FESTIVAL FEATURES | Wave Movements L-R: Bryce Dessner, Richard Reed Parry
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Indie rock giants Bryce Dessner of The National and Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry explore their orchestral leanings at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.
Malcolm Jack fi nds out more
A s new Edinburgh International Festival director Fergus Linehan brings pop and rock music into the programme for the i rst time this year, from Sufjan Stevens to FFS, few musicians seem better placed to rel ect on this important sea change than Bryce Dessner and Richard Reed Parry.
Close friends best known as members of renowned North American indie-rock bands The National and Arcade Fire respectively, they’re also both classical composers. Dessner has a masters degree in music from Yale University and has seen his works performed all over the world by the likes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet, while Parry’s debut contemporary classical album Music For Heart And Breath (produced by Dessner) was released last year. They appear at this year’s EIF as part of a performance of their debut collaborative composition Wave Movements, an ‘orchestral work with a very strong visual element,’ as Dessner describes it, based on the different wave cycles of the world’s oceans. Composed directly to the rhythms of waves, it will be played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra accompanied by a i lm from Japanese visual artist Hiroshi Sugimoto,
24 THE LIST FESTIVAL 20–31 Aug 2015
and alongside Parry’s composition Heart & Breath, which will feature Dessner and Parry on guitar and bass.
Dessner has known Linehan for many years, ever since the Irishman gave The National guitarist one of his i rst opportunities to see his classical works performed outside of the USA during his tenure as director of the Sydney Festival (which Dessner credits Linehan with ‘revolutionising’). ‘I think the message Fergus is embracing is a broader vision of what is music,’ he says, over the phone from New York. ‘It’s a statement that Italian opera and Beethoven symphonies and Schubert’s Lieder and contemporary works by modernist composers and Stockhausen and minimalist composers like John Adams, all of these things matter, you know? People no longer need a club membership or a bank account big enough to afford a ticket to the most expensive halls across the world to hear this music – you can hear it in many different ways.’ Dessner believes it’s important not to see Linehan’s message as being a pejorative statement on EIF’s more traditional preserves of classical and opera music, because the lines between pop and rock and classical