# Jeffrey Lewis: Music of Austere Contemplation
ASC CS CD43 • 69:10
Jeffrey Lewis belongs to that generation of British composers—he was born in Port Talbot in 1942—who found themselves caught between the dying embers of pastoral Englishness and the fierce continental modernisms of Darmstadt. The biographical note tells us he studied with Stockhausen and Ligeti, received Tippett’s blessing in the form of an Arts Council bursary. What matters, though, is what survives on the page after all that tutelage.
This disc, recorded in Macclesfield in 2000, presents five works written between 1986 and the date of disc. They share a certain… what to call it? A quality of deliberate, almost ritualistic restraint. Lewis isn’t interested in seducing you.
Threnody opens the program—solo piano, wide-spaced chords that rock back and forth like someone in grief who has moved past tears into something harder, more intractable. The stasis is intentional, even aggressive. David Jones, who contributes an intelligent sleeve note and plays throughout, understands that this music refuses to develop in conventional ways. It simply exists, insists on its right to be heard on its own uncompromising terms.
The two-movement Cantus, for clarinet and piano, shows Lewis working with what the notes describe as “eastern influences“—chimes, gongs, that sort of thing. I’m not entirely convinced by the orientalism, which feels more imagined than absorbed, but Karen Turner’s clarinet playing is genuinely limpid, a word the annotator uses and which fits. Against Jones’s spaced chords and dripping right-hand textures (again, apt description), Turner finds something approaching lyricism. The second movement grows more animated, the clarinet pursuing what sounds like an obsessive, almost neurotic quest for melodic independence. Whether it achieves this independence or simply circles endlessly is perhaps the point.
Teneritas—tenderness, softness—pairs Aoife ni Raghaill’s flute with Jones’s piano. Ethereal without tipping into the precious or fey, though it comes close. The increasingly insistent piano chords provide necessary ballast, keep the piece from floating away entirely. Lewis seems aware of this danger, pulls back just when you think he might lose the thread.
Sonante, the earliest work here, dates from 1986. Choppy, fragmentary, tense—all accurate descriptors for this clarinet-and-piano piece that sounds like someone trying to speak through clenched teeth. Turner navigates its angularities with admirable clarity, though I wonder if the music’s very refusal of continuity doesn’t eventually work against it. Tension without release can become monotony.
The centerpiece is Trilogy, twenty-five minutes of solo piano first broadcast on Radio 3 in 1994. Jones invokes Rothko in his note, and the comparison isn’t absurd—particularly in the opening movement, marked Lentissimo, intenso e molto expressivo (poco flessibile). That parenthetical qualification is telling: very expressive, but only slightly flexible. Lewis wants intensity within severe constraints, wants to achieve what Rothko achieved: furious simplicity, as Jones nicely puts it.
The first movement establishes this aesthetic with almost brutal clarity. Slow, weighted chords that seem to hang in space, each one mattering because there are so few of them. The central movement telescopes—again Jones’s word—the thematic material of the outer panels, compressing it into something more animated but no less austere. Then back to the opening world, though we hear it differently now, having passed through that central crucible.
Jones plays with the necessary clarity and unwavering concentration this music demands. The recording, made at ASC Studios, captures the piano’s resonance without romanticizing it. You hear the hammers, the decay, the spaces between.
Does it all add up? Lewis has clearly thought hard about what he wants to say and how to say it. The consistency of aesthetic across these five works suggests a composer who knows his own mind, perhaps too well. I found myself wishing for more variety of approach, more willingness to risk incoherence or even failure. Everything here is carefully judged, precisely calibrated. But precision and calculation, however skillful, can sometimes feel like substitutes for genuine urgency.
Still, there’s integrity here, and a kind of bleak honesty that commands respect if not always affection. Lewis isn’t trying to please, and in an age of manufactured accessibility, that counts for something.
