Giles Swayne's Cry for 28 amplified and electronically modified voices was commissioned by the BBC, first broadcast in 1980 and included in the 1983 Proms; now it has been released on the BBC's own Artium label. In it, Swayne sets out to tell the story of the seven days of the creation of the world, using not a conventional text but rather the phonetic components out of which speech is made, so that, during its span of more than 90 minutes of music, only three words emerge in comprehensible form, and these towards the end of the work. The idea is not a new one and indeed Swayne's indebtedness to the linguistic experiments of Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti and Kagel is often audible. What is strikingly individual about the work, however, is its tone. Swayne has attempted to create an accessible score that shuns intellectual complexity, aiming instead at an inarticulate, almost naively sensual form of communication. In particular, the composer acknowledges a debt to African music, and this influence has certainly left is mark. But I cannot help feeling the that there is something uncomfortably eclectic about Cry, and that in the final analysis it is neither an expressive work not a deeply moving one, though admittedly it is difficult not to be tantalized by the sheer glory of its sound-world.
There would seem to be two major problems here. First, Swayne's linguistic code is ill-defined, no doubt because his concern appears to be with an essentially narrative subject (the creation story), from which the expression of emotions is all but absent; it is not a work about joy, grief or human interactions in the way that Berio's Visage or Stockhausen's Stimmung are, and many of Swayne's intriguing vocal effects fail to communicate any real meaning. Second, the work's structure more nearly resembles a suite than a coherent, growing organism, and it does not really achieve any climax. By the end, I found myself frustrated both by the limited range of its motivic ideas and its tidy compartmentalization, and longed for some thematic or developmental cohesion of the kind that makes (for example) Stockhausen's obliquely related Inori such a gripping—and uplifting—work.
Part of the problem must also lie, I think, with the performance. This is not to say that the BBC Singers deserve anything less than the heartiest congratulations on mastering such a large and demanding score. But there is something complacent about their reading; where the music demands rawness, passion and guts, I was aware more of an immaculately rehearsed studio professionalism that seemed at odds with Swayne's self-declared intention to create an earthy score inspired by non-Western cultures. Again, there is an uncomfortable air of compromise, as two dissimilar worlds are brought together.
This is work that you are likely either to love or to loathe. You should certainly sample it in order to find out which. Of one thing there is no doubt, however: the BBC's engineers have done everything in their power to make the recording a spectacular one. On both headphones and loudspeakers its sound is outstanding.'