The Kaum Quartet grew out of a workshop on Mount Pilion, Greece. Blame it on the weather, but very quickly a group of us found ourselves dreaming up a completely new kind of saxophone ensemble. We were all soloists in our own right, and we all had an interest in multiphonics, microtones, and new concepts of group improvisation. We also had a sense of urgency: the saxophone has undergone huge developments in the last century, but many of these advances are the work and sole preserve of, well, soloists. We wanted to push these ideas, and transplant them to an ensemble. We wanted strict compositional structures – and we wanted to offset them with improvised textures. We wanted to open up a new world of sound for the saxophone.
For the Irish premiere concert of the Kaum Quartet, we chose the music of Hildegard von Bingen as a foundation. The melodies of this 12th-century visionary are transformed in different ways. Sometimes a fragment from her work is set under our microscope and examined in detail. At other times a whole chorale is contrasted against a backdrop of air and reed sounds.
After a week of rehearsals in a (yes, idyllic!) house in County Wicklow, we delivered our results in the beautiful acoustics of St Audeons church. It was as though a weight had been lifted from us. For the first time since getting together, we could stop worrying about what our ensemble was – the music we were making was our answer.
In Ave Generosa a soft body of multiphonics gradually unfolds, revealing fragments of the original theme only when we are deeply inside the texture. The original melody is almost dreamt rather than played, like the memory of music from childhood.
AnAus is a Morton Feldman-influenced structure in which one microtonal tone field gradually merges into another. The random nature of the saxophones' entry creates a machine-like music. Whilst practicing these pieces we often felt that the tonal possibilities and variants expand hugely with time – though this may simply have been our ears "opening up" to new possibilites. In any event, we decided to explore, increasing the length of the individual pieces to give us enough space to explore each field fully.
In Flock, we turn the movement of swarms and flocks into a musical form. After a slowly ascending microtonal line the saxophones erupt into a seemingly chaotic pattern, but within the external drama there are some complex patterns at work. Each of us carefully studied the patterns of bees (Seán), swans (Christian), ducks (Frank), and sheep (Hayden), transforming their rhythms and group movement into music. The final movement of the work stands in stark contrast to the fractal swarms, with a chord built from overtones which constantly falls back to its first fundamental.
A Manu uses a traditional Corsican theme for unaccompanied singers – a form that lends itself to a saxophone rendition. On its heels is De Sancta Maria, where some fragments of a melody from Hildegard are frozen in mid-flight and become chords. The chords themselves are sometimes stripped down and leave us with the single melodic line once again.
Kaum Quartet
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