My name is Benjamin Tassie. I'm a composer of electro-acoustic music. For the National
Gallery I've made some new music based on recordings by the English pianist Myra Hess.
Hess is perhaps best known for her arrangements of Bach for the piano and for performances
that she gave here in the National Gallery during the Second World War.
I was interesting in the differences between the situation when Hess was responding to a time of national crisis
and our own responses to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
I think Hess really understood that, in times of crisis, we need music.
Not only is it an escape from what's around us but because I think it communicates
something fundamental about the human experience
and it helps build communities of listeners, something that obviously at the moment we're missing,
we're missing live music at least. So I wanted to make some new music that responded to that
idea somehow.
So I took four recordings that Hess made: two pieces of Bach, a piece by
Purcell, and a keyboard sonata by Scarlatti and I processed those in the computer so that
sometimes there were fragments of the original leftover, sometimes they were very different
But I don't perform them.
I put that music onto two reel-to-reel tape machines from the
1970s and then had the computer process that audio through some guitar pedals and using analogue
synthesisers so that it really is a performance but in the absence of any performers.
I think what electronic music does when it's at its best, and particularly kind of tape music,
captures this trace of a movement of emotion of some kind of performance and, I suppose,
in the visual arts, when they appeal to me most, they also have this idea of movement
in two ways: the movement of the subject of the painting but also the movement of the
painter: you feel as if someone really made that and left an impression and that's what
I've tried to do in this piece with the music is to not only have Hess's performance really
come through somehow but also my own work shaping the material as well.