Arcane musical instruments feature prominently in Mary Bellamy’s music, and none are stranger than those required for the piece that gives the title to this collection. Ten years ago at the Ruhrtriennale, Heiner Goebbels mounted a staging of Delusion of the Fury, the only completed “opera” by the American Harry Partch. Using a scale of 43 intervals, his work is scored for the exotically named instruments that Partch himself made to perform his music, and for the Ruhr performances Ensemble Musikfabrik commissioned a new set of those instruments to be made.
In Behind the Transparent Surface, which she composed for Ensemble Musikfabrik in 2020, Bellamy uses four of those inventions – harmonic canon, spoils of war, bass marimba and adapted viola – alongside more familiar sounds, for music that commutes between dense, frantic activity and “transparent” stasis, and between orthodox tuning and Partch’s microtones. There’s another exotic instrument, a new design of bass oboe called the lupophon, in Unfurling, written for the oboist Roger Redgate in 2019, which with its multiphonics and explosive outbursts sometimes seems to create a fusion of an oboe and something very like a saxophone, while the pianist (Philip Thomas) confines himself to playing directly on the piano strings.
