HAILING

orchestra

2015-17 (re-orch. 2021) | 11’

(2.2.2.2 4.3.3.1 timp.+1 perc. hp. pno./cel. str.)

• Premierd by the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ed Gardner

hailing takes its starting point from Louis Althusser’s description of ideological “interpellation,” illustrated through the everyday act of being called out in the street — “Hey, you there!” You turn around, and in that moment of recognition, Althusser suggests, you are constituted as a subject.

“By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion,” Althusser writes, “the individual becomes a subject — because he has recognised that the hail was really addressed to him, and that it was really he who was hailed.”

hailing is a short tone poem that dramatises this theoretical scene, reimagining those fleeting seconds as if stretched into extreme slow motion.