… the programme that gets inside the minds of the world’s leading creative figures, and finds out how they work and think.
This episode explores Hannah’s collaboration with Paraorchestra on a new album and live show called The Unfolding. Paraorchestra are a unique ensemble that was the focus of my earlier article Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra. The Unfolding began with research and development days of experimenting and sharing ideas in Paraorchestra’s Bristol base which generated a collection of samples that became sketches of a piece yet to be be turned into a coherent whole. Ironically, the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 appears to have enabled Hannah to focus on this work as her other commitments were forced into abeyance.
Whilst the Unfolding exploys minimal words to explore and convey its time and the cosmos theme other vocal elements become an additional and powerful instrument in their own right. Hannah Peel explains:
When I sat down and wrote this we were in the beginning of lockdown and it was almost like that words were too much, like to describe what everybody was feeling. It was almost like there was so many words out there, like the news … I can’t describe what I’m feeling in words any more. And that’s the trick of music. It allows you to feel something and convey something and have a conversation with someone without having words. Sometimes words just aren’t there. It’s definitely been a conscious decision that there are very little lyrics in the tracks.
Hannah Peel is a composer used to and perfectly capable of crafting complex multi-instrumental pieces in her own studio but on this occasion while her outputs formed the structure of the piece they now needed to be transformed and translated into the arrangement and scores required by a professional orchestra. That required the input of the orchestrator Charlotte Harding who has worked with Paraorchestra on several projects. Charlotte worked with Hannah to develop the scores which were then sent to members of Paraorchestra so that they could learn their parts.
One standout description came from Victoria Oruwari who is a soprano in Paraorchestra. Victoria is blind, but yet, she constructed a scene in her imagination that became the guide to the way her voice contributes to the piece.
I’m blind so I tend to learn music better by ear and what I found myself doing was playing it [Hannah’s demo] through the night so I would go to sleep to it so that I would embody the music. I thought, yes, this needs to be gentle. This needs to be sensitive. This also needs to express the fact them I’m human. So I decided to create this sort of movie in my head. So I had this vision of one planet that’s quite bare but it has like hidden creatures in it and the creatures are kind of hiding underneath sand dunes. And then when my voice comes in, it’s some coming out of the sand dunes and peeping … There’s this lovely passage where all the flutes and all the instruments start to do this really fast movements towards the end of the piece and you can see all the creatures from the planet are coming out to gaze at this thing that has just landed … That’s kind of how I made sense of it. It’s my imagination. My interpretation. And I thought put that in your voice. Experience that wonder of seeing something you’ve never seen before just land on your planet.
The Unfolding collaboration extended Hannah Peel’s normal way of working.
Sometimes you can get stuck into a way of writing music, or you can get into a certain pattern that’s sometimes very hard to break. For example, I was getting like really used to writing music that was just for me, in terms of it was performed by me, it was written by me. And even though I was using instrumentalists for recording and stuff that collaborative element sometimes goes away when you’re always writing by yourself. And I really feel that this (the collaboration) connected me back to my roots of why I became a musician in the first place and played music with people … But I really love music that explore possibilities, that takes things further. The way the Paraorchestra are is they are progressive with the idea of what an orchestra should be. And by mixing all the analgoue, digital, and assistive instruments they make that magic happen and also you as a composer are brought along and that journey as well. You’re part of it.
The final words by Lloyd Coleman, Associate Music Director of Paraorchestra and bass clarinetist captures the essence of constructing coherence from what at first felt like chaotic fragments.
To see Paraorchestra, disabled and non-disabled throwing chaos around and it working completely well. This feels really special.
