‘Zwischen den Sternen’ – ‘Between the stars’ – are the opening words of one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke explores the strangeness of trying to measure outer space in human terms, and also touches on ideas about language – communication – that extend beyond the merely human into the wider world of nature. Nothing is immovably fixed in either time or space, and Christian Mason’s Zwischen den Sternen (2019) for eight players is similarly dedicated to exploring possibilities in circumstances where mobility is fundamental.

Although musical communication can take place when a score-reader silently translates written symbols on the page into imagined sounds in the inner ear, the transmission of sounds by performers across the space between them and an audience is how communication, as a communal activity, is usually understood. Mason acknowledges this image of a ‘space between’ in several recent compositions that question the convention of performers and listeners occupying separate, fixed positions; and in one work (In the Midst of the Sonorous Islands, 2016) he even breaches the usual barrier between performers and listeners by inviting audience members to make musical sounds.

In Zwischen den Sternen the players move on to, around and away from the performance space, features a domestic listening set-up cannot literally reproduce. But the kind of subtle balancing to be heard on this fine recording suggests different degrees of distancing and reflects how the players’ materials require a kind of mobility quite different from the settled tuning and regular rhythmic patternings of more traditional musical writing. Although the performers are allowed considerable freedom in what and how they play, Zwischen den Sternen does not seek to match the easy-going, improvisatory ethos of much postmodern experimentalism. Mason’s affinities with Scelsi and Grisey – two composers mentioned in the performance instructions – signify a commitment to a ritualised intensity, moving between rawness and refinement to fit with the choice of phrases from the Rilke sonnet as movement titles.

The overwhelming mysteriousness of stars in space is conveyed by a small collection of instruments rich in extreme contrasts – like the steel drums and the cello at the beginning, bass oboe and harmonicas elsewhere. This is not so much a ‘music of the spheres’, after the model of Stockhausen’s Sternklang, more a ritual, the human contemplation of something no individual can fully understand – a state of mind encapsulated by the brief, simple cello tune heard at the end. But Mason has also explored the very different musical consequences of making and sharing sounds that represent potentially harmonious relationships between nature and humanity. His two sets of Songbooks for string quartet, in magnificently vivid performances by the Ligeti Quartet, offer boldly sculpted interpretations of vocal music – by Tuvan throat singers and the Sardinian ‘tenores di Bitti’ – that replace the troubling mysteries of outer space with the earthy embrace of vibrant communal celebration. As Mason writes in the booklet notes, these musics seem ‘pure and rough’ at the same time, and his rethinkings acknowledge such polarities, yet the predominant characteristic – unmistakable in these high-powered, closely focused recordings – is sheer, unadulterated exuberance.