In a conversation some years ago with the composer and conductor Jack Sheen, Jürg Frey drew a line on the table between them with his finger. He was explaining the balance of figurative and abstract elements in his music. ‘Sometimes a piece goes more to the abstract on this side,’ he explained. ‘And sometimes a piece goes more to the figurative on that side. … You can bring it to absolute abstraction if you lose all of the melodic lines so it’s more of an abstract piece, but you can also bring some melody to it and then it becomes more figurative music.’
For figurative and abstract, we might add sound and silence, tone and noise, and even music and art/text/environment to make a map of criss-crossing, permeable lines. Every piece by the Swiss composer, who celebrates his seventieth birthday this year, sits somewhere on this map. Each piece is a unique set of coordinates along those intersecting axes. Shuffle the coordinates – shifting the balance a little from sound to silence, or from melody to noise – and you take a few steps further along the path, move the piece a few squares on the board. New possibilities unfold. Here, the terrain is a little higher so the views are wider. Here, lower down, the ground is soft underfoot. Here there are trees; here grass brushes against your ankles. Like every place, every piece has its unique atmosphere.
In Frey’s work place often takes more concrete form as well. It can be a way to engage with language and structure, as in the vocal piece Lovaty (1996), whose score is comprised of two long lists of names: one of birds, the other of fields, valleys and hills following a spiral path through the composer’s Swiss homeland. It can be a fixed point from which to think about time, as in the abstracted observations of the changing seasons in Landscape of Echoes (2019). It can be an environment, as in the series L’âme est sans retenue (1997–2000), composed from field recordings made in a Berlin park in 1997; or the eight-part installation Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit (2001–2), in which transformed field recordings mix with the sounds of percussion, stones and metal objects. Or it can be a reason to attend closely to what is nearby, as it was for the poet Gustave Roud (1897–1976), whose words provide the titles and inspiration for many of Frey’s works, including the extended piano solo, La présence, les silences (2013–15). Indeed Roud, who lived most of his life in the tiny village of Carrouge in southwest Switzerland, is something of a model for Frey in his close and devoted attention to the tiniest nuances and details of the world.
And Huddersfield is a special place for Frey: he calls it a ‘natural home’ for his work, a lot of which has been recorded here for the Sheffield-based label Another Timbre. In 2015 he was hcmf// Composer in Residence, and it is fitting that his seventieth birthday should be marked at the festival by a day of concerts devoted to his music, chosen by the composer. As well as the installation Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit this will include works for voices and solo viola, performed by EXAUDI and Stéphanie Bozzini; definitive performances of La presence, les silences and the early Sam Lazaro Bros (1984) for solo piano by Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt; and a performance of the Fourth String Quartet (2018–2020) by the Canadian Bozzini Quartet, whose essential recording of Frey’s Second Quartet in 2004 did so much to grow his international profile. Wherever it may fall on the map of Frey’s musical preoccupations, each event promises something special.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 46th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2023, takes place Friday 17 – Sunday 26 November 2023. Tickets for highlight events including the Jürg Frey @ 70 programme are on sale now.