DIALOGUES

The first in the series of events at Contemporary Space in collaboration with Folkestone New Music

Phillip Cashian in conversation with John Woolrich

Few composers, if any, pull music out of thin air. As Berio said, there’s no tabula rasa. Most music is a reaction to something else. It could be another piece of music, but it could equally be an extra-musical stimulus: a landscape, a poem, a film, a performer, a painting.

What kinds of things stimulate Philip Cashian’s imagination? Literature is important to him, and his tastes are wide ranging and often quirky. He has taken texts from playwrights, such as Lorca and Edward Bond, or poets, from Keats to Kevin Crossley-Holland by way of Baudelaire, Rossetti and Thomas Moore.  

Words are important, but the visual arts have been an even richer source of inspiration. A recent string quartet, Samain, takes its title from a painting by Leonora Carrington and there is a set of piano pieces based on work by the reclusive English artist Ben Hartley. And there’s more:  Blue Circus, a little clarinet concerto, takes its title from Marc Chagall, Firewheel comes from Bryan Wynter and Strix was inspired by Graham Sutherland’s painting, La Petite Afrique III. There’s a bit of darkness and a bit of the surreal in these choices. Perhaps inevitably then Philip Cashian has turned to Goya, the master of the dark and the bizarre, for the inspiration behind his chamber work, Caprichos.

A glance at Cashian’s titles give still more clues to his inner world. His favourite colours are dark: there’s a Dark Flight (for six cellos) and a Dark Inventions. Black Venus, for guitar, takes its title from Angela Carter. Then there’s night. No less than three of his orchestral pieces are nocturnes: Night Journeys (written for the LSO), The House of Night and Nightmaze.

These night pieces are sometimes disturbed by the noise of ticking mechanisms. His catalogue includes Settala’s Machine (Settala was a 17th century Italian maker of automata), Pietro’s Machine, Bone Machine and The Star Machine. There’s a Forest of Clocks, a Musica Meccanica and a Mechanik (after a sculpture by Edoardo Paolozzi). 

This mechanical imagery gives a clue to the kind of techniques Philip Cashian uses.  His music is often built from musical mechanisms, number patterns, repetitions and ostinatos. Notes are often generated using Stravinsky’s technique for rotating pitches, paragraphs are sharply contrasted and joins are avoided. Philip Cashian’s music is not only replete with vivid images, it’s also a world of ingenious devices.

John Woolrich 2019