Emsley: Helter-Skelter and Flow Form

Michael Finnissy’s generation produced no shortage of English composers who could write difficult music. What sets Richard Emsley apart, on the evidence of this Métier survey, is a patience most of his contemporaries never bothered to cultivate: a willingness to let a musical idea sit there, unresolved, until the listener’s ear adjusts to its logic rather than the other way around.

Take Helter-Skelter. The title is a joke, more or less. Nothing about this 1981 trio for flute, vibraphone, and piano actually careens. The three instruments proceed along separate tracks, rarely coinciding, each occupying its own temporal world — the vibraphone’s decay outlasting the piano’s attack, the flute floating free of both. Morton Feldman is the obvious ancestor, and Emsley doesn’t disguise the debt. But where Feldman often seems to be composing in a state of suspended grief, Emsley’s stillness feels more clinical, more curious. He wants to know what happens when three musicians agree not to agree.

The Juniper Tree, written the same year, is another animal altogether. Feral, really. Grimm’s tale — the one with the stepmother, the apple, the stew — gets a setting for soprano and four players that abandons contemplation for something closer to assault. The vocal writing sits high and jagged; the instrumental ensemble, oboe and flute doubling with percussion and piano, claws rather than accompanies. It is not a comfortable eighteen minutes. I’m not sure it wants to be. Whether it fully earns its own violence is a fair question — Emsley pushes hard, and the piece occasionally feels like it’s shouting to prove a point already made. But there’s no denying the craft, or the nerve.

…from swerve of shore to bend of bay… lifts its title from the opening page of Finnegans Wake, that great unpunctuated river-sentence that loops back on itself at the novel’s end. Composed in 1985 for the Fires of London, Peter Maxwell Davies’s old ensemble, it asks for the kind of virtuosic stamina that group was built to supply. The music churns. Overlapping figures pile against each other like actual tidal wash, no single line settling into primacy for more than a few bars. It’s exhausting to play, evidently, and exhausting, in the best sense, to hear. I found myself thinking of Birtwistle’s mechanistic energy, though Emsley’s surfaces are less brutal, more granular.

The solo pieces occupy different territory, and here the disc’s title track, Flow Form for piano (1987), is the clear high point. It does what its name promises: liquid, unforced, the kind of piece where you stop counting bars and just let the harmony drift past like something glimpsed through water. Ravel’s ghost hovers distantly, though Emsley’s harmonic language owes more to his own patient system-building than to any French model.

By contrast, for piano 2 and for piano 3, both 1997, strip everything back. Sparse. Halting. Long silences that feel less like rests than like the music catching its breath, or daring you to lose patience. For guitar 1 (1998) inhabits similar terrain, and whoever’s playing it here handles the instrument’s particular problem, how to sustain interest across a mostly quiet, mostly slow surface, with real sensitivity to timbre, letting individual plucked notes ring into the silences rather than rushing past them.

“Finnissy’s Fifty,” the birthday tribute from 1996, is a small, wry thing — a card, essentially, dashed off with affection and considerably less argument than its companions. It’s a relief after the density surrounding it, and Emsley probably knew that.

Métier has built a real reputation documenting British composers nobody else bothers with, and this release fits the pattern: committed, idiomatic performances of music that will never trouble the pops charts. The playing throughout has the particular authority of musicians who’ve lived inside a composer’s world long enough to stop finding it strange. No rival recordings crowd this repertoire, so comparison is moot; Emsley’s advocates here are, for practical purposes, the only advocates he has on disc. That should matter to anyone still curious about what happened to English modernism after Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle became institutions. This is not party music. It rewards the listener who sits with it, nothing more, nothing less, and on those terms it succeeds.