Rakhi Sing is a British composer, violinist and founder of the excellent Manchester Collective, a young and daring chamber orchestra that is redefining the live experience of classical and contemporary music. In Montreal, Collectif9 is a close spiritual cousin.
Sing has just released Purnima, a highly personal album in which she is performer (and composer of one piece), in a programme of eight works by composer friends (Alex Groves, Emily Hall, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe). While the violin is central to the approach of the works on the programme, electronic music is also very much in evidence, either as a panoramic atmosphere or more obviously through a synth-pop-inspired pulse. The album is a benevolent contemporary minimalism, infused with ambient, reverberating electro and, as mentioned above, synthpop. Alex Grove’s Trace I, Sing’s Sabkha and Emily Hall’s Outshifts are from the former, while the playful beats, stylish bass and elegant glitch of Michael Gordon’s Tinge are from the latter. Another Gordon piece, Light is Calling, a sort of digital-acoustic dream journey, is a kind of Arvo Pärt remixed by Thriftworks.
But the centrepiece of the album is Julia Wolfe’s LAD. It’s the most demanding piece (and the longest too, at 17 minutes) on the album. Rising, multi-tracked glissandos superimpose and add up until they meet in a major unison. This serves as a springboard for appogiatura melodic motifs that resonate like multiple bagpipes in solemn procession, eventually metamorphosing into a dignified Scottish jig, albeit a rather ghostly one, embraced as it is in a veil of undulating, enveloping vibrations inherited from the preceding unison chord. This is no coincidence: LAD is first and foremost a piece written for nine bagpipes! The arrangement made here for a single violin that performs all the voices is monumental and very impressive. I suspect Hans Zimmer drew inspiration from it in his Dune soundtrack, where the Atreides’ solemn arrival on Arrakis (Dune) is accompanied by a contemporary-sounding choir of bagpipes. The piece ends abruptly, with increasingly dissonant flights from the violin, shaking the tonal solidity of the chord held and maintained in the background. Wow!
This is contemporary music rooted in our times and in the return of a proudly displayed and, above all, renewed tonality.
