In the world of contemporary music, epic scale is often viewed as the preserve of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Morton Feldman, whose notoriously gigantic theatrical and instrumental essays – Stockhausen's Licht Cycle, Feldman's Second String Quartet – seem to be the ne plus ultras of new music set on a huge, cosmic canvas.
That's partly because so much contemporary music commissioning asks for pieces of about 10-20 minutes' duration. Thus it is rare that composers have the chance to pitch their imaginations at the largest of scales. But convention hasn't stopped the 62-year-old Scottish-born composer James Dillon from writing some of the boldest and most expressively extreme orchestral, chamber and theatre works out there.
With a composer as uncompromising as Dillon, there is no substitute for starting by plunging ears-first into two of his huge musical cycles. First comes the utterly unclassifiable Nine Rivers project, a collection of nine pieces for forces ranging from six percussionists to a large ensemble with live electronics and pretty well everything in between.
Next, the Book of Elements, a five-part essay in continuity versus discontinuity and concentrated substance for solo piano that amounts, I think, to the most significant contribution to the pianist's repertoire since György Ligeti's Etudes.
In both pieces, Dillon's combination of sonic immediacy and multi-layered complexity creates some of the richest experiences you can have in new music. This is music that seems to animate a mythic power that is both primeval and preternaturally sophisticated.
As Dillon says of the whole cycle, which took him 17 years to compose: "Nine Rivers is a mythos of imagined waters, of fairies and snake-gods, a melancholy of flow, a requiem for poisoned rivers, an odyssey, a theatre of memory …"
That suggests some of the elemental intensity that Nine Rivers contains: its soundworld of teeming, ever-changing energy, its fundamental investigation of the two types of time and experience that the word "river" suggests. As Dillon says, you have the idea of flowing water, of course, but more rarely, a "river" can also denote "he who rives – who tears apart, or in pieces, who severs, divides or cleaves".
All that means is that when you encounter the piece (whose world premiere as a single, day-long event was held in 2010 in Glasgow) you're in for about five hours of full-on musical flux, after which you're left existentially battered and bruised. From the strange, still centre of the piece to the multimedia meditation of La Coupure, (The Cut), it is like being put through a wringer.
The richness of Dillon's music in Nine Rivers lies partly in its surfeit of information and influences. He talks about quantum mechanics, the poetry of Rimbaud, the aphorisms of Heraclitus, among other things, as being important for the cycle. The relationship between acoustic instruments and electronics is just one of many questions asked by the piece. As a listener, you grab on to any thread you can and hold on tight. The idea of comprehending the whole of what's going on at any given moment seems thrillingly impossible. But, as Brian Ferneyhough has recently said, that's a basic condition of life. We are always filtering out excess information to focus on what we need, whether we are commuting to work or listening to a Beethoven symphony.
Next to Nine Rivers, and partly because it is written for solo piano, The Book of Elements, composed between 1997 and 2002, contains music of relative clarity and distilled energy. But its subtlety and the kaleidoscopic experience of listening to the trajectory of all five volumes is just as all-encompassing as anything else Dillon has written. The cycle moves from the 11 short pieces of Book 1 to the single movement of Book 5. What you hear is an idiom that sounds less iconoclastic than some of Dillon's earlier music, one that that is unafraid of subconscious references – the ghosts of Debussy, Bartók and even Schumann and Chopin haunt some passages – and that finds a lyricism and flexibility that is definitively Dillon's own.
Now, those aren't the only cycles in Dillon's output. There is his orchestral triptych on the idea of illumination, made up of Helle Nacht, Ignis Noster, and a flute concerto, Blitzschlag. That is not to mention his collection of six string quartets, his opera Philomela, and other self-contained orchestral works such as a craggily melodic violin concerto and a piano concerto Andromeda, written, like so much of his piano music, for his wife, Noriko Kawai, to play, or the coruscating brilliance of La Navette.
Dillon's music is fearlessly, relentlessly explorative. To hear it is to confront a volcanic imagination that makes listening an act of thrilling, vertiginous unpredictability.
Five key links
The Book of Elements
String Quartet no. 2
Ignis Noster
La navette
Andromeda