Premiere performances of 'And At Pains To Temper The Light' by Scottish Ensemble

Posted on 5 December 2024

Scottish Ensemble will give the world premiere of 'And At Pains to Temper The Light' on Thursday 5 December at St John's Kirk, Perth, followed by six performances throughout the month as part of their Concerts by Candlelight series. A livestream of the concert at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on Tuesday 10 December will be available for a short time here. Co-commissioned by the orchestra of Staatsoper Stuttgart, who will give the European premiere in May, the piece takes its title from a Lynette Yiadom-Boakye poem. About the work, Hannah says:

"My grandfather and his family were from the Berbice region of Guyana, which has deeply rooted and routed, yet largely forgotten or unknown, historical connections to Scotland. In And At Pains to Temper the Light I seek to reimagine and refresh these ties, creating renewed spaces of connection that have the potential to inspire transformation through sound. Strings of the violins and violas are bound with dreadlock cuffs: Afro hair objects that alter the sounds of these quintessential Western instruments into something new and variable through the merging of the Afro and Euro, forming creolised sites of connectivity as in the situation of the Guyanese plantations.

Whilst I have been using this technique for a few years, the interconnected design of Scottish Ensemble’s programme, gave me the opportunity to find new ways to use the cuffs, ultimately creating a quieter, lighter, more fragile, fractured, sound quality. This is the sort of sonic world I wanted to build for the piece. Specifically, there is a central meditation section, which can also be performed in isolation as a sound installation (entitled 'You carve & carve until a coin of light appears') at any location for an unlimited duration. Players silently read to themselves the number of people enslaved on the former plantations of Berbice and Demerara (such as at ‘ New Hope’, ‘ Profit’ and ‘Good Success’), while drawing their bows back and forth over the cuffs in the corresponding speech rhythms. It creates gentle, delicate, distant, song-like resonances. The action is a form of remembrance that illuminates, or perhaps even conjures through invocation, the lost voices of the plantations across space and time."