How does grief unfold and refold after the death of a loved one? How does it bend and diffract through the prism of loss? What are the possibilities of feeling or even love in the wake of bereavement? These questions linger as I listen to Lise Morrison's No grief without joy, released in July 2023 on Sawyer Editions. The debut portrait album comprises five works written between 2016 and 2019 in a time of feverish artistic growth while she was studying composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Yet, as Morrison writes in the liner notes, this was also a ‘period that echoes, in part, the grief after [her] mother's passing at the end of 2015’.
The album opens with The Actors (2017), an acousmatic work featuring multitrack recordings of Federico Fòrla, (oboe) and Sofie de Klerk (accordion). It was originally presented as part of an installation at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague and appears on the album in the same form. Samples of oboe and accordion are interlaced here to create an arrested chordal progression in which timbre, voicing and shape sit like material architectural features. The lo-fi recordings of the accordion are particularly tactile, with emphasised lower frequencies feeling almost grainy, like the touch of sandstone, in the ear. Where the accordion samples suggest an enduring tactility, the oboe shapes are almost illusive, like subtle shafts of light dancing on a mirror's surface. There is little in this work to distract from the textures and shading of timbre, which Morrison playfully manipulates like shadow puppetry through equalisation. Lasting just over 15 minutes, the work is the longest on the album and asserts the composer's aesthetic language of minutiae, which marks to greater or lesser degrees all the works on the album.
Five Times Recycled is the most recent composition and was written for Ivan Bushuev of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble in 2019. Scored for bass flute and tape recorders and performed here by Sara Constant, the two-movement work is self-effacingly humorous. The delightful first movement offers snappy rhythmic motives in the recorded flute parts as manic playmates for the live flute. Yet the tape hiss and distortion of the recordings engender a type of lo-fi refraction. This not only makes the listener aware of the material presence of the recorders but suggests something of the uncanny animation of these marionette-like ensemble members. The second movement retains this sense of the ghostly by referencing Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. Here, slow multiphonic chords are recorded live and layered over each other, becoming almost haunting memories of each progression. If the minutiae of timbre and voicing is the order of the day, Morrison's dark satire seems to suggest, then we are playing a mad game with ghosts.
The third work on the album is – on the surface – humorous in a less morbid way. Citing Morrison's South African background, Dololo is youthful slang for ‘nothing’, ‘absence’ or ‘missing’. It is often used in response to not finding what you are seeking (as in, ‘I looked for money in my wallet – dololo!’). The earliest work on the album (2015), it pre-empts the stripped-down aesthetic of the later works while still offering more traditional notions of motivic figuration, drawn here from mbira music. However, scored for flute, string trio, guitar and percussion, there is a marked sense of playing with synthetic timbres. The guitar and gongs, for instance, are drawn together to replicate something of the mbira's rattle, while the strings and flute often are suggestive of the mbira player's voice. The composition is far more delicate than the exclamation, dololo, might suggest. I do, however, hear the subverted expectation of finding nothing where you had hoped to find something (or someone): lush melodic lines are curtailed and fractured, rhythmic ideas are interrupted and structural teleology is negated. What we are looking for is gone.
Dololo is followed by a second strongly South African work, Mamela Mamela Mamela (2018). Scored for solo violin and originally commissioned and recorded by Lieva Starker (to whom, for full disclosure, I am married), it is here performed by David Bester. The title, which in isiXhosa means ‘Listen, listen, listen’, is a bold directive but perhaps should be thought of in terms of being drawn into a space of confidentiality: ‘listen, come close, I have something to share with you’. Indeed, the first part of the work is in terms of pace and structure suggestive of Nguni storytelling, in which time and care are taken in weaving complex narratives from scattered events or disparate characters. These shorter evocations eventually move into a section of more sustained melodic writing that ends in a soaring melody accompanied by the violinist whistling a quotation from David Bowie's ‘Starman’. Again, Morrison's writing is delightfully witty here, even if memory's longing is never far away.
The album closes with Study for marimba and thunder sheets, which was devised with Jonathan Boony (marimba) during a workshop in 2018. The work reflects the aesthetic of minutiae heard in The Actors and the second movement of Five Times Recycled. We are taken here slowly through a continuous progression of swelling chords produced in the tremolo marimba and by sympathetic resonances in the thunder sheets activated by transducers. It is a less overtly humorous piece, but it still retains a sense of playfulness in its inventive curiosity and inquisitiveness around sound's materiality. Indeed, Morrison herself performs in this recording, playing with the transducers on the thunder sheets.
Written in the wake of a painful personal loss, the works on this album remind us that grief and joy are always bound up together in strange ways. There is certainly a sense of sadness lurking in many of these works, but it is a sadness that is always entangled in moments of wit, playfulness and delight. As a debut album, No grief without joy sketches a process of becoming but does so by grappling with the themes that we often only hear in the works of far more established composers. It is a raw and moving collection presenting intelligent, inquiring and compelling writing.
