“Psappha is now closed.” On November 6, Psappha, a contemporary music ensemble based in Manchester, posted a short notice that signaled the end of over 30 years of commissioning, performing, and championing music from the 20th and 21st centuries.
On the perennially shaky UK new music scene, organizations are routinely thinned, trimmed and pruned, but rarely are they felled completely. Though news of Psappha’s closure had been trailed in May, the confirmation still felt like an abrupt final barline at the end of a score full of ideas, about half of which had been fully developed. The reason for this immediate halt was equally clear-cut. “The loss of 100% of our regular public funding from Arts Council England, which constitutes around 40% of our income in an average year, has ultimately proven too great a challenge for an organization of our size and scale to overcome, especially in such a difficult funding climate for the arts,” the ensemble said in their statement.
With the announcement came a silver lining, that NMC Recordings was to acquire Psappha’s full catalog. (Psappha also diligently videoed a large number of their performances, available on their YouTube channel.) Sinking into their vast online archive feels like a solo submarine mission, descending through a thin layer of greatest hits on the surface—Gavin Bryars’s “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” or Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King”—and into a murky, fascinating pool below. Here are a few examples from their back catalog.
Iannis Xenakis: “Psappha” (1975)
“People have told me that the name is ridiculous, that no one can spell it and nobody knows what it means,” former Psappha artistic director Tim Williams told BBC Music Magazine in 2022. Their name—an archaic version of the Greek poet Sappho—is taken from the landmark Xenakis piece for solo percussion, and goes right to the first moments of the group’s history. At their first concert in 1991, Psappha performed Harrison Birtwistle’s “Cantata,” which set some of Sappho’s poetry.
Reflecting on Xenakis’s piece in the New Yorker, percussionist Steven Schick revealed that he’d played both “Psappha” and Stockhausen’s “Zyklus” “easily over a hundred times in factories, libraries, mental hospitals, retirement homes, and at a shopping mall.” There is no reason, other than perhaps the logistics of a piece for lots of drums, why this rumbling solo shouldn’t be a part of everyday life. In the protected cocoon of the concert hall, “Psappha” feels restless, seeking to break out and taste the banality of the street sounds outside.
“‘Psappha’ exerted extraordinary musical and historical impact in large part because it was born into a relative vacuum,” Shick writes in his book, The Percussionist’s Art. The piece prized open that vacuum and let the world flood in: from a root in what Xenakis thought as rhythm’s purest form (a belief that led him to tab-guitar-like, graph-like notation) but with a suggestion of flexibility for the performer to involve their own choices in proceedings (with regards to which drums could be selected through the half-open notation), “Psappha” was a formative moment for the solo percussionist’s brave new world.
Peter Maxwell Davies: “Eight Songs for a Mad King” (1969)
Peter Maxwell Davies was an important influence on Williams, whom he first encountered when freelancing as a percussionist for the BBC Philharmonic, one of Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras.
Davies connected the group to a particular history of Manchester-incubated modernism: the “New Manchester School,” formed around composers Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, and Davies, pianist John Ogdon, and trumpeter Elgar Howarth in the music departments of the Royal Manchester School of Music (later RNCM) and Manchester University. The group fundamentally shaped the sounds and sensibilities of postwar composition in Britain; its members became the Pierrot Players, a group based in experimental music-theater, and then later The Fires of London.
Psappha was formed in the image of Davies’s Fires of London group, working from the starting point of the “Pierrot” format—flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano—and adding percussion. The ensemble’s patron until his death in 2016, the group recorded much of Davies’s chamber and theater music, including the 1955 version of “Stedman Doubles,” “Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot” (the companion piece to “Eight Songs” for high voice), and the music-theater piece “A Mr Emmet Takes a Walk.”
But there’s a special place for “Eight Songs” in the Psappha repertoire, and it’s become one of their go-to works. (It was also the first piece I reviewed in Manchester as an undergraduate.) In the “Eight Songs,” Benjamin Poore wrote in June, “musical disorder and psychic distress go hand in hand.” “Eight Songs” is brutal, strange, and whimsical. It’s also got an essential Psapphic quality: a whites-of-the-eyes brightness that makes even the darkest surfaces gleam a little.
Nigel Osborne: “Bosnian Voices” (2015)
Just as Davies’s late aesthetic opened up to incorporate different genres, so Psappha has broadened the musical styles it has tackled.
Before his current role working with young people in Ukraine, one of Nigel Osborne’s early humanitarian roles was in Bosnia in the 1990s, and it was during that time that he developed many pioneering music therapy approaches for children impacted by conflict. “Bosnian Voices,” premiered in 2015 (just over two decades since the conclusion of the Bosnian war), is a cycle of songs written by people in Srebrenica, the site of one of the worst atrocities of the conflict.
Reflecting on their lives then and now, the lyrics are hopeful and uplifting, and the corresponding arrangements are warm, tonal and more in the ballpark of conventional music theater than I thought Psappha might program. What remains is the ability to wreak emotional havoc. Carefree movements like “I Feel Free When I Ride My Bicycle” and “Springtime” are heartbreaking in their naïvety.
Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade “Patdeep Studies” (2021)
The introduction to Psappha’s 2022 album release titled “Commissions” describes the disc as a “celebration: of endurance and persistence, of quantity and quality, of sheer bloody-minded dedication.” It would be rather bold if it wasn’t so accurate.
There’s depth and strangeness in the selection of works on show: the icy sculptures of John Casken’s “Winter Reels”; the mischievous zips and clunks of “Two Games and a Nocturne” by Tom Coult; and George Stevenson’s “Trees Made of Air,” who was inspired by physicist Richard Feynman to “relentlessly question” the same musical phenomena from different angles. Connecting this assortment of pieces, the oldest of which was composed 13 years ago—one of Psappha’s many qualities is to champion the recent as much as the brand-new—is the bracing airiness integral to Psappha’s sound.
Also included on the album are five studies by Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade. Using her commission money to buy a sitar and learn the instrument with sitar player Jasdeep Singh Degun, Cruttwell-Reade surrounds herself with the Hindustānī rāg Patdeep, and tinkers lightly with the elements—ālāp, jor, gat, tans—from the inside. The studies are concise and sparkly.
Athanasia Kontou: “systole / diastole (in a heartbeat)” (2020)
Probably the most profound change to the musical ecology of the UK ushered in by Psappha’s closure is the loss of their popular “Composing for…” scheme. Designed for early-career composers in the gap between the end of undergraduate education and the start of a professional career, participants entered into a season-long partnership with a performer or duo, of which only five minutes of music was asked for at the end. Gradually, the instrumental selections became more eclectic (violin & cimbalom duo, hardanger fiddle, accordion, pipa, Eastern European clarinets, and sitar) as the focus turned onto idiomatic writing and collaboration, stretched over an unusually long amount of time.
The range of results from the scheme is enormous, and listening to just a few of over 100 resulting pieces, you can feel the tingly fresh feeling of composers committing things to paper for the first time. For a short flavor of the scheme, try Nilufar Habibian’s urgent yet haunting study for cello and piano “Az Tashanoje Khounat Avayei Barkhast” (“A sound arose from the convulsion of your blood,” taken from a poem by Mohammad Mokhtari, a university student killed in the 2011 protests in Iran), Phoenix Rousiamanis’s elusive, Tarot-inspired “The Sun, the Moon, and their lobster children,” and Athanasia Kontou’s “systole / diastole (in a heartbeat)” which maps the two-fifths/three-fifths relationship of a heartbeat’s parts onto a musical scheme of contraction then expansion.
Leonard Bernstein “Trouble in Tahiti” (1952, reorch. 2009)
Elsewhere this week, English National Opera announced that they would develop a main base in Greater Manchester by 2029. Good luck finding a) a dedicated audience, b) a suitable venue, c) an orchestra, chorus and technical staff willing to relocate from London (almost certainly on fewer hours and in fewer numbers than before), and d) a purpose that allows them to seep into the region’s cultural water table.
Obviously, these were all things Psappha Ensemble already had, that took time to nurture and a few careless months to wipe out. Seeing this ensemble disappear is utterly miserable. ¶