I Listened To The Wind Again

Louth Contemporary Music Society is delighted to release the single track CD of Jürg Frey’s beautiful work, I Listened to the Wind Again, for soprano, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and percussion.

There are things the leaves of a tree, the seconds of our lives, the slates on a warehouse roof that are as numerous as droplets in ‘a rain as soft as a mist’, to quote Jürg Frey’s text for his I listened to the wind again, which he wrote for the LCMS festival of 2017.

These are the infinities of this world, and generally they pass us by, because they are everywhere, or because we have not the focus to be still and observe each particular. Frey may teach us that focus.

It may be a matter, listening to this small richness of instruments (clarinet, string trio and percussion) that joins the voice, of sensing how a note on the viola differs from the same note played on the violin, or to how an interval on these two instruments changes when they exchange notes.

It may be a matter of recognizing how a word, joining the soft rain of instrumental sounds, may cause them to change, even bring them into alignment with it, or expressive conformity.

It may be a matter of feeling how the colour and the texture of the ensemble shift, and return, and do not return.

It may be a matter of experiencing sound from the inside, existing in the air we breathe, and from the outside, placed over there, where the musician is, just as the words seem to move from inside (in English) to outside (in French).

It may be a matter of weighing one voice against another, in the music and again in the text, into which Frey inserts quotations from two French Swiss poets, Gustave Roud and Philippe Chappuis, from the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi, and finally from the Lebanese-U.S. poet-painter Etel Adnan.

If having different accents, all speak with the same voice. Bai Juyi again gives us innumerability, of grass, and grief. (Paul Griffiths)

I Listened to the Wind Again is a Louth Contemporary Music Society commission, funded by the Arts Council, and first performed in Dundalk in 2017.

Funded by the Arts Council, financially supported by Create Louth and the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation