The composer Iannis Xenakis wrote one work for solo bass: the twelve-minute heraps, in 1976. I discovered it just a couple of years later, when I was looking to expand my repertoire and thought it was perfect: it’s an intense work, one that demands you throw yourself into it wholeheartedly, as well as containing moments of great beauty and fragility. At the time I was working on a programme of solo works – among them Jacob Druckman’s Valentine, which I was planning to perform in a red leotard, and Hubert Stuppner’s Rondo for a clown, which meant I had to run ofstage and come back in a clown outit. When the score for heraps arrived I thought it would be an excellent foil for the other two: it was music of great strength; the opening instruction is en écrasant (‘crushing the string’) and then the third bar goes from ff to pp, so it sets itself up as a piece of extremes right from the start.
There wasn’t much information in the score other than a note about the harmonics, and since I was in Paris at the time, I visited Iannis at his studio. I played the irst page for him and when I’d finished there was a horrible silence. ‘Non, non, non’, he said, ‘this is not how my piece should sound like!’ He’d written the piece for the bassist Fernando Grillo, who played with a special Italian technique – it involves creating pitches on a single string just by pulling the string aside, of the fingerboard. It dates from the time of the three-string basses used by Dragonetti and Bottesini, who used it to get really high notes at the end of their shortened fingerboards. I, however, was playing more of a sinuous quartertone line with separate bows, which sounded like teatime music, rather than what he wanted: a series of pulsations, indenting a continuous glissando. I returned to England to work on the piece with renewed inspiration and enthusiasm.