Joby Talbot - Path of Miracles

Joby TALBOT (b. 1971) 

Path of Miracles (2005): 

Roncesvalles [17:22]; 

Burgos [15:04]; 

Leon [11:44]; 

Santiago [18:13] 

Tenebrae

Nigel Short 

rec. All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak, London, 8-11 July 2005. DDD 

Joby Talbot's name crossed my line of sight when he was made composer-in-residence by the UK's Classic FM radio station. Under this arrangement he wrote one piece a month with each piece broadcast on a rolling basis. Talbot previously formed, with Neil Hannon, the pop group The Divine Comedy. They produced seven albums and collaborated with Ute Lemper in the CD Punishing Kiss. He wrote the music for the BBCTV series The League of Gentlemen. There were also two movie soundtracks in 2005: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse.

Path of Miracles celebrates and meditates upon the idea of pilgrimage and the specifics of the Medieval route taken by the scallop shell bearing pilgrims. The work is in four movements from Roncesvalles to Burgos to Leon to the resting place of St James (Sant Iago), Santiago de Compostella on Spain's north coast.

Loosely speaking Joby Talbot's music inhabits, at least in this work, the world of Tavener in its approachability, Penderecki in its ululating moaning and crooning (Roncesvalles) and Bax's Mater Ora Filium in its gothic complexity (especially in Burgos) but there’s a lot more to it. There is plenty of variety in his writing; try, for example, the pecked out precision of 8:47 onwards in Burgos. Leon opens with an otherworldly stratospheric carolling-chiming for soprano - this is a breathtakingly beautiful coup and there is plenty more. Superbly marked rhythmic writing can be heard in the light-footed Orff-style celebration of the Santiago movement. It’s eager and rumba-accented.

I should add that this is a work predominantly for choir. There is a minimal but significant role for bells.

When one comes to the last five minutes the sometime complexity melts away. Instead the spiritual centre of gravity of pilgrimage and the sense of tens of thousands of predecessor pilgrims registers with great profundity.

The sung words - Latin, Greek with a host of other languages in Roncesvalles but mostly English - are drawn from medieval texts and the poetry of Robert Dickinson. The words are fully printed in the excellent booklet.

This sincerely felt and communicated work is dedicated to the composer's father Vincent Talbot (1915-2005).

The recording is in surround sound although I experienced it in conventional stereo and as a CD not as SACD.

Talbot is quite well represented on Signum: Mother and Child SIGCD501; Dream of Herod SIGCD046.

Tenebrae handle this work of quietly eloquent virtuosity with a seeming ease that surely belies the skills needed to covey such endlessly subtle and allusive musicmaking.

This is music that will appeal to anyone with a taste for a rewarding branch of the new simplicity (and I intend no denigration in this generalisation). Talbot has produced a work of sheer, plangent beauty which conveys a sense of time-travelling, profundity and disorientating strangeness.

Rob Barnett

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 About Joby Talbot's 'Path of Miracles'

By  Gordon Hamilton (Conductor and composer)

Every now and then a piece of music comes along that makes me think of a familiar instrument in a different way. After a nutritious education of orthodox piano training I was introduced to Messiaen's piano – an avery, organ, orchestra and religious object all rolled up together.

Joby Talbot's hour-long choral work Path of Miracles recently shocked me out of a humdrum attitude toward the choir (goddammit lots of choral music can be predictable and boring).

Talbot creates a sense of timelessness, as though the music has no beginning or an end: the piece just sort of 'happens' and then is over. The work is very repetitive and even its rhythmic parts are slow-moving. Path of Miracles is like a spinning disc remaining still. Talbot's music is less linear (like a Shakespeare play, or a Beethoven symphony) and more planar, (like a sculpture). This non-linear feeling is decidedly alien to the European concept of art, which usually plays out as a story. Perhaps this is why other composers who have achieved a similar relationship with Time (such as Olivier Messiaen and Sofia Gubaidulina) have had interests in non-western music.

Path of Miracles follows pilgrims on their journey to Santiago, Spain and meditates on the four main staging posts, the 'Camino Frances'. While I normally roll my eyes at yet more modern choral music explorations of Christianity, this piece really transcends its religious subject. I feel like the people are on a long and dangerous dangerous journey during which they really exclaim, rejoice, hope and reflect.

Despite the story, the text is plainly less important than musical shape and colour. Talbot sometimes repeats part of a sentence many times, then adds in more text as a new layer. The text naturally becomes unintelligible (though I imagine it would 'pop out' if one were following the printed text). In his much shorter piece The Wishing Tree Talbot further distorts the text by separating syllables with rests. What results is a new layer of meaning, born out of the sound of the syllables.

This grand work is constantly gorgeous. How he does this isn't a mystery: he uses familiar church modes (scales) which couldn't sound bad if they tried. But Talbot's use of these tonalities sounds different to everyone else. Tension is created by subtler means than the German-Austrian axis of western harmony. Even Eric Whitacre and Morton Lauridsen who use a similar pan diatonic approach (piling all the notes of a mode on top of each other) still betray an allegiance to the old ways by intuitively returning to the home chord. Talbot, on the other hand – along with his spiritual cousins Arvo Pärt and Olivier Messiaen – invent new systems of organising familiar chords and modes. Here, there seems to be no "plan of keys" as we know it. Sometimes, after long comfortable stay in one zone, the music just abruptly switches key (your choir had better be populated by pitch ninjas, in this case Tenebrae).

In fact, Talbot seems to not give a toss about harmony. Stephen Leek's choral music places a similar non-importance on harmony, which is often just an accident of piling different layers together. Both composers revel in textures, soundscapes and repetition.

I find this is totally liberating as a listener. I love it when a composer invites us to "let go" on concentrating on something we thought was important (like harmony or structure) and draws our attention to 'bigger' things.