Freya Waley-Cohen and Manchester Collective: Spell Book
Many of Freya Waley-Cohen's recent works play with myths, magic and the occult as lenses through which to look at the contemporary world. Tonight we hear two of these works, including the premiere performance of her complete Spell Book.
Naiad
I had a set of images in mind when I was writing Naiad. I couldn’t find a word to sum them up, but they are things like the way the light catches on the scales of a fish swimming through a shallow sunlit stream, or when it’s morning and you can see the dew in a spider web in the grass and it has a tiny rainbow if you look close, or the patterns that bees fly in between flowers, or when you’re walking in a forest and the sun makes dapples on the grass through the leaves of the trees. It is constructed a bit like lace, with tiny details in delicate patterns creating a larger pattern or picture when you look at it from further away.
From early on it is made up of two layers: a slow-moving melodic duet and a faster moving filigree figure that at first appears like an embellishment. These two elements hang together in a delicate balance, variously shifting between foreground and background. This interplay is coloured by quickly changing orchestration, settling momentarily on duets within the ensemble here and there.
Naiad was commissioned for the Proms for a concert dedicated to Oliver Knussen who was a deeply inspiring, incredibly kind and generous mentor, teacher and friend to me.
Spell Book
In the spring of 2019, I read WITCH by Rebecca Tamás. Tamás’s witch is full of desire and power: she doesn’t think about the same things that other people are thinking about, but she is neither bad nor good – she exists outside that framework. I was captivated by the world outlook in these poems. While reading it, I started to have strange and witchy dreams and felt a strong impulse to engage creatively with what I found.
Among other longer poems, WITCH contains several spells. In the book Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry of which Tamás is co-editor, she writes that ‘Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe’.
A spell asks to be performed out loud in a ritual setting. It seemed fitting and almost natural to bring these incantations into the ritualistic setting of the concert hall. In each spell I’ve looked for the moment or method of transformation. Sometimes this is a specific moment of change within the song, sometimes it’s a sense of accumulation, and sometimes a shift of perspective. These songs are a sung Spell-book.
The set opens with the 'spell for Lilith'. In Jewish folklore, Lilith is the first woman, created at the same time, and from the same clay as Adam. She refused to be subservient to both Adam and God and left the Garden of Eden. She was given the option to return or to become a demon, and she chose to become a demon. The singer summons the image of Lilith, luring her into the space with flirtation and flattery, until the moment of transformation lets us glimpse into Lilith’s own world, unruly and joyous, and still out there somewhere.
The 'spell for sex' starts with a tight focus on an object, an ingredient and an action. It is a set of instructions to follow. The last line takes us out from the domestic setting and into the vast, dark openness of the night.
At the opening of 'spell for women’s books' a viola line coils around a list of three ‘vellums’. Each suggests a story in which a reader might become trapped, but, as the spell continues, subversive lines take us on paths that might lead us to escape these fates.
'spell for joy' is a pure conjuring. Each sentence gives action, movement and imagery, creating a profusion of ‘yesses’ that add up to a total and reckless joy.
While 'spell for Lilith' is in the first person, creating an immediate and intimate connection between the speaker and Lilith, 'spell for logic' is in the second person, addressing you, the audience. It brings togethers layers of logic, from the shallow, binding logic we use to try and organise and control our time, to the deeper logic of the earth and sea and its inevitable tides. And it is you, the listener, who is receiving these directions, and it is for you to consider ‘what you wanted from this’.
Imagery in 'spell for change' (receiving its world premiere today) is that of geothermal, deep tectonic change. The earth cracks open and the singer asks us: ‘are you scared yet?’
'spell for reality' speaks to the quiet domestic rituals of life, and their ability to conjure larger meaning and vivid images, as well as a quietly intensifying connection to the earth’s seasonal rhythms.
'spell for the witch’s hammer' (also a world premiere) refers to the Malleus Maleficarum, translated as the ‘Hammer of Witches’, a demonology treatise first published in 1486 which became a bestseller, second only to the bible for nearly 200 years. It focuses on how to identify and punish a Witch and was hugely influential in making witchcraft be seen as heresy, and therefore punishable by death, as well as solidifying the idea of the word ‘witch’ as being inherently linked to women. At a time when the printing press was changing the way information was spread, it was published with an inauthentic Papal Bull to claim legitimacy, and the ideas caught on like wildfire across Europe. This spell conjures accusations and tropes from the treatise, inverting them, taking ownership of them and then destroying them by devouring them.
© Freya Waley-Cohen
Details
Programme and performers
Freya Waley-Cohen Naiad
Spell Book
'spell for Lilith'
'spell for sex'
'spell for women’s books'
'spell for joy'
'spell for change' (world premiere)
'spell for logic'
'spell for reality'
'spell for the witch’s hammer' (world premiere)
Manchester Collective
Héloïse Werner soprano
Fleur Barron mezzo-soprano
Katie Bray mezzo-soprano
Song texts
spell for Lilith
Lilith you look so nice with that snake
your hair curled the way a serpent might
Lilith you are such a bad girl
i heard you like reproductive justice
i heard you like staying up all night with your lips
pressed against the cracks
Lilith can you make an owl demon?
a huge one?
flapping through the night with copper eyes
shrieking for our salvation
dripping internal blood all over used cars and buildings of
state
Lilith
you have a really great body
you are a taunt
an un-fucked thing in a realm of little bits
Lilith
please sleep in my bed at night
smelling of lavender and coal
rub my back and look at me with an impossible black gaze
the things you have seen
a whole universe of your own making
entirely pleasure cos yr made of fire
Lilith
take us back with you
sliding all over the floor
raving & screaming
and very happy
spell for sex
one damp steak
hung outside from the porch
whistling into the streaked and furious
night
spell for women's books
the cat shit vellum
the bad storm coming in over the flatlands vellum
the old murderer's vellum
the poet moves their hips like someone on a tram about to
vomit
Athena still and glacial in her blue ice-bath
fresh as a painted door
spell for joy
THESUN THESUN THESUN
nothing can be trusted!
raise up your rinsed hands!
terrible fury and becoming!
Take off your clothes!
one colossal owner of the void
brightness folding into itself
again and again vulval or filo
I see a shaking which is total and absolute fear
one day yr gonna die
the hot impossible apple of
your perfection
you freckled you covered in something
you utter
just open up your face
light's ice cream cone coming
on the inside of yr eyelids
say yes five thousand times
(o love)
spell for change
CRACK
goes the mountain
BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD
are you scared yet?
little fissures are putting their black hands onto
the earth
an opening
SMASH SMASH SMASH
I hope you like this
hot and wet and tired and pain
a bird grows nasty feathers
its song is geothermal
a clever shaking wound
spell for logic
you will sit on your hands
the sea has a fat logic if you look at it right
operating sneakily by the moon
you will menstruate exactly when the packet
tells you to
cut off all the dead parts in your chest
a cheap Andromeda
BE ORGANISED
lie on a ring binder and hold your breath
look at the flood of water running up the sand
the snow that hovers
bitchy and quiet
in this rest you are rested
this whole and perfect sleep
tell me what you wanted
from this
spell for reality
what do you do when the answer to
too much is absolutely nothing?
honey sits on the table
fat and glowing
winter light gives you a pass
nine minutes of feeling nearly
completely alive
sometimes the ashy body in the ground seems
to have all the answers
ultimate realness nasty truth as the final only truth
why then this stupid relentless yearning for snow
why the honey and talking
the burning bush is another form of ultimate realness
but what is it telling us
certainly it’s nasty
however also gold
also the entire pocket cosmos shifting and flapping
gentle limbs holding each other in the depth of the fire
then somehow
as much snow as you could ask for
wet-gold honey and locusts
spell for the witch's hammer
a two-pronged sword
to put them down
out there a lot of things happen
witches
undo each other a candle in each opening
witches wake at night and cry
beasts with curly horns comfort them
/suck gently
witches go astray
carnality swooping and fluttering like a ragged flag
they laugh so much
covered in purple bruises
teaching tricks GPS of the eternal flagellant light
always going home
the witch’s hammer sinks into flesh
then disappears and only mercury remains its little
peasant trail
the witches eat your book
then you
then everything
Taken from WITCH by Rebecca Tamás (2019); used with kind permission from Penned in the Margins, where the collection can be found
Artist biographies
British-American composer Freya Waley-Cohen has been commissioned by institutions and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Proms, Wigmore Hall, Philharmonia Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, The King’s Singers and The Hermes Experiment, as well as the Aldeburgh, Presteigne, Santa Fe and Cheltenham festivals. Her music has been released on labels including Signum, Nimbus, Nonclassical, Delphian and NMC Recordings.
Highlights of last season included the premiere on 22 February 2023 at Birmingham Symphony Hall of her orchestral work Demon – a joint commission by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra – by the CBSO under the baton of Ilan Volkov. Her work for string orchestra and solo recorder, Variation on Sellinger’s Round, was commissioned and premiered by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, led by Daniel Bard with soloist Lucie Horsch, in a series of concerts touring the Netherlands in February 2023.
Other recent successes include the world premiere of Pocket Cosmos, premiered in June 2022 by its commissioners London Chamber Orchestra and directed by Pekka Kuusisto. This concert concluded her year as LCO’s Composer-in-Residence, which included several performances of her music. Waley-Cohen’s first opera, WITCH, based on texts by Rebecca Tamás, was commissioned in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Music. The world premiere took place in March 2022, directed by Polly Graham and conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. WITCH was subsequently nominated for a 2022 Ivors Composer Award.
Waley-Cohen has created a number of immersive works and installations including Permutations (2017), an interactive artwork and a synthesis of architecture and music created during an Open Space Residency at Snape Maltings from 2015 to 2017.
She was the 2019–20 Associate Composer at Wigmore Hall, which held a day of concerts in March 2023 focused on her music. She was also Associate Composer of St David’s Hall’s contemporary music series, Nightmusic, from 2018 to 2021. Winner of a 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, she was Associate Composer of Nonclassical (2016–18). She is a founding member and artistic director of Listenpony concert series and record label. Freya Waley-Cohen currently lives in London.
Manchester Collective is known for its experimental programming, daring collaborations and engaging performances, and has expanded at breakneck speed since its formation in 2016 by Adam Szabo and Rakhi Singh.
The Collective’s vision is to reshape the future of classical music by creating radical artistic work from its base in the north of England. The shape-shifting ensemble performs a combination of cutting-edge contemporary music, classical masterpieces and staged work nationally and internationally, in spaces ranging from concert halls to warehouses, nightclubs to festivals.
It collaborates with an exciting array of award-winning artists, pushing at the boundaries of how classical music is presented and experienced. Notable previous projects include Sirocco and The Oracle with South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, Rosewood with guitarist Sean Shibe and a multimedia performance of Michael Gordon’s Weather with an installation by sound recordist Chris Watson.
New music is of vital importance to the Collective; in recent years it has commissioned major works by composers including Edmund Finnis, Emily Hall, Hannah Peel, Lyra Pramuk, Moor Mother, Laurence Osborn and Alice Zawadzki. This season features new commissions by Isobel Waller-Bridge, Isabella Summers, Fergus McCreadie and Katherine Balch.
In 2021 it made its debut at the BBC Proms. It is currently artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre. Last year it won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious Ensemble award.
Manchester Collective records for the Icelandic label Bedroom Community. Its third studio album NEON was released in June last year.
French-born and London-based soprano and composer Héloïse Werner was one of the four shortlisted nominees in the Young Artist category of the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards and one of BBC Radio 3’s 31 under 31 Young Stars 2020. From this season she joins Wigmore Hall as an Associate Artist, a position she will hold for five years.
As a soprano, she recently made debuts with the London Chamber Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Nash Ensemble, Grange Festival, and sang the role of Madame DuVal in Sarah Angliss’s new opera Giant, which opened last year’s Aldeburgh Festival.
As a composer, she has written for the CBSO, Aurora Orchestra, Clare Choir, Cambridge, Maîtrise de Radio France, London Handel Festival, violist Lawrence Power, bassoonist Amy Harman, violinist Hae-Sun Kang (Festival Présences), pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen (Lucerne Festival), CoMA (CoMA Festival), The Gesualdo Six,The Bach Choir and St Paul’s Cathedral Choir, among others.
Her debut album Phrases was released in 2022 on Delphian Records to critical acclaim.
She is also soprano in the contemporary quartet The Hermes Experiment (consisting of soprano, clarinet, harp and double bass). They won the RPS Young Artist Award 2021 and the Royal Over-Seas League Mixed Ensemble Competition 2019. Capitalising on their deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments, the ensemble regularly commissions new works – over 60 to date – as well as creating their own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation.
Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron recently triumphed at the San Francisco Symphony in the title-role of Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival as Ottavia (Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea). She is a current Rising Star of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and an Artistic Partner of the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias in Oviedo, for which she will curate/perform multiple projects across several seasons. Her interests encompass opera, chamber music and concert works ranging from the Baroque to contemporary music; she is mentored by Barbara Hannigan.
This season’s highlights include returns to the London Symphony Orchestra for Claude Vivier’s Wo bist du Licht and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella; the release on Pentatone Records of her recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (in which she sings the title-role) with La Nuova Musica; the start of a multi-season partnership with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot; Mahler’s Symphony No 3 with the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov at the Baden-Baden Festival; and Mahler’s Symphony No 2 and Das Lied von der Erde with the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias under Nuno Coelho.
In the opera house her role debuts this season include Penelope in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria with I Gemelli; multiple roles in Sir George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill with the Staatskapelle Berlin under Finnegan Downie Dear; and the title-role of John the Baptist in Maria Margherita Grimani’s La Decollazione di San Giovanni Battista with Haymarket Opera in Chicago. On the recital platform she joins regular collaborator Julius Drake for concerts in London, Copenhagen, Santa Fe, Padua, Ireland and Oviedo.
Fleur is committed to the way music can facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and healing. She holds degrees from Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music.
Winner of the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at Cardiff Singer of the World 2019, British mezzo-soprano Katie Bray has become known for her compelling stage presence and gleaming, expressive tone.
Her roles include Hansel (Hansel and Gretel), Rosina (The Barber of Seville), Varvara (Katya Kabanova), Louis XV Chair/Female Cat/Owl (L’enfant et les sortilèges), Lola (Cavalleria rusticana) and Nancy (Albert Herring), the title-role in Griselda, Daughter (Akhnaten), Lucilla (The Silken Ladder), Zerlina (Don Giovanni), Mallika (Lakmé), Zenobia (Radamisto), Minerva (Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and Charlotte (Werther) for houses including Opera North, Irish National Opera, English National Opera, Scottish Opera and Welsh National Opera. She also recently performed in a staged cabaret of ‘songs banned by the Nazis’, Effigies of Wickedness, at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, in collaboration with English National Opera.
Equally at home on the concert platform, she has performed in prestigious venues such as Wigmore Hall, Cadogan Hall and the Holywell Music Room. She appears regularly at the London English Song Festival, where she has directed concerts at Wilton’s Music Hall, as well as at the Oxford Lieder Festival for which she recorded a disc of Schumann songs with Sholto Kynoch. Other recent highlights include a semi-staged version of Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch with Christopher Glynn and Roderick Williams here at Milton Court Concert Hall and at the Ryedale Festival, and the premiere of new monodrama Frida with the East London Music Group.
Katie Bray is particularly noted for Baroque repertoire and has appeared with Barokksolistene and Bjarte Eike, Monteverdi Choir and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, La Nuova Musica, Ludus Baroque, London Handel Orchestra and Laurence Cummings, Wrocław Baroque Orchestra and Spira Mirabilis. She has also appeared with Britten Sinfonia, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Chambre de Paris and the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra.
