On 28 June Ensemble Modern and conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni performed Tansy Davies’ neon and Anna Meredith’s Tripotage Miniatures at Wigmore Hall, alongside music by Anthony Braxton, Bertam Wee, and Alex Paxton. They present the programme in the coming season at Frankfurt’s Alte Oper on 4 November 2025.
neon, scored for an amplified ensemble of bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, percussion, keyboard, violin, cello, and double bass, is one of Davies’ most widely-performed works. The 10-minute piece is an evocative synthesis of the pervasive groove of her music – with its roots in funk and electro – and a gritty modernist sensibility. The interlocking textures and rhythmic mechanisms of this collage add up to create an archetypical work in Davies’ catalogue, “pulse schemes influenced by Birtwistle overlaid with the driving insistence of funk” (The Guardian, Andrew Clements, 11 November 2019).
“neon consists of boxes”, Davies writes. “Each box contains a pattern or groove: some are bright and shiny, others dark and grimy. All of the boxes can be fitted together, the patterns are built to interlock with each other in numerous ways.” It has been taken up by the London Sinfonietta, players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, members of the Philharmonia, Asko|Schönberg, Athelas Ensemble, Red Note Ensemble, and Azalea, who recorded it in 2004.
Meredith’s Tripotage Miniatures is a collection of 3 duets, 2 trios and a tutti movement for mixed sextet, made up of clarinet, horn, flute, oboe, viola and double bass; each movement is around 1-3 minutes long. The miniatures explore different kinds of opacity, glitch, fuzz, shade and grime. They imagine, as Meredith puts it, “underhand dealings that place a sort of filmy surface on top of the material”: one translation of ‘tripotage’, she notes, is “Jiggery Pokery”.
Sometimes this filter seems to drain colour from the work – turning the material almost sepia, sometimes it makes ideas a bit murkier – harder to grasp, slippery and falling through the fingers. In the opening movement, ‘Lanolin’, we hear a jerky game of imitation between horn and Eb clarinet; in ’40 Watt’, the piccolo sits eerily low whilst the double bass plucks ethereal high harmonics, reversing the polarity of their usual registrations. The movements, which contain some small thematic links and last twelve minutes altogether, can be performed as a whole or excerpted.
Tripotage Miniatures premiered at Wigmore Hall with Aurora Orchestra in 2016, who later recorded it in 2020; it has also received performances from players from Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Ensemble 360.