Camden Reeves is Professor of Music at the University of Manchester. In this post, he explains how a visit to The Whitworth’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Albrecht Dürer’s Material World, inspired him to write the new musical composition ‘Melancholia & the Angel’. The exhibition was co-curated by Professor Ed Wouk, Professor Sasha Handley, Professor Stefan Hanß, and Imogen Holmes-Roe.

I made many attempts at this piece for violin and piano – the piece that would eventually become Melancholia & the Angel. None could lift off the ground. The balance between craft and creativity was off. It was only after seeing the wonderful exhibition Dürer’s Material World at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester that the impasse was broken. I was flying again. In Dürer’s Melencolia I of 1514, an angel is surrounded by the tools of artistic creation – scales, a compass, millstone, burin, syringe, hammer, nails, saw, straightedge, mathematical instruments and charts. But the angel is depressed. Nothing is working. Inspiration is lacking and, creatively, they cannot fly. The whole exhibition helped me to re-frame the artistic problem. The problem rests in straddling that tension between technique and free invention, enjoying the pull in both directions and allowing harmony to emerge of its own accord. I had the idea of composing music about the process of composing music – which for me is what Dürer’s image is about in visual art.

This work of mine is a short meditative invention. Inspired by the exhibition, I was interested not just in what a work of art is but also how it is made and what it is made from. In this duet, technical devices are present: two isorhythms (rhythm), two borrowed tone-rows (pitch) & two canons (texture). Only the isorhythms (built from the magic square in Dürer’s etching) contribute to the heart of the music. Around all this the invention is free.  The tone rows and the canons appear like discarded objects. The tone rows (one from Arnold Schoenberg’s Op. 23, the other by Bill Evans) are pizzicato and alien. The canons use violin harmonics and the upper register of the piano, as if from another dimension. These tools are abandoned – scattered, like the tools in Dürer’s etching. Wherever the spirit is in this music of mine, it does not reside in the techniques. Some techniques are necessary to channel it. The trick is in finding the right ones. The others must be cast aside.

This music was commissioned by the violinist Fiona Robertson and the pianist Philip Sharp with funds from the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

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