Fifty years into his music, you’d think it would be easy to say something solid about James Dillon. The world has tried: numerous attempts have been made to find an appropriate seat for Scotland’s great composer, with several retroactive decisions made on where to place the endless stream of work he’s been making since 1976. Call it ‘new complexity’, if it helps, with a nod to those dense scores of his, but the truth is he comes from a different place entirely. He’s not part of the institution; he’s not even bothered about reacting to it. Instead, he is defined by his determination to learn things for himself, and to explore the outer regions of sound and history.
A self-taught composer with an early background in rock, blues and folk music, Dillon picked up influences for himself. He discovered music from all over the shop, connecting genres and histories where he found them intersecting. He started playing music in slightly different realms – on the bagpipes, and in bands – while also reaching outside of the Western canon for clues. His work talks through time, and connects musical cultures; he describes it as ‘expressing the verticality of history’, harmonising seemingly disparate sounds through his own work. His 1980 work Parjanya-Vata serves as an early example: a dramatic string work titled after the Sanskrit words that refer to rain and wind, the personified characters that exist in the Vedic texts, here Dillon invokes musical links between the Hindustani raga system and the pibroch of the Scottish highlands, combining the energy and virtuosity of both traditions.
As for what else has run through his work over the years, pretty much all of it has been extracurricular. Obsessed with art and classical history, his compositions are like a personal library, a weird legendarium that comes together under his spell. Ancient mythologies and legacies swim through his discography, the composer mediating on ‘what we might have lost’ to history, and questioning our use of the past. His massive 2004 work Philomela retold the tragedy of the Princess of Athens, expanding on the writing of Greek writers such as Ovid and Sophocles as if he were contributing to the lore. Which he was: the piece he was so reluctant to call ‘opera’ was exuberant and immediate, a brash juxtaposition of baroque and contemporary sounds that gave its listener narrative threads while burning them through. It is a fine and thrilling line that Dillon walks; his passion for the subject material shines through, letting its audience in, while still working steadfastly towards a vision that is locked behind time.
Being self-taught may have given Dillon’s music the individualistic streak it’s known for, but his course hasn’t been all freedom and abandon. His music is in fact defined by pouring over the details, paying close attention to the smallest gesture and how it functions within a large work. He is a follower of what he has called ‘small deviations’, and is equally intrigued by how these fractions relate to something larger, operating at ‘inter-penetrating’ and ‘multi-layered’ levels. Driven by molecular events, his music can feel unsettled, and without a finishing point, rippling out from itself and becoming larger, more ambitious, through its detail.
With Dillon @ 70, hcmf// 2020 celebrates not only the relationship the festival has shared with the composer over the years, but also the twists and turns Dillon has taken with his music, from the intensity and violence of his large-scale cycles to the enchanting veil of mystery scattered through years of small, maze-like pieces. The programme is marked by friendly contrasts: commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and the Paris based Ensemble InterContemporain, Pharmakeia for 16 players is the complete edition of a cycle in four parts (Temenos, strophe a, Circe and strophe b), and emerges from the speculative world-building Dillon likes to do: ‘Pharmakeia takes the form of an interlocking ritual, the ritual of music itself, its performance, its sorcery’. The cycle’s third part Circe (commissioned separately by the German ensemble Musikfabrik) alludes to the myth of the eponymous Greek enchantress, here becoming a metaphor for the magical powers of music.
Alongside London Sinfonietta’s premiere sits a work from 2016, echo the angelus, an unheard solo piano work that will be performed by pianist Noriko Kawai. One of the world’s leading pianists, Noriko Kawai has been performing Dillon’s work since 2006. She was one of the principal architects for The Book of Elements, a full-scale compendium of piano works that Dillon completed in 2003. Known for its technical demands, Elements is a cornerstone of contemporary piano music. It sees Dillon express not only the beguiling range of music he’s internalised from classical and experimental composers, but also the untraceable steps he’s taken for himself. As a set of five volumes, Elements builds an insurmountable tension, placing familiar chords and motifs from earlier volumes into later ones, like figments in the imagination of the listener.
Performing his work, Kawai has been frequently immersed in Dillon’s music, where things are always in an active state of touch and go. She is keen to point out its ‘sensory’ nature, the way these bristling, bombastic pieces crash into fragile, unfixable comedowns. After working on The Book of Elements, Kawai joined up with the Arditti Quartet to perform The Soadie Waste, which begins with the five musicians playing with a kind of co-ordinated asymmetry, their personal frenzies connected by momentary silences they all punctuate milliseconds apart. Early on, they sync up on a gorgeous, celebratory harmony, which the piano then dissolves, making way for a passage of hushed frailties. The piece climbs in and out of its vulnerability, sharp and soft and sharp and soft to the end.
‘It takes me to somewhere unknown’, Kawai says, describing Dillon’s music. She has always found his music compelling to play, not for the challenge, but because ultimately, it’s ‘beautiful’. It may not be the most common adjective fixed to his music, but Kawai points to echo the angelus as a perfect example of what Dillon’s really doing when his pieces appear chaotic. She describes the ‘nervous chimes, the veils of sad church bells and angelic whispers‘ she hears in the piece. These are Dillon’s sounds, given the delicate attention he’s been writing with for decades.