Solos

Bryce Dessner has been lead guitarist of acclaimed US rock group The National since it was founded in 1999. Yet, almost in direct parallel, he has forged a reputation as one of classical and film music’s most innovative and imaginative composers. Listening to Dessner’s music, written for a range of ensembles, orchestras and soloists, is to witness a creative chameleon, an artist whose curiosity helps him constantly to evolve, to experiment—and to surprise. “I grew up playing Bach and Renaissance music, along with American folk music,” Dessner tells Apple Music Classical. “So I guess I’m a bit of a scavenger. I’m definitely inspired by many different things.” Those inspirations continued to come thick and fast during his years of formal music training at Yale in the late 1990s where he encountered composer Ingram Marshall and, soon after, the likes of Joan Tower, Ned Rorem, Steve Reich, David Lang and Julia Wolfe (“her music is far more rock ’n’ roll than mine!”). In many ways Solos, an album of music for solo instruments performed by a stellar line-up of artists, functions as a manifesto for Bryce Dessner’s musical loves and philosophies. “These pieces add up to something like a self-portrait, in a way,” says Dessner. “It's pretty bare, but I think that there's a lot of me in here, both simple and complex, and physical music, and music that is more architected.” So there’s Bach in Song for Ainola and shades of Arvo Pärt in the three-movement Ornament and Crime; and in the rough-hewn, eastern-flavoured Delphica, Dessner demonstrates an almost physical relationship with his instruments, “in the way a choreographer works with a dancer,” as he explains. It’s an approach, he continues, that stems from “watching Sonic Youth play electric guitar in clubs when I was 18, standing at the front, sweating.” But many of the pieces, such as the Tuusula for cello, or the plaintive piano work Song for Octave, possess elements of improvisation, rooted in the idea that music’s most captivating moments are often never written down. “You find quite sophisticated, complex systems being devised by people who are outside of the notation world,” he says of his experiences in the worlds of pop and rock. “I like that language of feeling the paint is still drying.” Here, Bryce Dessner acts as our exclusive guide through each piece on Solos. Lullaby for Jacques et Brune “My wife is French and is the godmother of two twins, Jacques and Brune, who our friend had on her own. I wrote this for them before they were born, as a gift. It has a lyrical, lilting style, and the chords and the sense of time signature are very Satie-influenced. It has a kind of effortless feeling. It’s played here by Katia Labèque who’s a close friend and, probably more than anyone else, has done my music for years now. I’m really lucky, because she’s one of the great French pianists.” Francis “Francis is from a score I did for the Fernando Meirelles film The Two Popes, which was a really wonderful experience. At that time, I hadn’t done tons of film music. I was on set with Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins in Rome, and I wrote this piece, which goes back to my classical guitar roots. It feels almost like Barrios or one of Albéniz’s arrangements—it has a Spanish guitar feel, and there’s something very simple, but kind of timeless about it.” Tuusula “In terms of my own compositional language, Tuusula is the closest to my art on this record. I have a long love affair with the cello. If I could have played a different instrument, it would have been the cello. “Several years ago I was asked by the Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who’s featured on the album, to do a summer residency in Finland at Sibelius’ house, Ainola, by Lake Tuusula. I was sitting in a cabin on the same lake, staring out during the day, and I wrote this in a week for the German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt who premiered it in the church where Sibelius and his fiancée Aino were married. “The music has little to do with Sibelius, though. It has these kind of song-like patterns; and then these really ferocious, almost more Bartókian, kind of Kurtág, aggressive celloistic elements. It’s a very physical piece.” Song for Octave “I was asked by pianist Bertrand Chamayou to compose a lullaby for his album several years ago, and I wrote this for my son, Octave, who is now seven. At the time, I think he was two or three, and I had started various pieces and then just happened upon this really sweet, simple theme.” Tromp Miniature “This was a commission from the TROMP Percussion Eindhoven competition—20 percussionists had to learn this piece. It’s a bit of a poem for percussion, with some lyrical elements and, because it was written for a competition, one or two virtuosic passages.” Ornament and Crime I, II & III “Ornament and Crime was a commission for my friend, Pekka Kuusisto, a violinist I feel a lot of kinship with. The first movement is the most virtuosic—it’s almost as if you took a Bach fugue or gigue and made it more jagged and intense, with sort of sharp edges. The second movement has a very almost kind of mystical, melodic feeling about it, very minimal, almost like a drone on an open string. And the third resembles something that in the past I might have played on guitar. It shares elements with Bach’s solo cello suites, or even a Philip Glass piano piece. It’s quite virtuosic but very fluid.” A Good Person “This was a theme for a film, which then Katia Labèque started playing—I felt that it fitted on this album. It’s got a simple idea that can kind of repeat, and it has an effortless feeling about it.” On a Wire “Lucky me to able to work with some of the world’s greatest musicians! A few years ago harpist Lavinia Meijer recorded a version of Ornament and Crime for her album The Glass Effect. She’s an exceptional Korean-born Dutch harpist, and she asked me to write a piece for harp and electronics. “For years I had performed Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint which features nine pre-recorded parts with one live part, and so I was a little bit inspired by that. In this piece, Lavinia is playing percussion on the harp, and also playing bass lines, melodies, and very fast arpeggio patterns.” Walls “Walls is another solo guitar piece—I thought it was important to include something of me playing on this album. That’s really the point of origin of this whole thing: before anyone would play my music, I was living in Paris in the late ’90s, writing pieces for solo guitar that I could play myself. “This piece comes from having grown up playing Bach and John Dowland. And then, eventually, Spanish pieces and transcriptions by people like Granados and Albéniz, as well as Villa-Lobos, which I really loved.” Delphica I & II “Delphica is a bit of a nod towards my wife Pauline. Her name is Pauline de Lassus—she’s a folk singer and comes from an old musical family where her great-grandfather was the 19th-century French composer Gounod, but her ancestor is also the Italian Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso. ‘Delphica’ is the title of one of Lasso’s motets, and this piece has some of that Renaissance music in it as source material.” Ornament III Piano “Ornament and Crime has been adapted and performed a fair amount. A pianist a few years ago did it in concert and it really works well, so for this album I asked Katia to perform a different version of it on solo piano. I think it works really well and quite differently from the violin version.” Song for Ainola “This is a piece that’s related to a moment, a sort of snapshot from inside Tuusula. There’s a moment in that larger cello work, which is almost more like a song that comes back, so I created a kind of separate Bach-like arpeggio, essentially, that could be played on its own by cellist Anastasia Kobekina. The idea was to have a standalone piece, almost like a little vignette—something she could play as an encore.”