Friday evening in Sheffield’s Arts Tower was a unique spectacle to behold.
As part of Classical Weekend, Platform 4, a composer collective based in the Steel City, put on a performance piece in collaboration with sound artist Lorenzo Prati.
The event was entirely one-of-a-kind.
The whole piece was timed, travelling across different spaces within Sheffield’s beloved modernist building, with performers on the paternoster – one of only two left in the UK.
Chris Noble, one of the group’s composers, reflected on how the night of logistical nightmares and original music came together.
Back in 2018, the collective were asked by a few different organisations to put on a performance of ‘In C’ by Terry Riley inside the iconic skyscraper.
The idea of performing in the Arts Tower again was mentioned in conversation with Nick Potter, on the University of Sheffield’s concerts team, and The Leadmill’s Rose Wilcox, Classical Sheffield’s programme coordinator.
With revisiting the space suddenly a possibility, they knew that it would be wonderful to play their own music.
Chris Noble said: “We wanted to create a Morten Felman kind of concert where it wasn’t ‘sit down, here’s a piece, clap clap clap’.
“There was stuff happening from all angles, and in some cases, more than one piece going on at once.
“It wasn’t really like a traditional concert, so we wanted to kind of embrace that, really, and the fact it was in this hulk of a ‘60s building.”
The group wanted to work with the space in the building, and decided to focus on the mezzanine and the paternoster.
Friday night’s performance was split into two halves – the first half was all about the lifts, and the second moved to the wider spaces of the lower ground and ground floors, and the mezzanine.
In this first half, the paternoster was the stage.
Musicians performed individually in the lift carts, yet remained part of a group piece.
The audience were split across floors one to thirteen.
Performers got on at the mezzanine, travelling up whilst they played, before getting off at 14 – just to get back onto the descending side and loop back around.
Platform 4’s Jenny Jackson said that when the performers weren’t playing, they would pose and move past as a tableau.
The first half was made up of two “foreground pieces”, and two “background pieces”, as Mr Noble described it.
Tom Owen, another Platform 4 member, had his piece, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud meaning ‘lift to the scaffold’, in the foreground.
Mr Noble recounted Owen’s piece as “absolutely bonkers”, involving people holding Bluetooth speakers whilst playing stuff from scores sellotaped to the walls of the lift cars.
Noble’s piece, which followed next, was inspired by the paternoster itself – playing with sounds that would ping in the space, and named after an old sign displayed as you enter the lift.
Played on 12 glockenspiels with each musician in a different lift car, they couldn’t be conducted – and had to rely on their start time and a trust in each other.
Titled ‘OVER-TRAVEL IS NOT DANGEROUS…’, the piece references the sign that read, “‘”over and under travel is not dangerous, but not recommended”, which Chris said he didn’t think was very threatening.
He said: “As soon as we had the opportunity to think about writing a piece for the lifts, the glockenspiel was the first instrument that came to mind that would ping off of the walls, ping off all the concrete.
He “knew that everyone was going to write something slightly crazy”, so decided to write something a bit lighter.
“The idea is that the piece is made up of slightly threatening-sounding riffs, but because it’s playing on 12 glockenspiels, it’s never a total threat, so it relates back to that sign.”
Discussing the sound of his piece, Mr Noble said there were “some quite scrunchy jazz harmonies in there – whether that always carries on 12 glockenspiels is another case”.
He said: “The theme of the piece was to write something that on another instrument would probably sound quite discordant at times, but when it’s just pinging around, sometimes the notes sound like notes, and sometimes they sound like pings.
“You’re never going to get the horrible scrunches.
“I think the medium sort of reflected the mode that I wanted to portray. The sort of non-threatening sparkly kind of sound.”
Lorenzo Prati, a sound artist and PhD student at the University of Sheffield who has been studying the acoustics of the Arts Tower, composed a loop that lasted the whole night.
The loop played in the background throughout, and had little bits from all of the other pieces that he had pre-recorded, and then new live recordings that were fed into the loop on top.
Mr Noble said: “He was like a crazy scientist, feeding it all back into his set up on the mezzanine floor.
“There were speakers everywhere, all rigged up on the lower floor.”
New parts were fed in at various different times and he triggered previous parts every so often, and the volume came up or down depending on the piece.
Then, with this playing behind Tom Owen and Chris Noble’s pieces, Jenny Jackson’s Nightingales played every eight minutes and 37 seconds by vocalists and musicians on the piccolo who were all dressed as birds.
This repetitive timing reflected the “rhythms of the lift”, matching the time it takes for the paternoster to do one complete circuit exactly.
As Noble described, “if you’ve not read the programme notes or had any kind of context, it’s utterly bamboozling – just birds shrieking.
“They would make an absolute cacophony for about thirty seconds and then disappear into the night, or just pose on the lift.”
The second half of the performance moved from the lifts to the lower floors.
The half-way landing on the stairs up to the mezzanine became the stage for Tom Owen’s Stairs Pairs.
Two clarinets and two French horns played antiphonally (in response to each other), with speakers on the lower ground floor feeding back some of what they were playing.
Like much of the performance that night, how the space was used and how music travelled around it was part of the piece itself and transformed how it was performed and experienced by the audience.
Following Stairs Pairs was the first of Tom James’ parades.
He had written two parades, where he circled the lower ground floor and all of the musicians would join in – akin to the Pied Piper, as Mr Noble said.
A tune would be passed down the line, and would gradually get distorted as it got to the back.
Noble’s glockenspiel piece then came back for a second iteration.
For this, he wanted to create a surround sound with eight performers on the lower ground floor and four up on the mezzanine, “so it’s like it’s coming at you from all angles”.
He said of the version in the lifts: ” You hear bits as the musicians go past on the paternoster, but you’re also hearing bits that are washing up and down from other floors.”
This second performance gave a chance for everyone to hear it a bit more, with a bit more clarity.
Recounting this point in the night, Chris described the moment when logistics posed a threat to whole piece:
“At half-nine – no one knew this was happening – they turned the paternoster lifts off so we had to get from the lower ground floor up to the mezzanine.
“All of a sudden, I’m sprinting up the stairs with three other glockenspiels, two of which are in their sixties, to make sure this piece started on time.
“Everything was being timed within an inch of its life because it needed to be matched with Jenny’s nightingale interventions and Lorenzo’s loop.
“Anyway, we made it. Got back down for another of Tom James’ parades, and that was it.
“It just turned ten o’clock as we finished. We couldn’t have timed it better.”