract power. Violins,
then viola and cello take leads and
fade motifs, twist textures towards
each other like glinting threads in
a cat's cradle. This, like the sectional
Clarinet Quintet that follows it, is
another one of Mills' finest works.
Mills is naturally made to write for
the Bb clarinet, its long-suspended
melancholias perfectly adapted for his
subversion and transformation of these
into something other than that. This
Quintet, like its piano counterpart,
embarks on a miniature odyssey, more
readily identified in its movements,
where the clarinet is delicately pitted
in between the spaces of the String
Quartet. Mills has a remarkable gift,
letting wind and strings mesh in timbres
that render them multi-valent to each
other. There are discords, but never
an avant-gauche jar. Before either of
these pieces, the Wind Quintet again
sharpens the sense between the instruments,
as well as fulfilling this in bewitching
melodic profile, sometimes the merest
tangled wisps. Again, one is reminded
of Ravel and more powerfully Bridge.
He would have understood Mills.
The piano pieces, too,
whether with the Bekova Sisters in the
Children’s Pieces or the three
in the third volume, recognize that
not entirely-screened out English pastoral.
It's a language at once modernist and
purified of all superfluous weight,
even that of more obvious modernist
techniques - though these lie unobtrusively
in the texture. One critic has in fact
called him a 'tonal Webern'. The listener
is directed, as in a pointillist painting,
to each glowing note and the resonating
space around it. In fact this purification
of language, despite the apparent heterogeneous
pulls here of Feldman, Webern, Ligeti,
is Mills' hallmark, together with his
instantly recognizable sound-world and
melodic gift. Like George Benjamin,
he can display each fully in the service
of modernism; there's no sense of post-modernist
compromise yet the music is serenely
beautiful, and appeals to a wide audience.
The piano pieces rarely pull virtuoso
resources down onto them, but in fact
their gently cascading vortices and
evocative titles command a technique
from the player, one of gradation and
terracing. These sound like quieter
Ligeti Etudes, but descriptive,
as though Bridge had convinced Ligeti
of something. It reveals an Englishness
in spite of all internationalisms, or
perhaps because of them this peculiar
essence is revealed when most bare,
as in the piano works, where everything
has to be negotiated on one betraying
instrument. These should - and could
easily - be programmed at a Radio 3
Lunchtime concert. Like most of Mills'
work they remain largely unpublished
and hardly known.
The first three discs,
covering music Mills wrote from 1985
to 1992, aren't dated or placed in any
chronological order. The guitar pieces
- the Five Sketches are all titled
and the last gives the third disc its
title - often wander in some hidden
narrative to a single string line, resonant
and utterly spare, recalling the early
works of Richard Rodney Bennett. These,
and some of the winds point to the last
disc, which might have been recorded
in 1993 and 1996, and though released
later, seem to inhabit a larger, more
public sphere. The solo saxophone piece
recalls, if one has to use the parallel,
Jan Gabarek in the sonic hit - Colin
Attwell's engineering again - as well
as the full noise of the Sax and Guitar
Quartets respectively. But a few seconds
dispel the too comfortable John Harle
sound-world, there's that melody treated
to a wailing wire again, somewhere near
the edge of what it's supposed to do.
Not any harshly dissonant flutter-tongue
or abrasive attempts to wrench the natural
rounded word of the sax, but to edge
its capacity from the inside up to its
genuinely expressive limits. Again one
follows Mills in one of his faster movements,
again like something that has been wound
up before the piece commences and is
being released, like a pre-signalled
language where we've come in at the
dénoument. The Sax Quartet unwinds
in a way we've expected, sparing in
its alternation of sonorities, but here
Mills prepares even more cunningly,
and there's more a sense of larger-scale
organisation, more tutti, with a few
Macmillan-like wails (from his Clarinet
Quintet) - purely coincidental but the
former's were rhapsodised over - we're
in more recognizably tonal territory.
The Clarinet piece,
'The Wind and the Trees', is a nuttier,
more quizzical offering. One often feels
among Mills' contemplative and natural
universe (he's a keen Green activist)
a benign, amused humour. Here's one
sharply burbled minute of evidence.
The clarinet and flute duo seems to
extend this into a twined colloquy,
winding down and up in a kind of ghostly
sarabande. The Guitar Quartet is a more
wild heterogeneous affair than even
the Saxophone sister, and it shows.
But ever insidiously, like some of those
early Rodney Bennett pieces where he
was truly exploratory, and not exploiting
himself. The guitars follow each other
down a glittering dark valley of sound,
unravelled. They form a kind of slow
cascading arc, a model that Mills often
brings to mind. The Trios which both
employ flute and viola swap harp for
guitar, and thus both come within the
same Debussian (and Baxian) ambit. There's
a language here that fully exploits
the viola's range, and indeed Peter
Sulski has helped release in Mills many
of this underrated middle-fiddle (to
borrow Grainger's bizarre pseudo-anglicising)
seams. Tougher, but timbrally more spectral
and glistening in higher registers -
burnishing off altogether in a kind
of slow high-wire vanishing. This is
Mills' contribution to the healthy English
(and composer-as viola player generally
from Mozart to Britten) obsession with
this very British instrument. The harp
too, provides more than points of colour,
a tickling serration of almost visible
waterfalls - an 18th century cliché
from the Welsh harp, but in this case
oddly apt.
Mills has written more
extensive works, including symphonies,
for orchestra. Satisfied as we can be
with these heroic Claudio recordings,
Mills must move to take more centre-stage,
and orchestrally really breathe the
large concert hall air he's heir to,
as it were. He is very frequently performed
in New Music Brighton concerts and by
other southern counties ensembles, and
is much appreciated by them. He's also
performed in Germany, Switzerland, Italy
and the Czech Republic. NMC have recorded
him, and the powerful, spare Tartano
of 1991 has been recorded on Vienna
Modern Masters 30401 by the Moravian
Philharmonic Orchestra in June 1996.
It evokes a landscape in Italy, willowing
between percussion-keyed delicacies
and slow-falling woodwind solos, wound
in those familiar gyring patterns, with
tuttis of colour and forward-moving
harmonies. Mills is clearly master of
all genres he's so far tackled. More
must follow. There is more than a touch
of genius in some of these works; here's
a major miniaturist who in fact has
had larger works simply sidelined. Mills
was not a composition student initially,
and his lack of contacts has told against
him, despite the endorsement of Matthews
and others. He really must now receive
his due. Start with the Bekova Sisters,
then move to the Clarinet Quintet and
String Quartet disc, with the popular
Wind Quintet the opening piece. The
last disc has a feel-good factor unusual
for Mills, yet is as profound, and some
might prefer to start there.
Simon Jenner
Read more about Mills
at
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~barrymills/
The Bekova Sisters; Aciel Bekova; Marius Stravinsky
(viola)
