Manchester Collective: Patterns in Repeat at Aviva Studios

Rhythm begins with the body. This idea runs through Patterns in Repeat, Manchester Collective’s latest programme at Aviva Studios. For the four women at its centre, music is something embodied and grounding – felt in breath, pulse and the vibrations of our vocal cords. Working from this impulse, Meredith Monk, Cassandra Miller, Cassie Kinoshi and Clarice Assad have each, in very different ways, pushed the limits of what concert music is supposed to be.

For decades, Meredith Monk has been one of the great escape artists of contemporary music, making work that spills into choreography, theatre, film and installation. Treating the voice as an instrument, her music often feels somehow beyond language, less interested in what sound signifies than in how the body produces it. But if she treats the voice as instrument, she also treats the instrument as voice.

Tellingly, her 2014 two-piano collection is called Piano Songs. “In some pieces”, Monk says, “I write for one player as the ‘singer’, the other as the ‘accompaniment’… in other pieces I wanted the two pianos to make one large sound.” The playful, propulsive Folkdance largely falls into the latter camp, full of tight interlocking phrases and lines where the instruments almost finish each others’ sentences.

Monk’s rarely performed Backlight pushes that idea further, into the ensemble. Here she plays with shadow and light through flickering layers of dissonance and texture. Four wind instruments – intimately connected to the breath-length of the voice – join lower strings whose bows become the in and out of breath. The music shifts from tension into suspended stillness, before the finale takes the chromaticism of the first two movements into more kinetic, almost ritualistic territory.

Attention to the body takes a different form in Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering, composed while bed-bound with illness. This physical constraint shapes the piece, written with her laptop perched on her chest. Around this time, she found a Leonard Cohen line stuck in her head: “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering”, leading her to experiment with a found recording of convent bells. Slowing them down revealed hidden voices. “Bell-resonances combined like interweaving lines in renaissance polyphony”, she recalls. From these resonances, the entire piece is derived, producing a fragile and luminous work that feels less composed than discovered.

Often taking meditative singing as her starting point, Cassandra Miller taps into music that lies deep within us. Continuum, from her Sonic Landscapes, finds vibrant harmony in the space between classical music and Brazilian jazz, with passages of improvisation making the piece shift with each performance.

There’s more of this sense of fluidity in Cassie Kinoshi’s brand new work, drawing on her eclectic musical life in London’s thriving jazz scene and Berlin, leading bands as a saxophonist and composing for theatres like the Globe. Her commission for piano and string quartet draws on improvisation, human connection and Black cultural practice – opening the idea of embodiment outwards into something more social, responsive and alive to the moment of performance.

Manchester Collective are the ideal ensemble to bring these pieces to life. None of the works featured sit comfortably within traditional concert expectations – and neither do the Collective, loved for their embrace of eclectic, experimental styles and concerts free of any stuffy formality.

If you can’t make the Manchester date, you can also catch Patterns in Repeat at Leeds’ Howard Assembly Room on 26 June and London’s Southbank Centre on 28 June, before the short tour culminates at Aviva Studios. Wherever you catch it, this is a powerful programme that sees contemporary music not as something to be understood, but as something to be felt.