Words by Emma Warren

Conductor and Composer, Robert Ames, is on the line from Budapest where he’s recording a film score. He’s discussing the present continuous of the pandemic and how tough it is for individual musicians to manage the vertiginous loss of live performance. It’s also tough for organisations like the London Contemporary Orchestra that use live performance for income and for the more profound economy of generating and transmitting new music and culture.

“The main function of the orchestra is to introduce new music to a wide audience and it’s very hard to do that without playing live,” he says. “It’s pretty hindered by the fact we can’t really put on concerts in any meaningful way.” The orchestra tested out a few digital solutions at the start of the first lockdown – remote sessions recorded in musicians’ living rooms or bedrooms and brought together at the end. "It was an interesting process but nothing like having a musician and a sound engineer and all the people who are so good at their jobs, all together,” says Ames. “It’s the communal thing.”

A communal ethos is at the heart of LCO’s work, closely accompanied by an open-minded attitude to genre, musical labels and the whole idea of who, or what, a composer is. “I’d happily listen to Jlin followed by Claire M Singer or Bach or Michael Nyman or Meredith Monk,” says Ames. “They’re great composers writing very different music in very different ways, but they’re all writing music, making it publicly available and for me that makes them composers.  A bedroom producer at a laptop making beats is a composer in my opinion. It’s not tied down to the literal scribing of notes on paper.”

Ames formed the London Contemporary Orchestra in 2008 with co-founder Hugh Brunt. Since then, they’ve collaborated with creative figures including Frank Ocean, Steve Reich and Secret Cinema and have recorded soundtracks for Assassin’s Creed, Alien:Covenant and Jonny Greenwood’s score for Phantom Thread among many others. “The most natural and obvious collaboration is between us as an orchestra and composers, so one of our primary functions is to commission great new music and to perform it.” LCO affiliates Claire M Singer and the orchestra’s composer-in-association Edmund Finnis are up for an Ivor Novello Award for two pieces they wrote last year: ’Gleann Ciùin’ in the Large Chamber category and ‘The Centre Is Everywhere’ respectively. 

Pre-pandemic the orchestra made a name for themselves by selecting settings that suited their ambitious and experimental repertoire, performing in Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Aldgate Underground and multipurpose nightclub Print Works. Live performance with audiences might be on pause but they’ve been busy recording work for soundtracks and audio projects – industries experiencing an uplift thanks to our collective home-bound streaming needs. Current projects are wrapped in secrecy but he can give me the numbers: two films (“and a big film”), three TV scores, one advert, two video games, a documentary and six records. 

One of those recordings can be discussed: their realisation of Italian Giacinto Scelsi’s 1958 composition ‘String Trio’. It was recorded in Margate with Galya Bisengalieva on violin, cellist Max Ruisi and Ames on viola and released this week on Spitfire Audio’s in-house label, SA Recordings. They recorded the four tracks over three days. “We lived with the music for that time. It’s not a sound world that you can dip into one day and come back to a week later. Having those three really intense days was a really good way to do it.”

It was an idiosyncratic recording process. “We stayed at the house of a wonderful guy called Stephen Bass [who runs Hot Chip label Moshi Moshi],” says Ames with a smile. “It’s not on a busy street but we were essentially recording in a living room with not-double glazed windows.” This, he says, with some understatement, gave the orchestra’s sound engineer Robert Lewis a somewhat hard task. “Cars would go past, an ambulance would go past, so we were recording this very complex, difficult music in this crazy setting.”

Ames was introduced to Scelsi’s music by a friend at university. “You can’t really pigeonhole what it is or tell when it was written. You can’t even work out how many string players there are playing,” he says. “Then you start scratching into his history and find he’s one of those genuinely individual voices, completely maverick. He just went out and did his own thing.”

Scelsi’s ‘own thing’ was to take ideas that had powered out of Italian Futurism and to use these as grist for a new kind of minimalism. In the early 20th century Futurism reflected and refracted industrialisation into a range of art forms including early electronic instruments like the Ondiola. In the late 1950’s Scelsi had gone through a marriage breakdown and had begun experimenting with single notes. The result was ‘String Trio’ with its stunning landscape of long tones and beautiful detuning. 

“As a string player, tuning is an obsession. It’s not like a piano or even a guitar which has frets. You’re tuning your ear to work out the correct intonation is all the time and that process never stops from the moment you start learning to the day you put it in its case for the last time – the constant training of muscle memory,” says Ames. “You’re training your muscle to play tones and semi-tones; our language. What Scelsi is doing is messing with all that training and messing with your ear and encouraging you to go into those spots you don’t usually explore: in-between those semi-tones and even in-between the quarter tones. The resonances you get when you play them together.”

The obvious association with quarter tones and non-standard tuning is the horror score with the unsettling and unnerving effect it has on listeners. “The flip side of that is the glorious and beautiful sounding chords that are vibrating in a way you don’t expect them too,” he says, pointing out the connection between nature and untempered tuning. “There’s something about Scelsi’s music that’s really elemental.” 

LCO’s focus on new and original music feeds directly into the soundtrack jobs they’re offered. “Our primary function is live music, experimental music, often at the cutting edge of the kind of music that’s being produced for acoustic instruments, and we bring that edge to film recordings. We’ve got players who are open to experimentation and we’ve had a chance to play on some film scores that really pushed the genre forwards,” says Ames. 

Last year, the orchestra realised Jed Kurzel’s score for The True History of the Kelly Gang. “There’s very rough and raw string playing, a lot of detuned stuff,” says Ames, who also worked with the orchestra on the Anne Nikitin - composed score for American Animals. “We get the really joyful bit of being presented with music from a composer then recording it and making it sound as good as we possibly can. The composers have the incredibly stressful bit of writing the music and getting it signed off by directors and going through a zillion changes. We don’t feel that so much because we’re at the end process when everything is ready to go.” 

London Contemporary Orchestra’s focus on new music gives Ames and his colleagues the privilege of working with artists in the early stage of their careers. “One of the most joyful things in my job is recognising people who are making really special music and giving them a platform to have it performed,” he says, “very often quite young performers, and we have a really good track record in terms of the diversity of the people we’re commissioning.” 

Alongside the music, they’re working to make good on the statement they released in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. “Our focus is primarily on making sure our management and our board and our administrators are representative of the community that we live and work in. We’ve made some good strides in that but we certainly owe our public an explanation of what we’ve been doing and that’s long overdue. We gave ourselves a hard deadline and we’re committed to meeting that.”

They’re planning a series of orchestral concerts for 2021, pandemic willing. “That’s where I want our focus to be, making live music and doing it orchestrally, with large numbers of musicians playing fantastic music and being very free in the way we programme. Being quite comfortable mixing somebody like Kjartan Sveinsson from Sigur Rós or Kelly Lee Owens or Duval Timothy. Installation concerts instead of just straight up concerts. There’s a fusion of art forms there, that’s a special one-off experience for someone.”