Rory Pilgrim: Melodies for Love and Struggle
by Annie Yelensky Goodner, 2024
“Listen: The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns…”
—Tracy K. Smith, “The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.”
“There are moments I want to enter. Will you follow me there,
to the place where the breathing walls quietly exhale a low freedom song”
—Jackie Wang, “The Politics of Dreaming” in Carceral Capitalism.
I. Radical Ear Worms
The sociologist Richard Sennet starts his book Together: the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation with an anecdote about his grandson’s London primary school, where one pupil had momentarily commandeered the PA system to broadcast of Lily Allen’s 2008 pop anthem “Fuck You.” Sennet writes that while he was proud of the kid’s anti-authoritarian flair (and also relays through a footnote the song’s original intention to castigate the fascist-leaning British National Party), he’s also concerned by what he sees as an “Us vs. Them tribalism”: there opposite of cooperation, where “all participants benefit from the encounter.” But I keep thinking about the moment the song might have crackled alive throughout the school building with its rowdy, grungy, percussive synth zeal. Did the student in question cue up the track in suspense and revelry like a miniature DJ; did their classmates—other than the one mentioned by Sennet who ground her hips to the beat—dance or sing along? There’s something both liberatory and communal about this image and the pop song more broadly, with its verses, hooks and refrains infinitely repeatable and easily improvised. Sennet goes on to discuss the cooperative structure of the rehearsal, where musicians “have to learn the ego-busting art of listening, turning outwards.” This practice, while at home in the quartet or symphony could also be a mirror of the pop song—of any tune, really—as it takes up residence in our memory, in our ears, where we might hear strains of melody and lyric that lead us to sing aloud.
The singable song demands to be heard, producing a constellation of listeners who inevitably also transform into a chorus that carry messages usually simple and profound, about love, loss and energized revolt. Rory Pilgrim’s 12-track pop oratorio RAFTS (2020-22) doesn’t contain the same finger-in-the-eye, burn it down ethos of Lily Allen’s hit—its dulcet melodies come in slow and then surge—yet it nevertheless reflects a radical, revelatory politics of aliveness. And RAFTS damn catchy. In the days and weeks after I first encountered RAFTS in the group exhibition “Radio Ballads” at Serpentine—the show for which the work was originally commissioned as a three-years long collaboration with community organizations in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham—I couldn’t get the songs out of my head; I couldn’t stop singing along (and aloud). I could trace the arc of the whole song cycle with snatches of lyrics:
“For it’s now/For it’s now/For waves to rotate/For time to dissipate/On your knees”
“And if you bring me your flowers/I’ll keep them safe for you/And if you bring me your flowers/I’ll keep them safe like you”
“Running I these fast lanes as I sleep/So watch me as I dream”
“With prowess and lucky shoes/That takes you to this magnitude/Prevent this harm and structural wound”
Even as RAFTS is refreshingly candid in its expressions of communal support, hope and solidarity, there’s perhaps a more covert gesture at play that depends on the song as a paradoxically camouflaged carrier of meaning. What was I singing after all? What was I taking part in? Whose song was I singing? Pilgrim, who often works in collaboration with community initiatives and especially groups of young people, composed the songs for RAFTS after a series of workshops with members of the Barking and Dagenham-based organization Green Shoes Arts that imagined what kind of architecture could hold and sustain the group in times of increasing precariousness.
In the borough, decades of deindustrialization, disinvestment and austerity policies decimated the local economy and social care infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic compounded experiences of neglect and social isolation. RAFTS, whose final form is an hour-long film that toggles between reflections, short tours, and stories told by Green Shoes members and a live concert of the oratorio cycle at Swiss Church in Central London, is an invocation of what works now in the present that might make a better future possible.
The image of the raft materialized early on in the workshop sessions: ancient and apocryphal, its also provisional and motley. or as one Green Shoes member, Carina, notes in RAFTS “we’re all just passing through, we never remain in the same place, we’re only just passing through, sharing with each other how we make it through each day, and giving tips on how to build a raft.” The song cycle that developed from this envisioning is no simple melodic interpretation or translation; it acts as a channel of communication that passes from the members of Green Shoes, through Pilgrim’s compositions and arrangements for harp, piano, chamber orchestra, and choir; across computer screens and headphones, from Barking and Dagenham, to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Idaho (where songs were recorded with the singer Declan Rowe John). Even when participants aren’t engaged with song, their’s a quality of their speaking and reflections that faces outward, even in its most intimate. Pilgrim’s songs seem to open up space for other kinds of speech. Call it amplification or melodiousness. There’s also the sounds endemic to our own lives and communities, that form a soundtrack both personal and collective. Partway through RAFTS, Carina is seen driving while singing along to Simply Red’s “Keep Holding On,” smiling to herself, tilting her head to reach a high note, as the borough slides past the car window. The songs we sing are always inflected by others, by familiar riffs and melodies, by the sound of our own voices.
Encountering Pilgrim’s songs in the gallery space can feel unprecedented—song after all is strikingly rare within contemporary art practice. There’s also an easy familiarity, perhaps owing to the fact that RAFT’s compositions harken back to the singing practices associated with social justice. Pilgrim’s use of the oratorio form, with the presence of a soloist, serves as a junction between different genres of music, uniting the experimental and the popular, a sacred and the ethereal. “One day I’m gonna reach there / feel real / so real / so real / unreal,” Robyn Haddon, a long-time collaborator of Pilgrim, sings as her voice alternates between ethereal and deep, almost earthen. This comes at the end of a remarkable 15-minute, two-song sequence in RAFTS— shot from day into night at Jim Peters stadium in Dagenham as members of Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance (BDYD) test out a series of synchronized and interpretative choreographies. Haddon’s singing is genre-bending, producing something between a ballad, a dirge, and a propulsive string-and-electronic fantasia. Most of the song in RAFTS are separate, like tracks on an album, but here, Haddon singing embodies the forward and backward motions of a metaphorical lariat described by Rowe John in the preceding number. As the sun begins to set at the stadium, Rowe’s singing tapers by first multiplying and harmonizing with itself, punctuated by flute and the rubbery pops of text messaging. Responding the music’s shifting tone, BDYD members slow their movements, rolls their arms and stamp their feet like butterflies, like young conductors divining a different future.
II. Resilient Geometries
The image of the raft, while originating in Barking and Dagenham, speaks to larger concerns across Pilgrim’s practice. In the face of atomising technological advancement, of increasing carceral states, or climate change, Pilgrim proposes that the act of dreaming—an approach to envisioning the raft—is key to our survival. “… dream is a hard thing to catch sight of – I said dream – I said dream what is it I said – I said it because just now, looking out, it’s a reflex, I saw, as if a stain or residue of scent, a yellowing on snow in patches, long thin stretches, like a very cold face remembering something it wishes to forget…,” the poet Jorie Graham writes in the middle “To 2040.” Appearing like Constructivist song lyrics, like a preordination of, to and from the future, Graham’s verses capture the gargantuan splintering cause by of ecological crisis coupled with a searching for impossible stability: “…it began, unexpectedly it began, it did not really cease again, it slowed some days, melted as it fell on some, days passed thru snow rather than snow thru days.” Here and across the collection of the same title—Graham’s most recent—there is horror and apprehension and there is also the gorgeousness of tiny movements, of touch, of two worlds touching, “branches that do not move moved—against snow, wall, pane, against trunk, intertwining & trembling inside other shadows, & all was alive.” Seeing only gets us so far. Seeing is suddenly feeling, and feeling brings dread, but feeling should be unavoidable.
Like Graham and like Buckminster Fuller, who implored his reader (if somewhat playfully) to tap into the fundamentally intuitive functionality of our spinning, zipping Spaceship Earth, Pilgrim seeks sources of balance amidst the chaos. In Fire At Sea (2022), one of a collection of small drawings that use pencil, crayon and nail polish, Pilgrim depicts an environment of opposites folded into each other. Potentially destructive but also self-regulating, curlicues of green sea meet flames that reach to the sky like fingers, like branches. Or perhaps this fire is falling, instead of rising, from the red droplets that emerge from a grey cloud. And yet this is not a violent image of doomsday, it’s one of containment and possible resolution. Fitted into a sculptural frame by made with light wood by Olga Mici?ska, the work transforms into an organic signpost or a musical score placed on an ornate stand.
Throughout Pilgrim’s work—consisting of sketches, drawings, composition, arrangement, films—there’s a challenge to the incommensurability of seeming opposites. “To erase, to erase, to erase you/to take away a past, to take away a future/to constitute the erasure of our system/so far,” Haddon sings in Software Garden (2018), her voice layered and electronic turning erase into race into raise. There’s something foreboding and also hopeful in these lines: the end is not just the beginning; these points are interdependent. In the short film Violently Speaking (2015), black and white images of limestone quarries on the Isle of Portland tell the story of edification through destruction and that digging things up isn’t about finding ghosts (of the past, of the deep), but locating new lines of connection across time, space, material. Threaded through the work are songs performed by a 5-person choir of teenage girls. Opening images of placid waters off Portland and the empty halls of the U.N. in New York City, and the distant blare of a fog horn prompt the quintet into folk singing, their voices bounding to high atonal notes then momentarily joining in harmony. Like the opening of a wormhole, their song sends us around Portland to stacks of limestone to Quaker meeting in Salt Lake City. The choir’s harmonic humming then brings us to the icy shores of the Great Salt Lake and to New York City and a drag performance by Trans activists, who lip sync Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman” and Shirley Bassey’s “This is My Life.” Pilgrim draws these songs together: the ecological and the bodily merge; sound and silence.“Till I look around and see/ This great big world is part of me/and my life/This is my life,” Bassey’s voice tremulates through the performer. “We’re all on this boat together!” chants the choir. For a moment peace seems possible not in the it’s overt, though empty signification of the U.N. chamber, but in the vibrations of collective song and collective listening.
III. This Precious Ball
“When you look out there Rory…you look out into millions and millions of light years of space […] We are, I think, 27,000 light years from the center of our galaxy” Eddie Paggett, an artist and member of Green Shoes, tells Pilgrim off camera in RAFTS. Paggett’s hands are visible, he measures distance, he clasps them, gesticulates for emphasis, “we don’t care we’re killing the planet…everywhere we go we destroy.” How to grasp the ungraspable? Jorie Graham conjures up a momentary, almost ineffable memory—the light cast on snow, “intertwining & trembling inside other shadow”—as a reprieve or perhaps a message sent from the darkest reaches of space that shines back from the darkness, tiny. Paggett presents his drawings, extraordinarily precise renderings of a 1951 British Railways locomotive, a a triumvirate of lilies, an oxblood-coloured orb. “I love precision…if we had that same care for our planet, think how beautiful our planet would be. Against a jet black backdrop, Paggett’s flowers seem to glow by way of a hidden light source.
Pilgrim’s storytelling and compositions also manage to interrupt the hugeness of neglect and injustice, with an almost weightless, though certainly not inconsequential, encounter with the earth and the earthly. Balance, Pilgrim seems to propose, is not about equal weight or equal gravity, but a landscape of sensations that awaken us to our proximity to all living things. In the Resounding Bell (2018) a group of young women in Southeast London are convene digitally with a local council of elders. The young people, reach out from a reach out via video and phone to their older interlocutors from a refurbished fire station in Peckham, what they describe as “reawaken[ing] the historic site of call and response with our voices.” The exchanges in the film — seven in total and framed as episodes — highlight small memories, encounters, songs, and advice between the generations. The mobile phone and computer also play a role as connector and custodian across space. While our screens might be vectors of alienation, separation and even mediated violence, in The Resounding Bell, they act as a conduit and an amplification device between the two groups. The format of the groups conversations also connects to a longer lineage with radio and television programming. h as the BBC programs Calling the West Indies from the 1940s or, indeed the original Radio Ballads, broadcast in the 1950s, both of which presented interviews, poems, songs and field recordings from communities that had otherwise been overlooked. Care for the planet, then, also embraces transmission and communication of stories across time and towards a new receiver.
At the end of film the group exists the firehouse to visit 140 year old tree in growing on the site of an old workhouse in Camberwell. As the group speaks about wanting the freedom to explore on their own against the expectations of an older generation, the camera traces the tree’s thick limbs, its corners and curves like the squeezing together like skin at a joint. There’s something instructive in this gesture of proximity that seems to say look and look again, notice the way the light strikes the bark. There’s a fragility and impermanence, certainly, but there’s also an invitation to listen differently.
Pilgrim’s compositions stick in ears and our minds, though they are far from formulaic. In fact many of the songs in RAFTS feature a flexibility in form and tempo that hold lyrics like: “7,907 miles tall/7,926 miles wide/This precious ball/When is enough enough?” The song structure brings together the soaring qualities of a hymn, the percussive tempo of a pop ballad, and the call and response of protest song. The question posed by the last verse is not easy to answer, of course, and that’s partly the point; the songs hold their earnestness and vulnerability together with their complexity. This is what we might call feeling. In the larger contemporary art world, there has been much writing and commentary of late that opines the way overwrought political discourses have erased the ebullient art of the early 2000s that “[…] worked out what it felt like to be alive in this strange new century and how to give that feeling form”. Of course feeling can be a fundamentally political act, not because it alters is us to the possibilities or properties of a given (art) object or context, but because it is fundamentally collective; it sensitizes us to ourselves and others. Especially in the rarified spaces of the art world, people often want to feel (if at all) in isolation. To feel with others is too earnest, too much a gesture of good will; it’s outreach. But singing defies the solitary: it loops through us and around us, pulling up material already there, reserved, embedded. Back at the stadium in Dagenham, the BDYD troupe is filmed from above as they twirl around, the pitch lights making shadows on the grass in the night; they form a circle, they look like the earth made up of colourful parts, moving, twisting, sometimes touching.