Improvisation Games and Meaningful Collaboration: ensemble Terra Invisus on debut album ‘Visions’

“We have a unique relationship with each piece on the album, and we believe the compositions also reflect the rapport we built with each composer through the workshopping process.”

Terra Invisus

Terra Invisus are a UK-based contemporary music trio dedicated to pushing musical and sonic boundaries through free improvisation, open notation, and and the performance of new commissions and contemporary works. Comprised of Milda Vitartaitė (piano), Alex Lyon (clarinets), and Rebecca Burden (cello), they draw on their individual musical experiences to curate forward-thinking live performances and collaborations. Formed at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Terra Invisus is a recipient of the Colin Blythe Bursary, and the winner of the Gladys Puttick Improvisation Competition 2022; notable highlights include performing Josh Kaye’s opera Outlier at Tête-à-Tête, and performances throughout the UK at St. Mary le Strand, St. Pancras Clock Tower, and Ashburton Arts, among others.

In April 2024, Terra Invisus released their debut album Visions, formed from a number of in-depth collaborations with composers. Featuring works by composers Jack Wood, Ryan Morgan, Jamie Elless, Joy Ingle, Emily de Gruchy, Joe Bates, Martin Suckling, and James M. Creed — picked from a call from proposals that took place in 2022 — the album launch took place at St. Pancras Clock Tower, London.

Following the release of Visions, we asked Terra Invisus to talk us through the process of creating the album, discussing improvisation games, just intonation, and fostering meaningful collaboration with composers…

–

In November 2022, we spent an evening in Rebecca’s kitchen ruminating on what Visions could look like. By the end of the evening had decided to put out a call for composition proposals from young composers across the UK.

At that point, we had been playing as Terra Invisus for around a year and a half, during our masters studies at Trinity Laban. Our interest in contemporary classical music led us to be consistent collaborators with the composition department, regularly taking on many exciting contemporary music projects.

Working in similar musical circles, we developed a friendship and in the summer of 2021, we applied to play an improvised set as a trio at the New Lights Piano Festival. At this stage, free improvisation was a little more remote to us, however we found ourselves instantly able to connect musically, despite it being our first time playing together as a group. The next week, we met up to chat and play through some trio pieces together. Rebecca brought Martin Suckling’s ‘Visiones (after Goya)’, which eventually became the piece that Visions was built upon. We rehearsed regularly and continued to improvise and perform together over the next year, winning the Gladys Puttick Improvisation Competition in 2022, by which point we knew we wanted to take the ensemble beyond the context of our studies.

Visions is a collection of eight new works, composed for piano, clarinet, and cello. It includes six new commissions from young composers and pieces by Martin Suckling and Jack Wood. We selected pieces that captured our varied interests and would represent the wide range of textures and styles we love exploring as an ensemble.

The six commissions began to evolve and materialize throughout 2023, as we met with the composers, to workshop drafts. After kindly receiving funding from Help Musicians and The Marchus Trust, we brought Benjamen Leigh-Grosart and his production expertise on board to bring the project to life. We rehearsed the pieces over the summer months and eventually recorded them with the incredible Jess Camilleri, across two long days at Strongroom Studios in Hackney, London.

We have a unique relationship with each piece on the album, and we believe the compositions also reflect the rapport we built with each composer through the workshopping process. It has been such a pleasure to work closely with Jack Wood, Ryan Morgan, Jamie Elless, Joy Ingle, Emily de Gruchy, Joe Bates, Martin Suckling, and James M. Creed and this body of work would not be the same without their collective talent. We released the album in April 2024 and have been touring the pieces to new audiences across the UK.

Blur – Jack Wood

“Living in a city, it is easy to slip into a state where we pass through our environment without really considering or even noticing our surroundings. I felt the fast paced, bustling, urban context of a city would lend itself to a gradually evolving texture in a minimalist style, propelled largely by the piano with the other instruments fading in and out. This piece aims to allow the audience to reflect on how they perceive their urban surroundings.”
– Jack Wood

We adore the soundworld of Jack’s piece and how it immediately captures your attention, with the delicate piano groove, woven with bass clarinet lines and cello harmonics. We spent the rehearsals working on the precision and flow of this section, as well as working on the pacing and direction to the ‘peak’ of the piece, where the cello drives the energy with glissandi double stops. The piece ends with a softer, reflective section which eventually morphs and dissipates.

‘Blur’ is an extremely special piece to us as it was one of the first pieces written for us as Terra Invisus and was premiered at the 2021 Rude Health Composition Festival. Instantly we connected with this composition and have kept it as a staple in our repertoire ever since. We always knew when it came to our first recording project, ‘Blur’ would be featured.

AUTO – Ryan Morgan

“How does music sound if ensemble performers actively avoid listening to each other? How do I get classically trained performers to stop listening to each other?

AUTO resists dominant compositional frameworks, with an approach of immediacy through a text score and structured improvisation. It explores the immediate and intuitive response of the performers while encouraging autocommunication, the focus on ones actions, decisions and restructuring of both ego and understanding of the performance material.”
– Ryan Morgan

From early on in our collaboration, we had been discussing our shared interest in non-traditional scores that would challenge us as musicians and allow us to explore very different approaches to ensemble playing and musical communication.

‘AUTO’ is an almost entirely text-based, improvised score, instructing us to act against our musical impulses. This is perhaps the most ‘improvised’ piece on the album, and every time we get to perform ‘AUTO’ it takes on an entirely different form. The piece grew from our first workshop with Ryan, where we tried many improvisation ‘games’ and he began to build the score around what we had explored together.

The text score is broken up into four movements, 1. warming up, 2. own time, 3. stop and start, 4. repeat, all played continuously. There is a small amount of notation in movement 2, where we improvise the shape and intensity of the material. From there the piece essentially becomes an improvisation game. In movement 3, we must stop ourselves when we find ourselves listening to another’s improvisation. In movement 4 we repeat the last phrase of our improvisation when we catch ourselves listening.

Three Days – Jamie Elless

“Writing music for and with your friends is a monumentally intimate and special experience. You know each other’s faces, voices, styles, lives, stories – you know each other, meaning you must be nothing but honest throughout the entire process. I wrote these three short pieces during an incredibly lonely part of my life; hearing them gradually take shape is an experience I will always treasure. These pieces mean far more to me than merely a record of the collaboration between four friends: they are themselves alive, they move, they bleed, they scream, they breathe just as I struggled to do.”
– Jamie Elless

Jamie’s music is very personal to us, due to our long-standing friendship and collaboration with her. ‘Three Days’ is not the first piece she has written for us as a group. Her 2021-2022 piece, ‘Four Date Nights’, is a set of four miniature movements, using plainchant themes and beating tones. As with ‘Three Days’, each movement has its distinct quality.

Movement 1, ‘I stood in the middle of the carriage and watched life stream past on both sides’, uses a simple plainchant which we play and then sing, taking care to pace it in our own time. It creates a moment of stillness as if we were watching life rushing by.

Movement 2, ‘I used to dream about falling down an endless sand dune’, is a timer-based score, using 3 chords in the piano to be repeated ad-lib, then a slowly emerging cello and bass clarinet Low C creeps in until the note swallows the sound of the piano chords. The cello then slowly takes us out of the piece exploring quiet harmonics on that same note. This movement creates the feeling that you are sinking or being swallowed.

Movement 3, ‘I touch my nose when I’m a bit nervous (and it rubs my foundation off)’, is the only piece on the album that uses graphic notation, for this we are repeating a single note but focusing on the density and texture, according to the graphics.

Living Light – Joy Ingle

“Based on Hildegard of Bingen’s first work of visionary theology, ‘Living Light’ follows Hildegard’s revelations from the creation of the cosmos through to the last judgement and the end of history. The piece veers between frenetic episodes of improvised material guided by Hildegard’s vibrant (and violent) imagery and passages from her own sacred monophonic works.”
– Joy Ingle

Joy’s score is an assortment of musical themes, structured improvisation, plainchant neumes, and text score. Traversing this piece requires our best attention and concentration as it can feel almost like a carousel of images, sounds, and words continuously entering our imagination. We have particularly enjoyed the contrast of creating deep and washy soundscapes in the improvised sections in contrast to some of the strict, monophonic material. We think this is what works so well about the piece, as the score directs us but also leaves enough space to let our imagination go. Balancing the divergent material was an intriguing process and eventually, we started feeling more and more comfortable with it, using the improvisations as a tool to bind the work technically and emotionally together.

Trance Dance (Happenstance) – Emily de Gruchy

“My piece is rooted in the 1990s EDM genre of trance music — characterised by a fast, pulsing tempo; repeated melodic phrases; and (as per Rick Snoman) a musical form that distinctly builds tension and elements throughout a track often culminating in one or two ‘peaks’ or ‘drops’. This piece was specifically written for the trio’s specialism in contemporary improvisation, including an entire section for them to explore extended techniques and incite the feeling of a mystical hysteria.”
– Emily de Gruchy

We were very intrigued by Emily’s proposal submission and we thought it would be an excellent point of contrast on the album which would frame the more ‘free’ works in a new light. The piece is rooted around the groove and rhythmic features of trance music. The instrumental parts pass around a riff throughout the piece and the free improvisation section allows for the music to almost break down and descend into chaos for a moment. We also worked on performing super rhythmic spectral harmonic glissandi in the bass clarinet and harmonic sweeps in the cello, a great example of how compositions can help develop your technical facility as a musician.

One obvious difference from the other repertoire we have recorded is that this piece is performed alongside a four-to-the-floor beat track that keeps us strictly in time. We had a lot of fun workshopping this piece, hearing the groove combine with the electronic part, as well as experimenting with the overall tempo to find what speed gave the playing the right energy.

Wound Honey – Joe Bates

“Honey has been used to dress wounds for millennia. In Wound Honey, we hear sugar sweetness alongside the astringency of iron-rich blood; amber and red and bandage; crystalline wax and clotted stasis.

Joe Bates writes music that aims to make us at home in alterity and find resolution within strange tuning systems. In Wound Honey, the piano begins the piece confined, trapped in simple two-note chords. As the piece progresses, it unclots, liquifies in increasingly elaborate figuration.”
– Joe Bates

Joe’s ‘Wound Honey’ is a set of four small movements using an adaptation of the Helmholtz-Ellis Just Intonation system. This was the first piece we played as a group using a tuning system as its predominant compositional feature, which was a fairly new way of working for us. Putting this piece together required equal time spent working individually and as an ensemble. In our rehearsals, it was exciting to explore the relationship between the three voices and their resulting difference tones.

We love how the movements have almost developed their own personalities for us. The first feels like sighing, and we try to lean into the weight each phrase creates with the intermittent silence. The second movement is notated more like a chorale, with piano trills and clarinet cues carrying us through the piece. To us, the third movement almost became the ‘cute’ one. We love the gentle gestures and moments of tonality between the piano and clarinet. The fourth movement also follows the chorale-like structure and becomes bigger and almost menacing towards the end of the movement.

Visiones (after Goya) – Martin Suckling

“On page 10 of the Goya sketchbook generally known as the Witches and Old Women album, there is an image captioned by a single word: ‘Visiones’. An elderly couple dance, apparently suspended midair in an awkward embrace: his attention seems elsewhere; she may be picking his pocket. Peeking out from behind a fold of the lady’s skirt or the man’s cloak is a grinning face, all sunken eyes and wrinkled skin, laughing at – what? The dancers, the viewer, the world?

3: A distorted memory of what has gone before. The piano is now the melodic lead; the cello a crazed, fragmentary virtuoso, unable to find a ‘pure’ tone; the clarinet restricted to a simple pattern of soft multiphonics. The spinning dance intrudes, then overwhelms.”
– Martin Suckling

To us, ‘Visiones’ holds many forms. For a while, it felt like a technical benchmark as we prepped it for exams, and we found the live performances challenging. So, in early 2023 we carved out space to spend time with the piece, without upcoming pressures. We acknowledged we had missed the element of dance that forms the subtle foundation of the piece’s rhythmic and harmonic complexities. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment for us and we started to feel everything flow and lock into place. We spent a while feeling this sense of ensemble pulse and broke into the fine details of the music. Due to the intricacy and complexity of this work, we often describe it as a never-ending journey. We feel we are always discovering new ways of living in and dancing around this piece when rehearsing or performing it. We often find ourselves hearing a new line emerge or feeling a shift in the way we listen to one another.

Trio: after an étude by Hélène de Montegeroult, composer – James M. Creed

“Trio was composed for Terra Invisus during a months-long dive into the large number of études that survive the French composer and pianist Hélène de Montgeroult. The trio is a simple piece about repetition and difference, about gentle symmetry, about watercolour, and about playing together. The title of the referenced étude—no. 28 (1820)—is roughly translated as “a song that carries its accompaniment in the same hand.”
– James M. Creed

This trio is one of the pieces that has given us some insight into the art of improvisation, about our impulses as trained musicians and how to challenge them. Simplicity can sometimes be the most challenging to deal with. The score consists of a specific selection of notes to use, (the pianist’s part consists of a single chord), and the rest is improvised with limiting parameters in place. As the desired sound world is described in the score as ‘placing stones into still water’, it presents us with a task to create a shape, with subtle inner movement, unfolding in its own time, without disrupting the natural flow of this piece with our musicality. During the workshops we discussed alternate ways to create a build-up, other than the use of dynamics, letting our lines interlock as a result of independence rather than reaction.

We have to thank all the people who have been a part of the project as releasing music can be a huge undertaking. Thanks to Help Musicians, Marchus Trust, Benjamen Leigh-Grosart, Jess Camilleri, Strongroom Studios, Edward Blakeley, Ary Maudit, Franklyn Oliver, Kornélia Nemcová, Eve Morris, Cordelia O’Driscoll and everyone who has supported the album.

–

Stream and download Visions at the link below:

• https://terrainvisus.bandcamp.com/album/visions

Learn more about Terra Invisus and their members:

• https://terra-invisus.com/
• https://alexlyonmusic.com/
• https://www.rebeccaburdencellist.com/
• https://www.instagram.com/mildavitartaite/

Learn more about the composers involved in Visions:

• https://ryansfmorgan.com/
• https://jam-elless.bandcamp.com/
• https://www.joyingle.com/
• https://soundcloud.com/emily-de-gruchy-474298625
• http://www.joebates.co.uk/
• http://www.martinsuckling.com/
• https://jamescreedmusic.wixsite.com/website/home

Check out our previous interviews with composers Jamie Elless and James M. Creed:

• https://prxludes.net/2024/02/19/jamie-elless/
• https://prxludes.net/2023/02/13/james-creed/