Programme note by the composer:​

The largest of my cycles has the generic title of Nine Rivers and is a cycle of nine works interlinked by a series of ‘tropes’ to make an overall duration of around three and a half hours. I began work on the cycle in 1982 and for a number of reasons it was not finished until 1999, with the fifth work La coupure the last to be completed. The actual order of working on the cycle was dictated to some extent by the complex commissioning process and the demands of other more urgent commissions at the time. The work employs a large ensemble of woodwind, brass, percussion, keyboards, harp, strings and electronics. La coupure is the fifth work, poised as a central pivot in the sequence, it is the only work for a solo performer and introduces electronics to the cycle: it ‘cuts’ into the acoustic sound world. The starting point for Nine Rivers was a number of loosely connected themes, the first being the ancient idea of river as a metaphor for time. Perhaps the most famous use of the metaphor appears in the Heraclitus epigram “no man steps into the same river twice”, which encapsulates what has been called his philosophy of flux or change. Lesser known is another of his epigrams on time where he curiously describes time as “like a child playing chequers” and invokes the role of chance in the universe. These two epigrams play both a conceptual and concrete role in the way I approach the cycle. The idea of flux or change captures the very fleeting essence of sound itself, musical form of course engages with memory and renders meaning to a set of emerging or fleeting properties.

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“the systematic derangement of the senses.” Rimbaud

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​​For a long time I was fascinated by Rimbaud’s strange poem Le Bateau Ivre with its images of the freed boat crashing
through rivers towards the ocean, and somehow the memory of this work attached itself to this project. In fact the project in the process of working on it also began to gather many other apparently unrelated cross-references, the drift of influences became an essential aspect of the work, for example, musical patterning and the interlacing techniques of Celtic knot symbols, current time speculation in quantum mechanics – for a while in the 1970s to subsidise my composition studies I worked on part of the CERN project at Imperial College in London. Like some medieval cathedral the idea for the project began to absorb and integrate ideas from different sources. These apparently unconnected ideas offered different conceptualities of time. The number ‘nine’ is seen in most cultures as a mystical number and in classical mythology it was said there were nine rivers of hell. However the number nine in fact emerged organically as I began to make calculations (for a synopsis of the cycle) around the notion of a journey through timbral rivers. From the early grid-like organisation of East 11th St to the measured chaotic organisation of Oceanos (the river of rivers) there are parallel transformations of figure, timbre and space. The synopsis for the cycle was completed whilst working on East 11th St (1981-82). The nine works divide into three parts of proportionally equal time-lengths and each of these three parts represents a stage within a particular conceptualisation of timbre, identified in the original synopsis with the three principal stages in the alchemical transformation of matter:

‘leukosis’ - whitening
‘iosis’ - redenning
‘melanosis’ - blackening

Nine Rivers is a mythos of imagined waters, of fairies and snake-gods, a melancholy of flow, a requiem for poisoned rivers, an odyssey, a theatre of memory . . .

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The etymology of the word river (in English) in fact contains a double and apparently contradictory history deriving from the French for both ‘flow’ and ‘sever (or cut)’

 

River: (ME. – (O) Fr. Riviere)
1. A copious stream of water flowing in a channel towards
the sea or ocean, a lake or another stream.
A copious stream or flow of (something).
Used euphemistically for the boundary between life and
death - 1790
 

River: (f. Rive)
2. One who rives – who tears apart, or in pieces, who severs,
divides or cleaves. To rend by means of shock, violent impact,
or pressure.
(Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

and Nine Rivers as a project, and as I have already mentioned, has a number of overlapping themes, interrelated through
this ‘double’ image of the river.

 

“united as opposites” Heraclitus

 

A principal theme examines and confronts differing conceptions of musical time. Time is simultaneously something that has an obvious reality, is ‘concrete’ but is also clearly constructed (in a cultural sense) and there will inevitably be a certain ambiguity between these differences. For example at a technical level how musical order and ideas of continuity or ‘flow’ may be influenced by analytic, philosophic or poetic import. The ancient mythic association of river with ‘time’ and ‘memory’ is combined here with a formal schemata derived from the physical sciences, where the analysis of fluid dynamics and pattern formation is ‘crossed’ with more poetic concerns to form an interlace.

 

Time is treated primarily both as continuous in the sense of musical ‘flow’ and discontinuous in the sense of ‘interruption’ (‘the cut’ of La coupure). These two extremes of organisation form an axis from which musical processes are derived. However in a musical work it should be emphasised that we primarily experience time as a space of intermittent glimpses, spontaneous flashes of order and disorder, resonances, tensions and release and it is within this ‘fuzzy’ domain that the spectre of any time space-form continuum will lie. Nine Rivers is a ‘speculum temporum’ a theatre of memory in the ancient sense of the idea, a connected symbolic space which contains a proliferation of references and cross references. Musical gesture, figures and ornaments run through and across the individual works.

 

One important aspect of my work during this period was the confrontation with electronics both as an extension of the soundscape and as a model for the re-imagination of acoustic music. Here I may take on board aspects of research into how an acoustic instrument might be examined beyond the realms of immediate perception. Secondly, how one might, metaphorically or otherwise, integrate electronic processes such as attenuation, inter-modulation, and so on, or post- electronic temporality, into the fabric of musical construction. Working with computers, the artifice of fabrication (an accepted price of computer technology) has inevitably infected the strategies of composition; a certain ‘feeling’ arises from the technical apparatus. Much of my work in this field has been driven by the idea of turning the machines against themselves. Certainly when I originally worked at IRCAM in 1989 on Introitus (part 8) it was not a popular notion. I think 20 years later there is a maturity around the place which can imagine such approaches. My use of chaotic algorithms (from fluid mechanics) in the construction of Introitus, for example, involved their being applied to the very architecture of the sound sources.

Since Nine Rivers, the correspondence between ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ in my work has become, in some ways, more promiscuous, or at least has taken a number of sub-routes. This I see as part of a wider strategy; my need for long term projects is important here. A great deal of what I refer to is now operating at a conceptual level, bearing in mind the
notion that language is not only a means of communication but an integral part of reason itself, and conceptualisation is an attempt ‘to grasp’ something. It could be argued that the attempt to translate, for example, ‘electronic processes’ into, for example, musical processes may be a case of simply transposing abstraction, however in effect it is quite concrete and this is important. Nature for me is the primary source of reference; however, I am extremely aware of what a loaded term “nature” is. What I refer to is the relationship between the structure of something and the forces to which that structure may be subject. A part of our experience of nature is abstract anyway. For example, if one admires the beauty of ripple patterns on the sand, when analysed they are merely the result of the ebb and flow of the tide in combination with the loose molecular structure of the beach. An interest in electronic processes can be both negative and positive from analysis to fabrication there is a kind of trans-substantiation. Musical form is a kind of growth process. If, however, one conceives of time as a set of fractured zones as I do in La coupure, for example, then what becomes of this process of growth? In some ways it may be seen as closer to filmic procedures. I want to some extent to play with the character of the material, its setting and re-setting suggests not a movement from one state to another, but a kind of floating point against which memory is constituted as a net of subjective interactions, what Joyce calls “a merry go raum”. I refer here specifically to an example of how one branch of acoustics namely electronic music may stimulate a revision of musical practice. The task for me has always been to seek an utterance which does not act merely as a sign for ideas, but actually brings them into being through a kind of differentiation. Not a “mimetic” act, but an essential action.​