Presenting four recent works for medium-sized ensembles, Tending introduces the music of James M. Creed through performances by Standard Issue, To Your Ear Collective and Outline Ensemble, three overlapping groups of younger UK experimental musicians working at the intersection of notation, improvisation and collective attention.

Creed's compositions unfold through sparse materials, repeated actions, instrumental doublings and gently unstable textures, where players follow shared trajectories while remaining responsive to one another in real time. In works such as Double Quintet and Duo, twelve musicians form paired instrumental conversations, producing a fragile density of echoes, divergences and murmured alignments, while Piano(s) and String Quartet uses the tuning disparity between two pianos to create shimmering overtones and a quietly elegiac atmosphere.

Drawing on interests that range from Sonic Youth and American minimalism to Cardew, Beuger, Eastman and Radigue, Creed shapes music of delicacy and patience, less concerned with dramatic gesture than with how sound is held, sustained and allowed to drift. The result is a beautifully restrained album of contemporary ensemble music, where texture, density, uncertainty and ending become forms of attentive listening.

Another Timbre Interview with James Creed

Before we talk about the music on your CD, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to experimental / contemporary music?

I broadly came to this music through one of a handful of what I gather to be the "standard" routes: I grew up playing guitar in bands of various sorts, gradually got into Sonic Youth and American minimalism(s) at around the same time, and from there started to work outward. Those interests were vague at the time, but at some point they took me almost instinctively into studies in Music at Goldsmiths as a (slightly) mature student in my twenties. At the point of applying and getting started there I didn't really know what I was doing or what I wanted to do, and in part it was a structured way to move (from Berkshire) to London where I was already playing regularly in those bands anyway. Once I'd started those studies I threw myself into as much as I could, and through the guidance of some immensely helpful teachers (I owe a lot of the musician I've become to Mira Benjamin, Pete Furniss and Jeremy Peyton-Jones in particular) I was exposed to a lot of the music that's become central to what I've been writing more recently — Cardew, Beuger, Eastman, Radigue, etc.

Your CD involves three different ensembles - Standard Issue, To Your Ear Collective and Outline Ensemble - all set up and led by younger musicians from the UK, none of whom have appeared on Another Timbre before. Do you feel that they are part of a new generation of experimental players, and if so, do they differ from more established groups in their approach?

All three groups are formed of good friends of mine that I collaborate with regularly. Standard Issue is a generally fixed ensemble who occasionally tag me in to play guitar as needed depending on what they're playing; To Your Ear is a group of which I'm a member, and is a series as much as it's an ensemble; Outline Ensemble is the name I've been using since 2019 or so for any group I put together for varied events and projects. The three groups are porous: members of Standard Issue are in the To Your Ear group and/or regularly play in formulations that might usefully be called Outline Ensemble. I'd definitely say that the fifteen players on this disc (not counting me) form part of a young generation of the sorts of experimentalists broadly concerned with notated music (though many of us are keen improvisors). It's all very collaborative and peer-to-peer — I love working with them all. I don't think these groups take what's necessarily a different approach to established groups like Apartment House, Explore Ensemble, Distractfold, etc. in the broad sense, but there's definitely a buzz to us all being at once early in our personal development and early also in the development of the ways in which we work together. We'll be continuing to work together in these varied combinations and I'm excited about how that might unfold, especially for my being able to see so clearly how cultivated and mutually-restorative many of the relationships those more established groups have been able to form with each other and with their longstanding collaborators are.

All four pieces on your album are recent works written for relatively large ensembles (6 to 12 players). Are you particularly drawn to larger groupings, and if so why?

I'm generally interested in certain approaches to textures, activities, uncertainties and endings. That's vague I know, but to bear it in mind whilst listening to any of my music or when reading any of the notations I've written that are part of bringing that music into the air should clarify that statement simply enough, I think. A trajectory might continue until a natural limit is reached (like the end of the piano); a loop might continue until someone decides to end it or until another process has ended. I say all that because I don't think of what I write for soloists and small groups as being all that different to the music for larger ensembles that's profiled on this disc. It's the same sorts of parts, and the scale has more to do with density than with material. The largest ensemble, for instance, is gathered for Double Quintet and Duo. It's twelve players, but each part is sparse and somewhat free, and I've asked the players to listen only (or at least principally) to their instrumental double. The pairs don't need to play precisely together, but to think about how their playing dovetails with that other person, knowing that this other person thinking about the same. What emerges is a shifting, fragile texture of six murmured conversations and so it's a dense piece in a way, but it's six duos guided by the same trajectory of available pitches and the "task" of each player is little different to solos and duos I have written or might write. All that said, I'm very much interested in approaches to homophony and, generally, to being one amongst many. I find that much easier to explore with larger groups, which may just be an issue of skill or something I'm yet to find another answer for. And there are textural affordances, of course — I'm obviously fond of doubling, and that increases ensemble sizes quickly if I'm able to run with it.

Most of the music on the album has a gently floating, shimmering feel - rather like the cloud formations on your photo on the cover. Is that slightly otherworldly feel something that you're consciously looking for?

I'm often drawn to it, yes. It's partly that I simply like the sound, of course, but it's also a useful palette for a lot of the things I'm interested in exploring. Music that's coaxed into being and then sustained by careful attention — a description I've used previously in a notation is the ways that someone might hold a sleeping baby or a delicate glasswork: secure, but not firm. Each action is simple, important, and probably repeated. That's where a lot of my music sits and it lets some of my other material drift forwards, the expressions of character of players and their instruments that emerge from these simple doubles and repetitions. That's particularly apparent in Piano(s) and String Quartet: the tuning disparity between the new and old piano turns it into a sort of eulogy for the one that was to be donated, but also the different approach taken by both pianists to the pulsed middle C that continues through most of the piece is expressive and generates this beautiful overtone melody, moulded around their characters, that shimmers from both pulsed strings. Things like that are a large part of why we don't tend to rehearse my music very much. Rehearsing is a wonderful thing for lots of music, but it can be flattening for some and certainly for mine. The recording of Double Quintet and Duo on the album is a capture of the very first read-through, on the day of the premiere and only a minute or two after I finished setting up the mics — I'm still tuning my guitar through the first minutes!