How album booklets taught me to be a composer
written by Matthew Gilley, composer and chairman of CoMA London Ensemble
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I’m working on a new piece about lace, or more specifically the history of the lace industry in Nottingham. It’s taking a lot of time and research – there’s a lot of books to be read, journals to search through, a workshop to visit, people to speak to. But one of the first places I think to turn is Wil Bolton’s album Quarry Bank (2011).
The album uses extensive field recordings of the Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, a cotton mill that has been restored with spinning machines and looms of the industrial revolution. It’s not just the music I’m here for, though, it’s the album booklet: archive photos and documents, notes, threads from the mill. It’s a beautiful demonstration of how history might inspire music, how the rhythms of machine and instruments communicate. You can see how the album is in dialogue with its subject, in a commentary all the richer for having the visual and textual accompaniment.
Liner notes would have been one of the first ways that I appreciated music not just as something to listen to but something to think about, to study, to analyse. Now, taking some first steps as a composer, I appreciate them even more. They are a treasure trove – and a remarkably open one – of music history, theory, critical analysis, commentaries from musicians, interviews.
I’ve come to composition a little late, having only started to pursue it seriously since my late twenties, and on a non-academic route. I help to run the amateur contemporary music group CoMA London, and I’ve learned through practice, observation, independent study and more practice. As such these little, constant inspirations have been invaluable.
I’ve learned much about Beethoven’s late string quartets and their connections forwards and backwards in tradition from the Danish String Quartet’s Prism albums, for example, without ever having to open a textbook. My copy of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes contains a table of his piano preparations. This is cheap, democratised knowledge: a bountiful source of learning easily accessed before, after or totally outside of academia. There are brilliant musical lessons here, open to anyone with £10 or so to spare.
Liner notes come in a variety of styles. The most obvious might be a mini (even not-so-mini) essay or critical appreciation of the music. Karen Power’s … we return to ground … (2024), which uses field recordings as “aural scores” for the players of the Quiet Music Ensemble, is accompanied with an essay by the musician and critic David Toop. This is highly conceptual music, the ideas and processes of which are not necessarily obvious on a first listen – even on subsequent listens, having some commentary to guide you is a boon. What’s particularly appealing to me is how Toop looks into the music, and then outwards to the question of why make music in this experimental way. These “immersions in non-human worlds”, he writes, have the potential to be transformative, as a “speculation that human creatures might rethink (even ultimately dismantle and reconstruct) hierarchical, exploitative, destructive and ultimately deadly models of coexistence with non-human creatures through the metaphor of music”.
These ideas are further illuminated by Power’s own notes on her process. “For me the act of field recording is composition,” she writes. Yet, “such sounds don’t necessarily translate to a musician when confined to standard musical scores”. Hence her developments of aural, graphic, video and text scores to immerse the musicians, and listeners, in the material. “Different kinds of music/sound require different ways of listening.” As much for the curious listener as the composer in search of inspiration, there are detailed notes for each of the album’s three pieces and small excerpts of the visual scores.
Kristine Tjøgersen’s Between Trees, also from last year, takes nature as a subject too in a series of compositions inspired by birdsong, forests and ocean habitats. The liner notes, however, take a different, more abstract approach. Each piece comes with a short, impressionistic text by Hanna Bjørgaas, a biologist and writer. “A sea urchin snarls!” she writes. Or, “Cane toads rhyming from a drainage ditch / two frogmouth birds humming a quiet duet”. Elsewhere is another call to immersion, but in more poetic terms: “Sit down by a tree. Lean your back against the trunk, feel how the roots are anchored in the ground. Put your hands behind your ears. Let them grow outwards, and listen.”
Written like this, a good liner note reduces the distance between composer and listener. They show that you might learn to compose by learning to listen well.
As a composer you are often confronted with the question of how much to explain your music to audiences. The position of the liner note is a freeing one. Especially when written by a third person, they are a reminder that the artist doesn’t have a monopoly on the interpretation of their own work. If this critic can engage with it on their own terms, then so can any listener. Bringing the listener closer to the composer, as a good note does, makes the composer’s work seem less rarefied and mysterious. It can be a blessing to remember that you need not be so precious about your work’s meaning and to allow the listener their importance.
Toop says that when he comes to write a liner note: “I imagine a person who is curious (in both senses), curious to know more about the music and curious for wanting to know more.” Whether context, history, analysis or something more like poetry, what he writes “is offered as a form of guidance, perhaps a way into music that may seem to have no clear path or rationale. This is founded in experience rather than any sense of superiority over the listener.”
Liner notes enhance the experience of listening, and the listener’s immersion in the music, by encouraging it to be more intentional. “Maybe listening is too easy,” Toop says, “in the sense that it can follow a routine, an orthodoxy that is difficult to shift once the brain has decided on a pathway. If I can imply other entry points or reference points then my job is done.”
The intention should be to “amplify hidden or occult aspects of the music that are entirely absent if you simply stream or download a digital audio file”. Indeed, few record labels seem to have embraced the possibilities of digital notes (Jennifer Walshe’s recent releases on Diatribe would be one notable exception).
With only the music, you miss out on the full sense of being engaged in a dialogue between all of these curious listeners, some of whom might be composers and critics, others of whom might later become them. Online forums do a similar job – and make the conversation much more literal and active. There’s something special, however, about how a liner note sits at a balance point between critical authority and an exchange between peers; also about how the liner note seeks you out, appearing alongside music as an encouragement to contemplation and action, rather than being something you would have to look for in a different space.
In this relatively digestible format the dialogue is distributed widely, musicians, critics and all these listeners sharing in immersion in this music. The liner note makes the case that musical ideas can and should be communicated in a format, and with a clarity and concision of language, that can be appreciated by any listener curious enough to read them.
This is a dialogue that continues over time. I have two copies of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic – the first recording from 1975, and a far longer recording from 2007. The piece has changed significantly in different performances over the years, and doesn’t quite have a fixed, definitive score. Bryars is quoted in the booklet for the first release describing the music as reflecting an “idea of assemblage, and taking iconic things and recycling them”. Toop links this to pop art and sampling. Manuel Zurria’s notes for the later release expand on this theme, saying that the music expresses “our Titanic idea: one related to memory and to lifetime, to concreteness and abstraction: a metaphor for the journey between life and death, the ocean surface and depth.” This edition captures the idea elegantly by dating the composition as “(1969-)”.
These exchanges between editions are a reminder to always be developing and revisiting your ideas, always questioning yourself, and they demonstrate that this can be done in relatively small, everyday ways. Robert Crehan wrote here last year, and Joanna Ward spoke in her interview, about the challenges of pursuing composition alongside work and other commitments, and I’ve felt some of the same difficulties. I work full-time, help to run an orchestra that meets weekly, and composition has to fit in the gaps. I’ll always have a need for inspiration that fits into those gaps as well. If liner notes gave me an idea of pursuing music seriously while I wasn’t even looking for it, now the continual little contrasts, conversations and flashes of insight they throw up help to keep me going.
It’s not about always being switched on, or always working, but cultivating a thoughtful approach to listening that avoids the sense of “routine” and “orthodoxy” that Toop mentions, keeping you open to new ideas. This idea of composer as listener is there in Pauline Oliveros’s theories of deep listening too: “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.” Or think back to Power’s description of field recording – surely an act of listening – as an act of composition.
While the exchange of ideas over time is most obvious between editions of the same music, it’s there between everything. Rereading the notes for the earlier edition of The Sinking of the Titanic, I realise what an excellent example it is of how research can inform music. It goes into some detail about how Bryars took the fact that hymns were played as the Titanic sank, but there’s disagreement about which hymns exactly, so he incorporates several candidates at different levels of explicitness and clarity to reflect the uncertainty. Apart from being interesting in its own right, this adds some more conceptual weight and practical insight to the example of Wil Bolton’s Quarry Bank.
You can see developing here a personal canon: Bach, Beethoven, Bartok and Cage, sure, but also Gavin Bryars and Karen Power and Kristine Tjøgersen and Wil Bolton, and in this library of liner notes they all get equal prominence. And crucially this is a canon of theory and analysis as well as the music itself, freed of traditional expectations. Working independently can give you great freedom to develop your own influences, but there’s also a risk it leaves you adrift from context. That’s where these little essays can really come into their own – making a syllabus that’s still your own, but with a polyphony of interpretation and reference points.
My approach to trying to learn to compose has been pretty simple: consume everything. Play as much as you can, listen to as much as you can, read what you can. Liner notes make this voracious mission a lot easier, and provide a gentle guiding hand along the way. They nudge you to think about what you’re listening to, listen more actively, and in approachable language engage you in a wide exchange of ideas over distance, over time and over genres. They remind us all to be more curious listeners.
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References:
- Wil Bolton – Quarry Bank (Time Released Sound, 2011)
- Gavin Bryars – The Sinking of the Titanic / Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (Virgin EG Records, 1998)
- Gavin Bryars – The Sinking of the Titanic (Touch, 2007)
- John Cage – Sonatas and Interludes (Decca, 1975/2012)
- Danish String Quartet – Prism III (ECM, 2021) and Prism V (ECM, 2023)
- Pauline Oliveros – Quantum Listening (Ignota, 2022)
- Karen Power – … we return to ground … (Other Minds, 2024)
- Kristine Tjøgersen – Between Trees (Aurora Records, 2024)
- Jennifer Walshe – An Gléacht (Diatribe, 2024)
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Matthew Gilley is a composer, curator, and violinist living in London. He is chairman of CoMA London, an innovative amateur ensemble that commissions and works with composers to create a repertoire of contemporary music that is open to players of a wide range of abilities. He has also co-created To Your Ear, a concert series run by a collective of composers and performers. These two strands are reflected in his composition: work for amateur ensembles, inspiring creative playing through open scoring, elements of player choice, and the introduction of idiomatic extended techniques in an accessible way; and patient, attentive chamber music, for specific player collectives, engaging closely with small sounds and encouraging thoughtful interpretation.
