Lully Loops by DAVID BRUCE

100 years ago, the advent of audio recording changed the way we all relate to music forever. Music used to be extremely special — something you could only hear when somebody played it right in front of you. Somebody like, say, Jean Baptiste Lully, who conducted and composed for one of the first ever string orchestras at Louis XIV’s Versaille in France. Thanks to recordings, we all became Louis XIV and could listen to this music in our palaces and play it on repeat whenever we liked.

Another revolution in this relationship has, I believe, happened over the past 20 years ago, with the rise of the internet and with the increasingly easy access to sophisticated digital technology. We now all have the entirety of music at our fingertips, from that made by a remote tribe in what’s left of the Amazon jungle, through to countless recordings of the most obscure composers of the past. And we can do anything we like with it, things the composers themselves would never have imagined — not just play it back instantly, but play it backwards, loop it over and over, chop it into little pieces and re-assemble it. I think composers are only starting to come to terms with what this means for music. One result is that we all have to be much more careful in recognising our sources. Where composers of the past might have borrowed liberally from a piece of folk music — or even another composer — composer doing that today will quickly find themselves exposed to a note-for-note comparison video on YouTube (and this isn’t entirely a good thing, but that’s another story).

The idea for Lully Loops started with a tiny fragment of Lully’s Chaconne from Phaëton. It’s an insignificant blink-and-you-miss-it moment in the middle of the piece, but for some reason, I found it incredibly touching. I pulled down a score from the internet, wrote out the phrase and started playing around with it.The music that I developed from that little phrase seemed to keep hold of the emotion I’d originally felt and extend it into a movement of several minutes. It’s a slightly macabre metaphor, but I felt almost as if I’d caught a piece of Lully’s soul — a soul shard as Douglas Hofstadter touchingly calls it — and somehow kept it alive, flickering inside my own net of notes.

The second movement takes an extended Gavotte passage from Lully’s Armide and throws it in a washing machine of rhythm until it becomes something quite different. The original tune is squashed into a 3 beat pattern, inside a 5 beat pattern which itself shifts back and forth across the barline. The movement as it ended up became incredibly difficult to notate — if I made it easier for one player it became almost impossible for another — I’m still not entirely confident I found the best solution.

The third movement distorts things in a different way — this time it’s not Lully, but his father-in-law Michel Lambert, whose song “Ombre de mon amant” is slowed right down and eventually played entirely in reverse (as if the tape recorder were running backwards) in a technique I associate with the internet movement known as Vaporwave. Somehow the process of distortion heightens the sense of distance from the original and creates a powerful, even disturbing effect, filled with nostalgia, longing, and perhaps darker undercurrents.

Finally, the fourth movement plays with ‘cut and splice’ methods of musical creation, chopping Lully’s Gigue pour Bacchus from Intermedes de Xerxes into a thousand fragments and re-assembling them to give a fun and uplifting ending. It’s said that Lully’s orchestra felt so shockingly fresh and uplifting in its day, that it hearing it had the power to cure people of their melancholy. My hope is that in a very different way and in a very different world, Lully Loops manages, at least to some small degree, to achieve something of the same effect.