On 12 July Julian Anderson’s Poetry Nearing Silence (1997) was performed by the Yellow Barn Music Festival Ensemble at the annual Vermont chamber music festival. The 15-minute work is scored for flute, clarinet, harp, two violins, viola, and cello, with the second violin also taking up a ratchet – or fishing reel – and triangle.
Poetry Nearing Silence is a suite of eight miniatures after The Heart of a Humument (1977), a collection of poems and drawings by Tom Phillips. The book sees him ‘treating’ an obscure late Victorian novel by selecting certain words and phrases, and then painting over the rest of each page. This process is mirrored in vividly imagined music whose pithy energy creates a playful, virtuoso tour de force for all seven instruments.
Its witty movements cover diverse musical terrain. In the lugubrious ‘Know Vienna’ there are hints of a disjointed waltz and a blues; the violinist’s ratchet provides “a sort of composed background noise” in ‘my future as the star in a film of my room’. Two folk-inspired movements pay homage to the music of Leoš Janáček – Anderson’s favourite composer – and that of the Carpathian Mountains.
The titular movement sees an offstage clarinet – the ‘voice outside’ – challenging the quiet ticking of the onstage ensemble. Its prompt is a portrait of Samuel Becket – one of the great masters of theatrical silence. “For much of the piece silence plays a vital role”, Anderson notes, “in punctuating the music, disrupting it, concluding it, or stopping it in its tracks.”
Poetry Nearing Silence was commissioned by the Nash Ensemble; the group recorded the work in 2019 as part of a focus on Anderson’s chamber music. In November 2023 Anderson himself conducted the piece with students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where Anderson is Professor of Composition and Composer in Residence. The work, which has received over fifty performances internationally, has been taken up by groups including Aurora Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, students from the Julliard School, Ensemble Modern, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Das Neue Ensemble Hannover, and Ensemble de Musique Contemporaine de Strasbourg.
Towards Poetry, an extended version of the piece, was choreographed by Mark Baldwin for his debut with the Royal Ballet in 1999. In 2001 the pair would collaborate again on The Bird Sings With Its Fingers, a specially-commissioned ballet score for the Mark Baldwin Dance Company and Sinfonia 21, inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Orphée.