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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2025
Two of the most important creative stimuli for Edward Cowie throughout his composing life have been the natural world and working closely with performers, such as the BBC Singers and Kreutzer Quartet. Over the last four years, he and I have been in the studio recording his bird portrait duo cycles, and three geologically themed piano sonatas collectively titled Rock Music. Reflecting on this music and exploring, through my written correspondence with Cowie, how our outlooks align, offers insights into the relationship between music and the environment, particularly when forms and processes with such a rich history as the sonata are in the frame. The gap between the perspectives of performer and composer is also a lens through which salient interpretative matters can be perceived.
1 ‘Profile: Edward Cowie’, TEMPO 310.
2 See Katie Wood, ‘Biography’, Edward Cowie website. Accessed 26 November 2024. https://edwardcowie.com/biography/.
3 Cowie’s relationship with the BBC was also demonstrated in his foundation of the Earth Music Bristol concert series in 2011: his introduction to the first series can be heard on the BBC Sounds website: ‘Earth Music Bristol: On Lyre Birds and Bell Birds’, The Essay, first broadcast on 23 May 2011. Accessed 7 December 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b017cjyx.
4 ‘[…] from a very early age, I wanted to learn about how the universe works by engaging in field study, reading and analysis. Nothing I learned as a result of musical training has given me such a huge kaleidoscope of formal structures and paradigms.’ TEMPO, 310, October 2024, p. 99 Interestingly, although Cowie identifies these compositional methods with his teacher Alexander Goehr, his esteem for Goehr could not be higher.
5 Cowie has recently announced that he will stop composing after completing his latest cello sonata.
6 The recordings are scheduled for release in April 2025, also on Métier Divine Art.
7 On the recordings, Peter Sheppard Skaerved is the violinist for Bird Portraits, Sara Minelli the flautist for Where Song Was Born and Anna Hashimoto the clarinettist for Where the Wood Thrush Forever Sings. Saxophonist Gerard McChrystal and Richard Shaw’s recording of Because They Have Songs will also be released this April.
8 ‘Natural’ links do not, however, preclude musical ones in Cowie’s work; the Preludes are similarly grouped, according to the four elements.
9 ‘On Playing Edward Cowie’s “Bird Portraits” – A View from the Violin’, from liner notes to Edward Cowie, Bird Portraits (Divine Art Ltd, MSV 28619, 2021), p. 11.
10 A sense of the uncanny, strong in Where Song Was Born, is even more pronounced in String Quartet No. 7 ‘Western Australia’, which explores mysterious and wild environments along the road from Fremantle to Shark Bay. It is described as ‘a watershed – a zenith – of a fusion between composer and players [the Kreutzer Quartet]’ in the composer’s note (Edward Cowie, The Kreutzer Effect (Divine Art Ltd, MEX 77103, 2024), liner notes, p. 5).
11 ‘Nature is both variable and invariable’, liner notes to Edward Cowie, Bird Portraits (Divine Art Ltd, MSV 28619, 2021), p. 7.
12 Together they also form a three-movement ‘metasonata’: opening movement, slow movement, rondo/variations. Cowie also compares them with Beethoven’s final triptych (Op. 109–111).
13 The visual artist Heather Cowie, Edward’s wife.
14 The Third Sonata is a theme and variations in which the theme is divided into three sections of contrasting material, referred to as ‘Protoliths’.
15 The emphasis is mine (RC).
16 Beverly Jerold’s suggestion for an alternative translation of Fontenelle’s famous question of c.1750, the standard being ‘what do you want of me?’ ‘Fontenelle’s Famous Question and Performance Standards of the Day’, College Music Symposium, 1 October 2003. Accessed 25 November 2024. https://symposium.music.org/43/item/2195-fontenelles-famous-question-and-performance-standards-of-the-day.html.
17 Liner notes to Edward Cowie, Bird Portraits (Divine Art Ltd, MSV 28619, 2021), p. 5.
18 T. J. Clark, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 2022), pp. 31–33.
19 See Roderick Chadwick, ‘Un sens artistique très développé: Messiaen’s Cahiers as Performance Aid’, in Messiaen in Context, ed. Robert Sholl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 206, where I write about this in relation to Yvonne Loriod’s performances of Messiaen’s ‘Reed Warbler’, one of his largest bird canvases.