Winter finding by Ian Wilson

We see, we hear. The transmutation of the visual, or our response to it, into the aural has been a recurring preoccupation of Ian Wilson’s large-scale instrumental works. It is tempting, therefore, to read much into “Man-o’-War” – a descriptive title referring both to the historical battleship and the poisonous jellyfish. With its martial percussion and dominant brass, it is not hard to imagine a militaristic aspect. During the work’s composition Wilson even considered the alternative title “White City”, after Belgrade, his war-torn home in the late 1990s. But drawing such conclusions would be a mistake even as irony and Wilson has never claimed a deeper association. Although the imagery of the title translates musically into a frequently threatening tone, it is, at base, a festival commission, a showpiece for players and composer.

Written for the 2001 BBC Proms, “Man-o’-War” was, at the time, Wilson’s highest profile commission to date and several aspects show the composer seizing his opportunity to appear on a global stage. It is built around a small collection of melodic themes that develop in a series of episodes. Each episode contains a new statement of one of the themes, with the overall sequence building into a dramatic, quasi-narrative structure. The design depends upon high contrasts, and Wilson takes the opportunity to give solos to many members of the brass and wind sections, as well as carefully deploying his percussion resources to emphasise each change of mood. One might say that “Man-o’-War” is an example in miniature of that great showpiece genre, the concerto for orchestra. It succeeds, too, in presenting many of Wilson’s strengths as a composer for orchestra in its formal confidence, careful use of colour – including several microtonal passages – and driving rhythmic energy.

Although Wilson dropped the Belgrade reference for “Man-o’-War”, his experience of NATO’s bombing of that city affected several of his works of the late 1990s. By the time of his second violin concerto “an angel serves a small breakfast” (1999), he had returned to Ireland and was keen to find a way out of the emotional trauma of the previous months. As is often his way, he turned to the visual arts, in particular Paul Klee’s lithograph “Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück” (1920). What interested him was the exploration of transparency, and “angel” is one of Wilson’s most delicately lyrical pieces. It was composed for Rebecca Hirsch at a time when Wilson was involved in writing several concerto works, and it was for these that he developed a particular technique of integrating a soloist with the orchestra. The soloist’s melody acts like a composite of tiny filaments that fall away in turn, like unravelling a single thread back into a bale of wool. It is a beautiful device, heard to great effect at the start of the work, but Wilson is careful not to let it slip into automatic process. Instead, the tension between that taut singularity of the solo violin and the diffuse polyphony of the orchestra is teased in and out: note how, soon afterwards, the diverse activity suddenly coalesces into a wiry series of bell tones.

“Winter finding” (2004/5) sits in a particularly complex relationship to its visual inspiration. Commissioned by RTÉ, it has its expressive origins in Cy Twombly’s “Quattro stagioni”. Unusually, however, Wilson did not compose immediately in reaction to these paintings, but commissioned Lavinia Greenlaw – librettist for his first two operas – to write a four-part poem that could mediate between him and Twombly.

Greenlaw – with the benefit of language as her medium, rather than abstract paint or sound – introduces several specifics of place and drama. Nevertheless, there are themes that persist between the three interpretations. Winter is bleak, but illuminated in brief and intense moments. Greenlaw’s poem introduces the solstice at Newgrange, when a beam of dawn sunlight passes through the doorway of this ancient tomb. Her poem speaks of patience, of waiting for such a moment: “To know that light moves is to know. / Why rush past into whiteness?”; most of the colour in Twombly’s painting in in the right half, so that the eye feels a pulse of hesitation when reading it. Wilson’s music similarly holds itself back as glissando string chords and a slow clarinet melody refuse to settle anywhere for more than a moment.
Spring, for painter and poet, is a time of violent, erotic wakening. There is violence in Wilson’s music, too, in jagged string and brass writing that recalls “Man-o’-War”. It grows, however, from the winter section (although none of the four seasons is identified as such in the score), and the blurring between sections continues. Just over eight minutes into the piece, expansive wind and brass chords evoke a giant body of water like the Fal Estuary that titles Greenlaw’s poem, but closer inspection reveals that the string and percussion scoring in the background has brought us back to the winter opening.
Summer – another solstice – is still once more. Twombly’s painting speaks of a maddening, dazzling heat. Greenlaw observes that “Such constancy is no celebration,” and Wilson’s music is the most unsettling of the piece: a single chord for strings, harp and percussion is restated over and over, defeating all efforts to advance in a new direction. Activity returns in autumn, the most exuberant of Twombly’s paintings. Greenlaw finds this a time of catastrophic changes, as muddy tides wash over and erase the colours of summer, and the final minutes of Wilson’s music enact such a layer by layer collapse, ”a rolling up of the word” that briefly returns to the glissando string harmonies and wandering melody that characterised winter at the start of the piece, before a short coda brings all to a troubled and fragmentary close.

On receiving a commission from the 2004 Venice Biennale, Wilson turned again to the visual arts,, this time to Shomei Tomatsu’s 1961 series of photographs of atomic bomb damage in Nagasaki. “Licht/ung” contains some of the most explicitly representational material in Wilson’s music, but even then the focus is less on the details of a particular extra-musical phenomenon as its potential for creating and informing a musical argument. Of more interest to Wilson – and this comes from the mediation of Nagasaki through Tomatsu’s photographs – is the increasing distance between the historical event of the bomb’s detonation and the malevolent light it still shines on our present. As captured in Tomatsu’s photographs, the marks of the bomb – as heat, light and radiation scars on flesh and landscape – remain visible many years later. Wilson’s own piece, therefore, attempts to capture less the horror of the bomb but the effect of distancing and memory, the clearing away of scar tissue and the callousses of memory to uncover how historical catastrophe might still affect us in the present. The form of the piece brings this about, repeating and expanding an initial idea that at first carries nothing more profound than the vaguest suggestion of threat – a dissonant brass harrumph – but by repeatedly scraping away at it reveals more and more of the disaster that lies beneath.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson ©RTÉ 2009

Ian Wilson (Belfast, 1964) has composed over 200 works in many different genres which have been performed and broadcast on six continents. He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s national association of creative artists, and his music is published by G. Ricordi & Co. Ltd and Universal Edition.

ianwilson.ie