Sylvia Lim's debut album demonstrates a fondness for rare instruments and unusual combinations of sonority. Born in 1992, she recently completed a Ph.D. at Guildhall School of Music & Drama and now teaches at this institution. Her work is intimate, ideal for listening to at home: in a single work she explores a very small range of sound in depth, revealing unsuspected characteristics and rewarding close listening. sounds which grow richer as they decay is released by the Texas-based Sawyer Editions, ‘a small-batch label specializing in contemporary, experimental, and improvised music’, and the recording sessions took place both in London and in Texas.
The album starts with Piece for three tuned cowbells (2019), played with admirable precision and sensitivity by percussionists Ben Clark and Antonin Granier. This polyrhythmic piece, around ten minutes long and in three distinct sections, was, according to the composer, ‘driven by childlike curiosity’. Around four minutes into the piece, the sounds are more distorted and resonances come to the fore, as if a bell is being stroked. What appears on the surface to be an abstract work gradually acquires a ritualistic quality.
sounds which grow richer as they decay (2017), for the unusual combination of two trombones (Ian Calhoun, Zachary Johnson) and harp (Kaitlin Miller) is a strange piece showing Lim's original sonic imagination. The harp, as if exhausted, produces a deep metallic-edged twanging (an effect produced by the vibrating string being moved by a pedal) and the trombones emerge from nothing to produce quiet sustained sounds that often sound electronically produced rather than human. Silence plays an increasingly important role in this piece, which moves inevitably towards a silent conclusion.
It is hard to believe that Reordering the Unconsumed (2016/17) is for two cellos, such is Lim's ability to reimagine the instrument. High-pitched fragments are separated by silence, and while the range progressively expands, it is as if the sound emerges from nothing with almost no initial attack. The two cellos (Christopher Brown, Natasha Zielazinski) wind around each other, descending to the depths of the instrument and vanishing at the end of the piece as if the sonority has collapsed.
The longest piece on the album is Colour Catalogue: Whites (2018), for bass clarinet (Heather Ryall), two flutes (Fiona Sweeney, Katie Macdonald) and two cellos (Evie Coplan, Christopher Brown). The instruments, generally introduced in alternating pairings separated by silence, produce fragile sonorities that require close attention. The fluttering of the bass clarinet makes the listener feel as if they are present in the bell of the instrument, and Ryall's control of harmonics after about 7 minutes, paired with breathy flute sounds, is a striking moment. Lim's objective description of the piece is ‘a catalogue of different gradients of sound’; she creates a timeless atmosphere, and the piece ends suddenly as if this is just a fragment of something that could carry on forever.
Perhaps the most surprising piece on the album is flicker, for piano, performed by Alvin Leung. Lim views the piano not as an instrument with hammers and pedals, but as a stringed instrument whose strings can be plucked or gently struck, only to decay almost immediately; only very occasionally does a ‘natural’ piano key sound. Again, the focus is on delicate sonorities at very low dynamic levels, though there is necessarily more attack than in the other pieces on the CD, and the reiterating rhythm suggests a flickering flame. From about 4’33”, plucked chords are interspersed with silence. Hugely narrowing down the range of possibilities of the piano, Lim's aim is to ‘explor[e] a single sound from various angles’, and again an unsuspecting listener might be surprised by the origin of the sound source.
It seems that this fragile recorded music is very much an idea in the air. Lim's work can be compared to Georgia Rodgers’ 2019 all that dust CD, which I reviewed in 2020 (TEMPO, 74, no. 294) and which also explores sound at the threshold of audibility in microscopic detail. Both Rodgers’ and Lim's recordings are ideal for home listening, and although Rodgers shows more interest in how the performance space is an integral part of a work, Lim has an intriguing ear for unusual sonic combinations. Lim's CD is a fascinating introduction to her musical language; it will be interesting to see how she develops as a composer, perhaps moving towards larger formations?
