Discussions about the nature of music usually revolve around its capacity to express a narrow range of primary emotions – joy and sadness, for example. Whether music can be said to embody more specific characteristics such as goodness, evil or compassion, however, is a more complicated argument to make. Can music be kind for instance? This is precisely the question Andrew Hamilton sets himself in Friendly Piece, a work written for the Crash Ensemble during his time as the group’s composer in residence back in 2019. This digital release features a live recording of the piece as performed by the composer and the Crash Ensemble at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2023.

Hamilton has a talent for coming up with clever gambits to frame his compositions and Friendly Piece follows very much in this line. Despite the musings on kindness in the accompanying notes however, the piece seems much more preoccupied with nostalgia and memory. It largely consists of small snippets of material that include, amongst other things, the sound of a bird’s wings from Monaghan, fragments of a sacred text, and memories of a childhood obsession with The Sound of Music. The piece is driven by snatches of broken text spoken by Hamilton himself who acts as the main soloist in this performance. Abstract phrases such as ‘even as a mother’, ‘living being’, ‘responding to people’,  and ‘this is what should be done’, are interspersed with whistles, whispering sounds, yodeling and fleeting contributions from the ensemble. 

All of this gives the piece a delicate and almost tactile sound quality centered upon the pleasant timbre of Hamilton’s own voice and the rapid rhythmic patter that characterises his delivery of the words. Indeed, Hamilton is so central to the piece that the sounds produced by the Crash Ensemble are really orchestrations of the timbral qualities of his voice. 

Structurally the piece follows the composer’s signature approach of presenting each of these fragments as short compressed moments that return obsessively and accumulate micro variations along the way. The texture is relatively spare in the first half but the ensemble becomes more involved in the latter stages when ascending and descending glissandos terminate in rich microtonal chords. 

As interesting as all this is, however, the problem is the material simply doesn’t justify the fifty-seven minute duration. The first significant shifts in texture don’t occur until the twenty-minute mark and the sparse monotony of the first third of the piece will test even the most goal agnostic listener. 

The problems don’t end here unfortunately. Like some of Hamilton’s previous pieces – Music for People who like Art and In C for instance – there is a gradual build up in the final third to something approaching a moment of catharsis. In Friendly Piece, this occurs when the repeated glissandos coalesce into a full-blown song near the finish. Its arrival is a satisfying moment for sure but the twenty-minute journey from when the first fragments of this song appear to its realisation are drawn out and unfold with a sense of inevitability.

Listening to this piece live as a member of a captive audience would no doubt be a different experience to listening to it at home on a recording. Both Hamilton and Crash Ensemble deliver an excellent performance and such unwavering concentration over a lengthy period of time is impressive. In truth, there’s probably enough material here for a good fifteen to twenty-minute work but expanded out to almost an hour, Friendly Piece asks a lot of the listener to stay the full course.

Friendly Piece by Andrew Hamilton and Crash Ensemble is available on Bandcamp. Visit https://crashensemble.bandcamp.com/album/friendly-piece.

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