Piano Suite VII Collection (Lola Perrin) by LolaPerrin

Piano Suite VII: Collection 2009
After Hussein Chalayan

During the spring of 2009 the Design Museum in London organised a debate at Shoreditch Town Hall, hosted by Cypriot-born designer/artist Hussein Chalayan, to explore what makes London such a magnet for the artistic community throughout the world. I had been invited by the museum to create a music performance inspired by Chalayan who was on exhibition at the time. Taking his interest in the issues of cultural migration and displacement as my starting point I ran a questionnaire at the debate to capture the family histories of his audience. 190 questionnaires were returned, and these created 190 unique family tales, each spanning three generations across a hundred years.

The people poetry I collected through asking my questions allowed me to roam through a borderless sound-territory creating music that would otherwise not have been found but for the lavishly diverse family histories I was lucky enough to bask in. I commissioned John Kennedy to create drawings from the tales which gave me additional triggers for the composition. The complete tales, with Kennedy’s cover illustration “The Sea of Names”, are held in the Design Museum library.

After writing the music I had one final process to go through. I filtered words from the 190 tales and ended up with four narrations in the style of radio news reports. The narrations were read aloud in between the piano pieces by the correspondent, Mihir Bose - whose voice I have admired from afar for many years. And so “Suite VII: Collection” is a work that’s in the style of a live radio show. The narrations are at the back of this book. Pianists performing this suite are encouraged to have the narrations read aloud in this order: narration 1, piece 1, narration 2, piece 2, narration 3, piece 3, narration 4, piece 4.

Metronome markings are indications of general tempo feel.

1 London is a rhythm (unrecorded)
2 First memory
3 The Sea of Names
4 Across one hundred years

Contains tracks

• 1 The Sea Of Names by LolaPerrin
• 2 First Memory by LolaPerrin
• 3 Across One Hundred Years by LolaPerrin