Fruitflies trapped in a bottle: Lawrence Dunn on his piece 'Suite'

It’s been a huge pleasure to work with Explore Ensemble over the past few years, and to be included in this great new release for Huddersfield Contemporary Records, alongside some amazing other composers: Cassandra Miller, Lisa Illean and Rebecca Saunders. Suite was commissioned for the ensemble’s tenth anniversary in 2022 – I’ve watched them perform for most of that time, since early days at the Royal College of Music. The anniversary concert was at Wigmore Hall, which leant the experience great emotional resonance both for me and for the ensemble. The recordings for this 2023 release were all made this winter at the Jacqueline du Pré music building – having lived in Oxford for a while, this leant the recordings an emotional quality for me too. It’s been a privilege to be involved.

I first met Explore Ensemble’s Nick Moroz while on residency in Russia in 2015, and we’ve been friends since then. The ensemble and I began working together directly in around 2020. At that time, in the midst of pandemic, I had been knocked sideways and was very pessimistic about the future of live music. After just completing a doctorate in composition, I was out of work, and seriously considering retraining. (I applied for a number of jobs in housing and in the NHS – I didn’t get anywhere.) The ensemble programmed my Sentimental drifting music for their performance at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2020, which had been reorganised as a broadcast from BBC Maida Vale. I recall going down to see them rehearse at a church in South London and just weeping to hear music actually performed live.

Explore Ensemble at Wigmore Hall

Around that time, the ensemble decided to commission something new for 2022. Writing the piece that became Suite over the course of 2021 (it took several months) did much to aid in breaking through a horrible period of writer’s block, which had been going on since 2019.

The piece is in one movement, though often abruptly sectional. Baroque suites usually consisted of a selection of generic dances. This piece travels through broadly analogous sections – polyphony, keyboard preluding, chordal homophony, consort-like texture, fauxbourdon, concluding with a kind of processional and a short coda. Three field recordings are used in the piece, the first from Los Angeles’ Terminal Island Detention Centre, the second a recording of children singing the national anthem of Suriname (in Dutch), and the third a recording of fruit flies trapped in an empty wine bottle.

An excerpt from the score for 'Suite'

The piece is, then, broadly concerned with the historical conditions we are all contained within, like those fruit flies in their bottle. The colonial implications of the anthem and the port of Los Angeles, the procession of historical materials and forms. The title is double – it is a “suite” of available materials, what we have to hand, that determine our conditions.

I think music is basically pre-verbal. It can crystallise our feelings before they are simplified and encapsulated by words. In this case, it is that vertiginous feeling of deep historical entanglement. That the very thoughts in one’s mind are historically determined, more than one can ever assess or dismantle. That everything has been determined by forces outside of one’s control. That worldly conditions, ideas, one’s physical and mental being are the result of a cascade of millions of prior events that can never be entirely known or even described. In some small way this feeling is what the piece is trying to capture.

Explore Ensemble: Perfect Offering is out now on Huddersfield Contemporary Records, distributed via NMC

This article was originally published in our Friends' Newsletter, Spring 2023. Alongside articles like this, our quarterly Friends Newsletter is packed with behind-the-scenes updates on recordings and education projects, as well as invitations to see our work in action plus opportunities to meet composers and artists; find out more about becoming a Friend here.

Main article image: Lawrence Dunn © Hannah Pye

NMC's Discover platform is created in partnership with ISM Trust.