Interview, Hugo Ticciati on Purcell From The Ground Up

Born in the UK and now resident in Sweden, violinist Hugo Ticciati has long been focused on exploring the wider links between music and the spiritual, meditative side of life - recently spending two weeks in the company of monks in the foothills of the Himalayas.

This connection is ever-present in his musicmaking with his chamber orchestra Ensemble O/Modernt, nowhere more so than in their most recent album, Purcell from the Ground Up, which draws together various related themes with a common denominator of grounding and rootedness. I spoke to Hugo to unpack a little more of the philosophical ideas underpinning this striking musical mélange.

You reference Heidegger’s statement that ‘ground means being; being means ground’, but presumably Heidegger (whose language is notoriously opaque at the best of times) wasn’t talking about a repeating bassline when he referred to a ‘ground’. How does this aphorism underpin this massively varied album in musical terms?

I should say right away that I am by no means an expert on Heidegger’s philosophy! I love a whole variety of philosophical writings, and Heidegger is one of several philosophers I read unsystematically, hoping to grasp a fraction of what he says while embracing the ‘un-understandability’ of it all. Heidegger of course was not talking about ‘ground’ in the sense of a ground bass – though Nietzsche, who was so driven by the power of music, certainly did make that connection. I read the quote as a gloss on the essence of ‘Being’, which is so central to Heidegger. When I think of ‘grounds’ I always refer that idea back to the ground of our being: Who are we? How are we as individuals grounded? It’s a personal take on this little aphorism, in which concepts of ground and being are closely interrelated, and both are connected with the rhythms of breath and breathing. Becoming conscious of the involuntary mechanism of breathing, we become more grounded – create a heightened awareness of being in our bodies. I don’t think we should necessarily read too much into this quote. The focus of the album is as much on being grounded as it is on the ground bass in music. Linguistically, of course, the same word applies, so there’s that connection, but there’s also the fact that the repeating bass lines provide fundamental continuity, simply by being repeated. Again, that links back to the cyclical rhythms of breathing, as well as to the way we create self-awareness and a sense of identity through repetition.

The decision to have spoken dialogue over some of these tracks is a novel one, and allows parallels to be explored in the texts of Shakespeare and the poetry of Baba Israel. But do you worry that the speech may distract the ear from the music (or indeed vice versa)?

This question harks back to the great debates they were having in Monteverdi’s time about ‘la prima pratica’ and ‘la seconda pratica’, and Monteverdi’s epoch-making conviction that music should be regarded as subservient to words, and not vice versa. The question of what the relationship between words and music is, or should be, pervades the history of music. Sam West begins the CD with an unaccompanied reading, so the Shakespearean text is heard by itself – unadulterated, as it were. He then reads Shakespeare over music by Purcell that has been remixed and looped, and both are created afresh by the introduction of Baba Israel’s beat poetry.

There’s not a lot of ‘pure’ Purcell going on; part of the purpose of the mixes is to confound expectations and destabilise the idea of purity. Towards the end of the CD the idea is more about losing the restraints and having fun, seeing what we can do with these ground basses and where they can take us. I was concerned to try to enlarge the scope of the listening on offer. Words and music gain from each other or detract from each other, depending on a host of factors to do with context and the mood of the listener.

The account of the performance on the ancient Egyptian trumpets unearthed in the ’20s was fascinating, but on first glance doesn’t seem to have a direct connection to the music you’re presenting on this album. Do you feel there’s a similar element of ‘bringing the past to light’ to your performance of these various chaconne-inspired works?

There are several aspects to this. Irving Finkel, who is a curator at the British Museum, took part in the festival where the idea for this CD was first conceived – a week of concerts and events on the theme of ‘Purcell: From the Ground Up’. As always, the word ‘ground’ is multivalent, and in this case we begin with the earth itself. Irving is one of the world’s experts on ancient Mesopotamian tablets, inscribed with cuneiform writing, that have been dug up, mainly in Iraq, over the past century and a half. He spoke at the festival on the recovery of Babylonian music, which in a very literal sense has emerged out of the ground because what we know about it was written on buried clay. On a more philosophical level, there is another connection with breath and breathing, and the fact that, when the ancient trumpets were blown in 1939, new life was breathed into these objects after an interval of nearly three and a half thousand years. The bigger question relates to how we should respond to the very same sound that mourners heard at the funeral of Tutankhamun. It’s a magnified and concentrated version of a host of questions we face when we perform Vivaldi or Purcell, for example. Bringing their music into the present, we’re re-enacting something from the past, and here we go right to the heart of the O/Modernt philosophy, which adapts a motto from John Cage: ‘invent the past; revise the future.’ This provides O/Modernt with the rationale behind our juxtapositions and combinations of different types of music from over the centuries, brought together in divergent styles. As listeners, we can never get rid of the fact that we are entangled in history. Placing that understanding at the heart of the creative process, I try to make some of the key issues it raises explicit.

In addition to all of that, is the pride that O/Modernt takes in allowing leeway for the unplanned, the unexpected and the unexplained! We express that musically in the ongoing interest in improvisations – there are three improvisatory tracks on the disc – but also in O/Modernt’s range of activities. So, for example, related to the ‘ground up’ theme, we published ‘Clay: Themes and Variations from Ancient Mesopotamia’, an ingenious and beautifully made book by Paul Williamson and Debbie Loftus that imaginatively and entertainingly brings sixty ancient texts into the present.

You mention the ‘awareness of the present’ that arises from the mindfulness and meditation of both religious and secular philosophies, and its relation to music. Do you think this is particularly true of structures like the chaconne that have at their heart a repeated cell (more so, say, than some large-scale work like a tone poem that undergoes a much more extended harmonic journey)?

One part of this again relates to breathing as a bodily process we can be aware of or not; if we aren’t, the process continues automatically, without the need for conscious control, and we stay alive. I detect a similar ebb and flow in ground basses. When a ground bass is established at the beginning of a piece, we’re aware of it, but as the piece progresses the ground recedes until it becomes an element in the background – almost autonomic, like breathing. Then, perhaps, we respond to the filigree, the overlay, that is built on the repeating musical fundament. Depending on the style of the music and the performance, however, we can also be coaxed into a renewed appreciation of the ongoing bass line.

I think all mindfulness is based on repetition, whether it’s breathing, intoning a mantra or meditative walking. The music of Philip Glass becomes mindful in this sense through its use of recurrence, and I think ground basses have a similar draw – inviting you to enter a particular musical zone.

What I find so engaging about ground basses is that they seem to tend to the extremes of minor and major moods – if they’re major they’re extremely exuberant, and if they’re minor they tend to be very gentle and melancholy. With the melancholy ones in particular, every time the bass repeats you sink deeper and deeper into a reflective state. I wouldn’t exactly call it meditative, but I compare it to repeating a mantra – each repetition takes you deeper into the words, but also into yourself and into the action of breathing. So I do think there is a very visceral and dynamic relationship between the repeating bass and mindfulness.

Your previous album, “White Light”, had a similarly dizzying eclecticism to it, drawing on sources from the Baltic to the Beatles via the classical traditions of the Indian subcontinent; do you think this is the way classical music is heading – or should be heading – in our interconnected age?

What I try to do with O/Modernt and also with other musicians I work with is shed light on relationships that might otherwise be missed. Take John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, for example: what relationship does each have with Indian music? Clearly, there are sonic affinities, just as, when the Beatles went to India, their music became infused with the character of the subcontinent. The deeper question is about what underpins the sonic character – how is it grounded, if you will? The word ‘eclectic’ can be slightly dangerous: you can’t just mix all these things together and create a mish-mash just for the sake of it, which does happen quite a lot nowadays. On the contrary, you have to be aware of each tradition, to love it and to cherish it. Brought up in the west, it’s natural for me to love and respect the western classical tradition, so when I work with Indian music, I’m very aware that the Indian musicians must lead the process. They must feel that they are totally in their zone, so to speak. It’s largely a case of finding the right musicians from the right traditions, who are sensitive to where any necessary lines might be drawn. And a sense of fun, of course! It doesn’t work if you take yourself too seriously because we come together to experiment and explore with enjoyment. More broadly, I do think there’s a general movement towards connecting things, seeing relationships, finding out how one kind of music enriches another – how does rock music, for instance, enrich one’s understanding of Vivaldi and vice versa.

“From the Ground Up” has emerged out of the Swedish festival where O/Modernt annually explores the musical potential of a single composer; in this case initially Purcell, though the lens broadens somewhat to take in other kinds of ground and chaconne. Can you tell us anything about your future plans – do you see yourself doing something similar with another great early composer a year or two from now?

We stage a festival every June for which I choose both a composer and a theme. ‘Purcell: From the Ground Up’ was held in 2018. In 2017 the theme was ‘Vivaldi and the Return’, focusing on musical ritornelli and then expanding to take in the idea of returning more broadly. Among other ideas we’ve explored are ‘Rameau and the Vertical’ (2013), based on Rameau’s idea of the vertical dynamics of harmony, and ‘Handel and the Art of Borrowing’ (2016), which was devoted to Handel’s musical borrowings. This year (2019) the title is ‘Misreading Beethoven’, and we start with some ideas about artistic misreading originated by the American literary critic Harold Bloom, particularly in his book ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ (1973). The emphasis is less on anxiety than on how we all, artists included, misread our predecessors (as I’ve misread Heidegger, for example!).

In terms of recordings, it looks like the next album will be a return to the connections between Vivaldi and rock music. I work closely with Marzi Nyman, a multitalented Finnish rock guitarist and composer, and I think our next disc will combine some Finnish rock with various classical composers, linking back to the work we did for the 2017 festival. Looking further ahead, in 2020 we’ll be exploring ‘Schubert and the Sound of Memory’. All the festivals will eventually generate albums, but not in the original chronological order. As with all the creative work we do at O/Modernt, we try to let things happen naturally!