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W<\/span>hy write words about music, Hans Keller once asked, when you could just write music about music instead? His mid-century essays in sound were never more than an experimental curiosity, but one that exposed the acts of translation, mediation and re-creation we undertake without thinking every time we describe our favourite symphony or explain why a song makes us cry. Reversing the process, this curious concert by the Netherlands\u2019 New European Ensemble<\/a> (which travels to the Edinburgh book festival next month) invited music about words, as four composers responded to novels by Ali Smith.<\/p>\n Interconnectedness \u2013 paths that intersect, patterns that repeat, stories and lives that echo \u2013 binds the four books of Smith\u2019s Seasonal Quartet. This project spins that web still wider in new commissions from four female composers: Australia\u2019s Kate Moore, Alice Yeung from Hong Kong, South Korean Seung-Won Oh, and Italy\u2019s Sara Zamboni. Pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kinan Azmeh completed the sequence of narration and performance taking audiences through a cycle from autumn to summer.<\/p>\n Did composers choose their own novels? Do the works represent a generalised soundscape or a particular response to Smith\u2019s spoken passages and episodes? In the absence of programme notes we were left to imagine our own connections. Smith\u2019s love of a list found meditative musical answer in the looping repetitions and slow-phase harmonies of Moore\u2019s Fall Falling; Spring\u2019s embedded folk-tale of virgin sacrifice lent a sinister intensity to the throbbing rhythms of Azmeh\u2019s Essays on Solitude, built up in insistent layers of ostinato \u2013 a contemporary Rite of Spring.<\/p>\n