DESCRIPTION:
For five bass clarinets. First live performance (in advance of studio recording 2016)
Performed by Sarah Watts
With Jason Alder, Sarah Homer, Ian Mitchell & Dai Pritchard.
Conductor: Terry Davies

Lola collaborated with bass clarinettist Sarah Watts, expert in the art of performing several notes concurrently (multiphonics) to establish how Sarah’s multiphonics could form the basis of a new composition. The resulting work, ‘Her Sisters’ Notebook’ for bass clarinet choir, features interplay between multiphonics and a harmonic language they gave rise to. The mysterious sound of Sarah’s multiphonics led Lola to other mysteries: the sense of a forgotten music lost through time and in particular the 800AD Byzantine Abbess composer Kassia who appears as fragments in the work and whose music reaches us through the centuries under an endlessly turning eclipse as portrayed in David Oates’ painting ‘Kiss 19’ – which Lola followed during the composition process to establish the work’s structure.
David Oates writes: “‘Kiss 19’ is one of an ongoing series of paintings that is based upon the principle of the visual phenomenon of the eclipse. These interactions are taking place constantly in the Universe, and suggest to me a pulse in the vacuum of space, seen or unseen. I have used the generic title ‘Kiss’ to give the series an overt human connection (as in a previous series I had used the title ‘Spoor’). I aim to combine a formal, minimalist visual language and a Romantic preoccupation with our relation to time and space; the vertical format adds to this, by alluding to the human spine. Lola Perrin’s composition ‘Her Sisters’ Notebook’ I think similarly seeks to connect the formal with the humanistic.”