Tonia Ko’s ‘Soothe a Tooth’ performed by violist Stephen Upshaw

Commissioned for me by the Riot Ensemble in collaboration with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Soothe a Tooth is a piece which vividly captures the anxiety of  2020 and life in lockdown; the work is led not only by melody, but by tension and the body’s subtle rebellions against external forces.

Tonia’s music conjures involuntary gestures of the body. These aren’t only metaphors, though. They’re physical realities, worked through in sparse, tightly wound writing: repeated tensing and relaxation of the hands, gestures exposed and unembellished, guiding the sound almost as a byproduct of bodily necessity.

I remember the first time I played the opening: no sweeping arco, no lush vibrato (that does come later!), just the raw articulation of fingers pressing, holding and releasing the string without the bow. The hands dictate the sound and the sound reflects the hands’ struggle. Even the silence is loaded, charged with the effort of sustaining stillness.

As Tonia writes in her programme note, ’Soothe a Tooth is a brief contemplation on clenched jaws, cracked teeth, and dry tongues – as well as the coping techniques one might try in order to soothe these invisible stress responses. The work highlights and isolates the physical motion of tensing and relaxing hands, often allowing the gesture to dictate sonic results. Through these repeated patterns, the lone musician attempts to tolerate his own distress.”

Preparing this work was an interesting combination of approaches. While scrapes and taps are recurring motifs, sections of traditionally heroic and virtuoso instrumental writing also appear. It was useful at first to isolate these different types of material and refine the expressive and technical demands of each before undertaking the final and most interesting step of negotiating the joins between the sections which Tonia, a string player herself, writes so idiomatically.

When the opportunity finally arose to perform the work live after lockdown at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, it was incredibly exciting to finally be able to share the performative elements of these gestures with other people in real time (both in the hall and on radio).

Performing Soothe a Tooth is a fascinating exercise in not trying to beautify every sound but to admit vulnerability. Every repetition of trying to make a forte sound with only the tapping of the left hand becomes a meditation on perseverance. Having performed the piece several times now, I found myself reframing the music in concert - not as a piece to conquer, but as a moment to inhabit.

Soothe a Tooth features on Stephen Upshaw’s EP Veneer, out on 12 September 2025 on Coviello.