Streaming and digital download, 2025. Available from www.richardbarrett.bandcamp.com/album/first-light.

Reviewed by Ross Feller
Gambier, Ohio, USA

Throughout the ages, composers have reused their material in order to extend its lifespan or generate new work. One can think of this practice as an archetypical theme and variations form. With the advent of recording technologies, it becomes possible to repurpose recorded performances into related compositions. Depending upon the electronic modifications and processes used, these familial works can both shed new light on their forebears, while also plumbing pathways not yet traversed. The concept of the remix has, of course, played a significant role in popular music. It has been used to recast an original song into new genres, or improve certain aspects of its composition or production. More complex collage forms such as John Oswald’s Plunderphonics have played minor roles as an influencer of current practice, primarily in niche areas.

In the 1980s, Welsh composer Richard Barrett’s name first entered prominence as a member of what some musicologists called The New Complexity, a largely acoustic form of composition featuring hand-rendered scores chockfull of overloaded notation. Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy are often cited as the progenitors of this ‘movement’. Barrett studied with Ferneyhough at the well known Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik summer program held in Darmstadt, Germany. But unlike many of Ferneyhough’s students, he is also a performer who specializes in free improvisation that utilizes electronics and computers, as well as compositions that mix electronic and acoustic resources. He considers free improvisation as a method of composition, rather than as a separate activity.

Like Ferneyhough, Barrett has a predilection for works composed in series, tied together via thematic, registral, procedural threads, and/or extra-musical associations.  Besides the idea of getting more bang for your buck there is the sense that works composed in series supply their creators with numerous opportunities to create self-referential contexts that can serve political, social, or structural complexity.

“First Light” is one of the works in a planned series entitled Natural Causes, which, as a whole, consists of four acts, each within a multiple/composite form. (It should be noted that Barrett’s titles for this work, are found in all lower case letters). “First Light” is the fourth work in Act 2. But as a separate work, it “differs from what is heard in the context of “Natural Causes Act 2”. The order of its sections is changed and they are frequently superimposed on one another; the original 12 channels (8 projected into the performance space and 4 more in adjoining spaces) are reduced to 8.” Additionally, some material from the electronic parts in two of the other works from Act 2 are also incorporated, while sound events from the original “First Light” have been removed.  According to the composer, “First Light,” as a stand-alone piece is “intended to be heard as an independent composition with its own poetic and structural character, and its constituent sections might not always be readily recognisable as such.”

The stand-alone version of “First Light,” is an 8-channel electronic composition that “is a reordered and recombined version” of a work for eight performers and electronics entitled “Natural Causes Act 2.” The source work is a “musical contemplation” of 16 texts by the English poet Simon Howard, a close friend and former classmate of Barrett’s. In his liner notes, Barrett writes that Howard’s texts evoke powerful “sound-forms and a compulsion to realise them.” The number 16 refers to the number of instruments Barrett had in mind for his piece. The poet died suddenly, three months after sending Barrett his texts.

Natural Causes is divided into four acts, each with different instrumental, vocal, and electronic combinations. “First Light” uses sonic contributions from five performers, as well as a brief appearance of the voice of Blind Willie Johnson, a gospel-blues singer. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the use of Johnson’s voice is no mere cultural appropriation. Instead it relates to one of the compositional principles used in Natural Causes, mainly, that when specific musical works are mentioned in a text, that particular music appears, in some form, in Barrett’s composition. So, in one of the works from Act 2 of Natural Causes, that is utilized in the stand-alone version of first light, the text: “Blind Willie Johnson whispers Gesang der Jünglinge” appears. Barrett slices and dices, or fragments, filters, and recombines recordings that Johnson made between 1927 and 1930, to create a related texture to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s well known electronic composition. These two are unlikely bedfellows, perhaps, but present an interesting mixture of source materials.

“First Light” begins with detuned, inharmonic, crotale-like and string-like sounds along with a background, synthetic drone that resembles an outdoors, ambient environment. The detuning effect produces gritty, difference tones that create a palpable sense of instability. After about a minute we begin to hear water and crunchy sounds to which time stretched variants are added.

Immediately before the three-minute mark the crunchy sounds seem to morph into analog clock (or metronome) ticking sounds. These sounds are then transformed into irregular loops that somewhat resemble the sounds of slow and deliberate typing (sometimes referred to as the hunt and peck method) by analog typewriters. Perhaps this has some relationship to the underlying text for this work. Intriguingly, this section also resembles Morse code tapping.

Shortly before the four-minute mark of this 24-minute work, we begin to hear the first obvious vocal and whisper sounds. One of the whispering voices is that of the composer himself. The overall effect here resembles an eerie movie soundtrack or certain works by Dieter Schnebel. Barrett uses a granular approach to processing, which draws attention to specific overtones, while also disguising the identity of the individual sounds in his palette.

Some of the filtering effects he uses sound like subtle homages to the earliest musique concrete work done by Pierre Schaeffer. There are even train sounds, as in the studies Schaeffer completed in the late 1940s. This aspect adds an interesting historical quality to the abstract sounds heard. Additionally, it is perhaps worth noting that locomotives, in texts and sounds, played significant roles in country blues music and in the work of political-minded folk musicians such as Woody Guthrie.

There are lengthy sections in this piece in which it would appear that the composer utilized field recordings from large indoor facilities such as transit stations. Perhaps they were taken from a subway station, as suggested by the photograph used to represent this piece, on Barrett’s Bandcamp site.

Toward the middle of the piece certain sounds heard previously, reappear, but are transformed through a variety of developmental techniques. One unique quality to this material has to do with a series of pitch sustains that follow an atonal contour, familiar to acoustic compositional contexts but less common in current electronic works. These pitch sustains, prominent in the middle section, are set against a quickly evolving Rolodex of sampled sounds, which makes for an effective material polyphony.

The Howard text upon which “First Light” is based, contains some raw and disturbing imagery. In Barrett’s piece this disturbing sense bubbles just below the surface of the music in the form of detuned pitch constellations, chaotic percussive sounds, ambiguous environmental sounds, and also in terms of how the text itself is used: whispered and barely audible.

Several times Howard’s text mentions the term grisaille, a monochromatic painting technique that relies upon shades of grey to impart a sculptural, three-dimensional quality. In the music this seems to be activated in the subtle uses of tonal comportment, combined with filtering and various processing techniques.

The sense of space is also effectively present with respect to the panning or placement of sounds. In the stereo file this is a significant component of the piece, which also suggests that the 8-channel version would be well worth hearing live.

The piece concludes with granularized fragments of text superimposed over a recording of a child’s playground or schoolyard. Some of the text fragments have been pulled apart and made to sound like breaths. The very last minute is punctuated with distorted, bell-like timbres, paced steadily, like a walking bass line.

The timbral palettes used by Barrett certainly make this work captivating. But at times I found myself desiring more attention be paid to micro details of the overall sound, much in the same way that some New Complexity works utilize multiple processes in friction with one another, in order to probe the results or byproducts of these processes. Perhaps instead of nested tuplets we might encounter nested electronic techniques or processes. Also, Barrett’s reliance upon largely through-composed, organic development would have been better served with greater amounts of contrast. The composer, perhaps, could have done more to blend and integrate his sound sources into a less linear unfolding. Nevertheless, Barrett has created an interesting hybrid work that features identifiable and disguised acoustic instrument attributes, woven into an electronic texture worth checking out.

One possible problem for listeners might be the question of how embedded works, composed within series, are to be heard. Or, how do different versions of embedded works alter this equation? Presumably it is rarely the case that listeners come to the table with all the detailed information supplied by a composer in their program notes, or have previous or related works in a series. So, the contextual placement of a piece within a larger series fails to take shape. Instead a work is encountered as a standalone piece, perhaps connected to a series, or other work, merely by the composer’s written or spoken words. The strength of Barrett’s work is that it is able to function on a variety of levels.

Barrett has sometimes been described as a political composer, meaning someone who attempts to address political and social concerns with their work. A problem that some political-minded composers such as Louis Andriessen, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew have struggled with, is the issue of immediacy. On one hand, if you gravitate toward complex musical forms you may risk the opportunity to connect with listeners, and be dismissed as merely part of the cultural elite. On the other hand, if you over simplify your music you risk being accused of pandering and not being taken seriously. In this piece Barrett seems to be able to walk the line between these two extremes, subtly suggesting concepts rather than applying sledgehammer tactics.