G O M B E R T played by Apartment House
by Clive Bell
This is a story involving three people and an ensemble. First a composer thrown into jail, his career derailed by a scandal involving alleged sexual violence. Second, a producer and label boss - after receiving a memento mori in the form of a cancer diagnosis, Simon Reynell is on a mission with a highly personal project that challenges how we listen to early music. Thirdly another composer, this time with one foot in the contemporary and another in the Renaissance: James Weeks. And an ensemble - Apartment House - whose close relationship with the Another Timbre label has led to one of the least expected and most beautiful records we're likely to hear this year.
Simon Reynell has run Another Timbre pretty much single-handed from Sheffield in the UK for nigh on two decades. His first release, Tempestuous, was John Butcher, Xavier Charles and Axel Dörner live at the 2006 Huddersfield Festival. Quiet wind explorations inside a church during a proper Yorkshire storm. "The title of this 51 minute improvisation," wrote Barry Witherden in The Wire, "refers to the weather buffeting and rattling the windows of the church where the gig took place." Starting from free improvisation, Reynell moved gradually sideways into releasing albums of reductionist composition - Cage, Wandelweiser guys like Michael Pisaro, then Morton Feldman, Marcus Granberg and Catherine Lamb - always following his own instincts.
I talk to Reynell over a Zoom link: "Fairly early on in running Another Timbre, Michael Pisaro said to me, 'What you're doing is of value especially because it's reflecting your personal taste. You shouldn't be releasing things because you feel, oh, I ought to do this. And perversely that will be what other people value in it.' And I took that to heart."
In 2023 Reynell received a cancer diagnosis and spent months waiting for surgery. In a public conversation with composer James Weeks, he recalls: "I inevitably had some end-of-life-type thoughts - ‘Are there any things that I’d like to do but haven’t yet done?’ With regard to music the main thought was it would be interesting to see what happened if I took some of the early music I love and asked Apartment House to record it: how might it be different from existing realisations by early music groups? Would they find something new in the music?"
Apartment House, the contemporary group founded by cellist Anton Lukoszevieze three decades ago, have a very close association with Another Timbre. It works both ways: AT brings projects to AH, and vice versa. However, AH also have their own thing going, pieces that probably wouldn't float Reynell's boat. Last time I saw them live, they tackled a song by Mark E. Smith's The Fall, and their 2024 shows included Nico and John Cale's The Marble Index.
Apartment House
In spite of this broad range of repertoire, the Apartment House musicians may have done a double take when Reynell announced his current wheeze: an album of five hundred year old vocal scores by Flemish old master Nicolas Gombert. I speak to Apartment House viola player Bridget Carey: "This was entirely curated by Simon, and he had very clear ideas. It's rather wonderful! He's curated something for the first time, and we want to support him being a creative artist."
A long-term fan of early music, Reynell has some critical ideas on how it's currently performed and packaged. And he's totally had it with blissful angels on album covers. "Some early music CDs I don't listen to, especially the large choirs. When they get too self-consciously spiritual - that earnestness, it jars with me. It's already beautiful music, you don't need to wrap it up in a chill-out ethos." You're objecting to the otherworldly atmosphere, I suggest; you believe that music is always involved in everyday life? "Yes - it's slightly perverse," he replies, "because I do think listening to music can be a transcendental thing, and I enjoy that about it. I'm emphasising that in the contemporary releases I do, but I definitely wanted to de-emphasise it here, because the customary context in early music practice is to over-egg that side of it. I wanted to quietly rebel against that."
Reynell's rebellion consists of eight vocal motets by Gombert (c.1495 – c.1560), but recorded with no voices. Instead, Gombert's imitative counterpoint, of which he was regarded in his day as the pre-eminent exponent, is assigned to a dark-hued, low-pitched ensemble of cello, violas, violin, bass clarinets and bass flutes, plus - a surprise decision - a trumpet. Vibrato or excessive expression are avoided - "We don't emote," confesses Carey - and there are no echoing cathedral reverbs. The task of dishing out the individual parts, deciding whether bass clarinet or cello carries the bass line, who carries the top melody, and also conducting the whole performance, fell to James Weeks, a composer who lives and teaches in Durham. Weeks already has a pair of his own albums on Another Timbre: his Windfell is a solo for AH's violinist, Mira Benjamin, while Summer is a sexy hovering by Explore Ensemble around Siwan Rhys's patient piano chords. But the shimmering loveliness is given a spicy element by Weeks's liking for microtonal tunings, so that long clarinet 'off' note disrupts the harmony we expect.
For the new album, G O M B E R T, Weeks has composed five interludes. A whole CD of Gombert's dense polyphony might cause aural indigestion, so now and then we switch into Weeks's world of pure electronic sine tones, piano and microtonality.
As an ex-chorister and the director of vocal group EXAUDI, Weeks feels utterly at home within both contemporary and early music. Over Zoom from Durham, he explains his composing strategy for his interludes: "I was trying to work with the same sort of modality as Gombert. But I decided to colour it, or discolour it, in some way. All the microtones are very deliberate 'out of tune' versions of the modal notes from the Gombert. We wanted to move the overall timbre away from the Gombert. Simon knew a whole disc of Gombert would just be relentless - it's like this great thick wall of polyphony. He said, 'I want a contrast, much sparser and more still.' And so, he's like the patron giving his shopping list of things he wants in the piece [laughter]. Sometimes you think, 'No! I'm the composer!' But in this case I have massive respect for Simon, and they're good ideas anyway. There's a couple of moments when the clarinet plays almost the same timbre as the sine tone, but it's about two hertz flat, and out of nowhere comes this unearthly beating. I have to say, it's brilliant playing!"
Nicolas Gombert is part of the so-called 'lost generation' - a lesser-known gang of sixteenth century composers, writing polyphony between the innovative Josquin des Prez and the later Renaissance big beasts: Palestrina and William Byrd. Gombert's contemporaries were especially intriguing, in Reynell's words, "pushing things to the limit, so that the polyphonic weave becomes really dense and complex." An example is the album's opener, "Mille Regretz". Gombert has added two voices to Josquin's original setting of this chanson, creating a six-part polyphony with no rests - relentless indeed. And those two extra parts are low voices, so everything is darker. Give it to a choir in a big church acoustic, and you're got the familiar Renaissance choral sound. But Reynell de-familiarises the Gombert, not by tweaking or re-working, but simply by giving it to a six-piece instrumental group to play in a straightforward manner. No expensive reverbs to evoke the heavenly host. As Carey puts it, "It's conversational music. It's a plain harmony exercise, and it was rather joyous from my point of view."
A trope beloved of Gombert's generation of composers was the false relation - a salty crunch of harmonies at the end of a line, making the ear wince (or leap in pleasure). Weeks explains it to me as that moment when two versions of a modal solution are presented at the same time. To me it sounds like showing off - a composer taking a corner on two wheels. Audiences should maybe punch the air, or give that special head-shake that Indian listeners bestow on a musician who has just ripped out a classy phrase. Plenty of false relations to savour on this disc.
Weeks also tells me that playing vocal scores on instruments was perfectly acceptable practice back in the day: "Not only homogenous groups like viol consorts, but also broken consorts, where whoever was available would play the music." Carey: "We're a bit like the village church orchestra, where you've got a bassoon and a rackety old viola player and an oboist or whatever. It's got that spontaneity about it, which I quite like." Back to Weeks: "As a concept I was totally behind it; I didn't even think it would be weird or leftfield, I just thought it would be lovely."
The music may be five hundred years old, but contemporary resonances are everywhere on this disc, starting with the cover. It's a detail from a painting called The Massacre Of The Innocents by Pieter Brueghel. Frozen snow on spiked trees, armed men on horseback and a mother pleading with soldiers. It's hard to look at this without thinking of recent events. "So many early music albums take a painting of angels and cherubs," comments Reynell, "or focus on the splendour of the rich and powerful. I want the music to be seen in the context of the social history of the period. Brueghel is a great one for that! He puts himself down in the street. He's taken the biblical story and he's putting it in the Netherlands, and the beginning of the Eighty Years War."
Then there is Nicolas Gombert's own life. He was composer and choirmaster employed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The job involved accompanying Charles across Europe, even onto the battlefield, wherever pageantry was required. Religious services and jousting events all required music, so Gombert would have been shepherding choirboys through the mud to wherever the Emperor required their singing. Reynell explains the context: "Charles took his musicians and his entourage with him, he was keen to show he was cultured. Because those guys were aware of soft power, and they wanted to be associated with grandeur and ceremony, and music was a part of that. Charles V was a music lover, but also a very militaristic and brutal ruler. He used the wealth plundered from his empire’s new colonies in the Americas to fund multiple wars within Europe in an attempt to expand his already extensive territories there, and these wars were often fought in the most brutal ways, not dissimilar to Gaza today, with long sieges, massacres of civilians, starvation being used as a weapon and so on. And Gombert was right there beside Charles V as he was doing this. In fact, one of my other favourite composers, Antoine Busnois, was actually with his employer, Charles The Bold, when he was killed on the battlefield."
The brutality seems to have rubbed off. At the height of his career, Gombert was disgraced for raping a choirboy. He was imprisoned and condemned to hard labour rowing a galley. Somehow he seems to have continued composing, and was released eight years later, but drifted into obscurity.
In his conversation with Reynell, Weeks remarks that, "There’s a significant overlap between people who listen to contemporary music and early music, because there are so many ways in which the two speak to each other across what happened in between." This seems a good point, and I ask him to expand on it. "Well, I grew up surrounded by people who were inspired by both ends of the spectrum of western music. People I was listening to - well, even Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett, those English composers of yesteryear, they were part of the early music revival. On the continent you've got Anton Webern being inspired by Heinrich Isaac [1450-1517] and his canonical pattern making and so-called mathematical music. When I got into [Harrison] Birtwhistle and the more modernist English composers, again I found they were obsessed by Ockeghem [1410-1497]. From school I was going to concerts with both of those things in and I loved them both. Amongst performers too, the Hilliard Ensemble used to mix the two, it's very natural."
On the new record, in amongst Apartment House's violas, cello, flutes and clarinets, is an odd sound, which on a first casual listen I thought might be some kind of oboe. In fact it's the trumpet of Rebecca Toal. Toal co-hosts a podcast titled Things Musicians Don't Talk About, where mental health issues are given an airing as they affect musicians. While not an Apartment House regular, she has played a couple of discs for the label, Sound Pieces by Pauline Oliveros and Eden Lonsdale's popular release, Clear And Hazy Moons. Reynell insisted on a trumpet for his Gombert project, but Weeks was sceptical. In the studio he quickly came round, as he recalls to me: "Ha! It shows Simon's brilliance. I was astonished - it sounded almost exactly like a Renaissance cornett. But also this particular player had the most wonderful sense of style. The moment she started playing I thought this actually lifts the whole thing into another dimension. I remember feeling very excited on the day, it's like hearing Gombert from lots of different angles."
On the phone I call up Toal for a chat; she turns out to live walking distance from my house. How did she get this special sound? "It was just a B flat normal trumpet," shrugs Toal, "and I used a cup mute for most of it. Simon said bring a load of mutes. James said, okay we'll see how it goes - but almost immediately he was convinced. And it does blend but it has its own sound at the same time, which is delightful. Apartment House is such a personal ensemble - it's so individual and it really makes a difference." We agree that part of the attraction of Apartment House is you feel that honest music making is going on right in front of you. "There's a plainness," suggests Toal. "It's a bit rough at points in the recording. I love it, you can tell that we're just playing, it's really refreshing. You can feel yourself in the room, with the roughness and the closeness of it, which I really like. I didn't realise till Simon told me that it came out of his cancer diagnosis, and in hindsight - oh, the project makes sense. The record is so beautiful but so bleak!"
Graindelavoix
The early music world has been given a shake-up in recent years by Graindelavoix, formed in 1999 by Björn Schmelzer and based in Antwerp. They insist they're not so much an early music ensemble, more an experimental art collective, and their name comes from an essay by Roland Barthes. If you're fed up with choirs that stand still and dress formally, maybe Graindelavoix are for you. They allow bodily expression into the room, they generate plenty of excitement, and as singers they're aware of other traditions: snarling Sardinian choirs, for example, maybe Georgian polyphony too. Reynell agrees with me they're a breath of fresh air. "They have videos that I've watched dozens of times," he admits, "and they're gripping to listen to. On the other hand they can be a bit up themselves. They are a really good thing, and they're trying in a similar way to put that music in a context of more earthy performance, rather than heavenly. So I'm allied with them on that, but they occasionally over-egg it in another way. Eighty per cent approval!"
All this aligns with Reynell's personal search for a fresh approach to early music. And for all Graindelavoix's passionate performance, as Weeks points out, "You shouldn’t mistake it for being authentic or historically accurate – they’re playing as fast and loose as they want, and why not? In fact I love that these pieces always have to be re-interpreted because we don’t know exactly what they sounded like or exactly how they were performed in the sixteenth century."
Gombert's music had a life both inside and outside the church - Reynell now wants to pull it as far away from the church as possible. He wants to liberate that music from the precious or the pious, reconnecting it with everyday life, work and politics. A pious approach is a misunderstanding of where the music comes from, perhaps especially in the case of Gombert, floundering through the muddy fields of his boss's battles.
Politics is of course a part of this. Reynell should have the final word: "My own politics have always been quite decisively leftwing. But I've always felt if you try to be political with a big P in music, it's often not very successful and doesn't further the politics much. Obviously [Cornelius] Cardew’s late music was a prime example of that. I think of Christian Wolff as someone who has tried to be political with a small p, in the sense of - well, being nice is part of it! [laughter] Working in situations where you try to minimise the hierarchy involved. That was part of the appeal of the whole improvisation thing. You're trying to be even-handed and reasonable with people. I've always tried to operate with that kind of ethos."
Have a listen:
Apartment House: Nicolas Gombert – Musae Jovis; (arranged for instruments by James Weeks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJuJRhG2LQ0
Apartment House: James Weeks – Media vita iii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYMs7LyYUZo
