Consolations in Travel

This piece reflects on the memories of car journeys Daniel took with his mother as a child and adolescent, and the mental journeys that music can take you on. Daniel would make cassettes to listen to on these car journeys; a mix of his sister’s goth record collection and classical music records found around the house, Fauré’s Requiem and Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade being two such works described by Daniel as his gateway into classical music.

Over time, these cassettes degraded, yielding sonic artefacts used in the work to underpin the orchestra. Short, looped excerpts from the cassettes are overlapped to form a textural bed for the orchestra: the imprecise pitch of degraded tape ‘flutter’ represented in slow, quarter-tone vibrato and glissandi, and the ‘wow’ of trumpet mutes.

Sampled hiss from the cassettes mingles seamlessly with live cymbals in waves of white noise. Towards the end, the violins take up a snatch of melody from the loops, played in tempo but out of sync to create a broken tonal sound; a cacophony, hinting at spiralling thought patterns and cycles of negative thinking.

Whether imitated by the orchestra or actually present underneath the live instruments, the cassettes are a ghostly presence throughout Consolations. Revisiting these physical artefacts of a formative time and finding them changed, the piece explores a reconciliation with the stasis of time, concluding with a final, bright cloud of brass and reversed loops.

Consolations in Travel is a deeply personal work that evades harmonic stability, exploring the cognitive barriers and cyclical patterns of memory that come up in response to anxiety and depression. It is the first composition Daniel has developed in direct response to an exploration of mental illness. “Up to this point, my work had been about the interpretation of a subject, a literary work, or the coming to terms with a music influence.”

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