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Freya Waley-Cohen and Manchester Collective: Spell Book

Grainy, greyscale photo of Freya Waley-Cohen overlaid with grey and turquoise paint swirls

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

Event date 1 Feb 2024
Start time 7.30pm
Running time
75 minutes
There won't be an interval
All timings are approximate and subject to change

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.