Naomi Pinnock: I put lines down and wipe them away (2025)

Naomi Pinnock (*1979)
I put lines down and wipe them away, for orchestra (2025)

SWR Symphonieorchester
Elena Schwarz, conductor

World Première, 19 October 2025, Donaueschinger Musiktage '25


On the wall behind my desk are images, quotes and words taped up in a mostly random order.

Anne Carson, Robert Morris, Amy Sillman and me.

The mingling of these makers’ ideas with my own becomes a kind of conversation in the process of creating. Their ideas and mine converge, splay out and continue off in tangents in my composition. I don’t always know why I pick out certain lines, words or images, but there is often a thread of similarity that joins them.

Handwriting, drawing, the hand-brain connection are some of the things that they seem to have in common. Anne Carson, writing in the "London Review of Books" tells of how, due to progressive Parkinson’s disease, she is losing her ability to write with her hand, how our style of handwriting is controlled by our brains: "Your handwriting is your brain, and your brain is you."

From 1973, artist Robert Morris began to make an ongoing series called "Blind Time Drawings". Each work is made without looking and, with an assignment of how to proceed set out, the aim is to attempt to complete this task in a given timeframe. Often the assignment is to repeat a gesture over and over. Failure is baked in: it is impossible to perfectly recreate the same gesture. And this process, this failure, is as much part of the work as the final drawing itself.

I am drawn to the impossibility of repetition. Human error. Slight shifts of instrumentation or lengths of notes. I’m looking to create a patchwork of similar materials, oscillating or overlayed, aided by swells of chords, moving in and out, creating a shifting wash of color. Things appear, disappear and reappear; scratching, brushing sounds bump up against glassy chords; dusty erosion wears away layers.

Amy Sillman works in layers. Underneath a final painting are possibly dozens of other potential paintings, layers that have been covered, paths that have not been chosen, a visceral searching for emergent shapes. In the strokes, spills, scrapes and stains, the body leads the mind.

The scribbles, drawings and messages on my wall are like guideposts. They are stones to touch for the sometimes blind journey of making. In her essay "AbEx and Disco Balls", Sillman writes: "As we pass into a time when pencil smudges themselves are an increasingly exoticized thing of the past, the world is still tactile and material. To touch it is to know it."


LIVE: Abschlusskonzert Donaueschinger Musiktage | Elena Schwarz | SWR Symphonieorchester
https://www.youtube.com/live/tUEYncik_go

Donaueschinger Musiktage '25 #domt25
https://www.swr.de/donaueschinger-mus...

Ausführliches Programmbuch der Donaueschinger Musiktage '25
https://cutt.ly/yr30m4tZ

Official Composer Website
http://www.naomipinnock.co.uk


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