Boring Like A Drill.

I’ve got wind and rain lashing against my leaky window, but still it’s been a quiet end to the year. I’m thinking back on what I’ve seen and heard this year – not too hard, just enough to see what’s stuck with me – and it’s the quiet, contemplative, introspective works that have defined the year for me. 2011 and 2012 were each dominated by the euphoric spectacle of seeing Stockhausen’s Sonntag and Mittwoch aus Licht. This year, the events which were epic in scale were far more modest in immediate presence, audience, venue, and sound world.

Hearing Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston live for the first time in winter early this year seemed to set the tone. Not the best performance imaginable, but the experience of sitting in a smallish room with the musicians, in the back of an art gallery in Camden, for four hours was invaluable. A small crowd came and went throughout the afternoon; a few stayed.

I mentioned more recently that amongst the usual dazzle and complexity of featured composers at Huddersfield this year (Alberto Posadas’ elegant, Hèctor Parra’s slightly clumsy) three oases of stillness stood out. Firstly, Antoine Beuger’s en una noche oscura sort of pleased me because I didn’t like it. Another four-hour stretch of stillness and near-silence, it showed me that I’m not an indiscriminate sucker for anything sufficiently hushed and conceived on a sufficiently expansive scale. It felt stilted and precious, disappointingly inert. Unlike other punters there, I did not experience any transformative effect as the piece progressed into the small hours.

Anton Lukoszevieze’s arrangement of Henning Christiansen’s Fluxorum Organum, on the other hand, took on a strange new life. Originally collaged from repeating fragments played on an organ to soundtrack the film of a Joseph Beuys performance, this chamber arrangement for a small ensemble of winds and strings revealed a different character, somewhere between Satie and late Feldman in its cross between the naive and the gnomic. The episodic series of repeating patterns could be taken as either forbidding or beguiling.

One of the two biggest highlights of the year was Jakob Ullmann’s Son Imaginaire III. Successfully performed at last, after three attempts in nearly 25 years, this concert had everything Beuger’s piece lacked. Again, a piece that hovered on the threshold of audibility, but in Ullmann’s case the music contained a faint but indelible richness, a mystery in how the sounds blended together in ways that couldn’t be understood, from one musician to the next and with ambient sounds in and outside St Paul’s Hall. Sitting there, attention focused on perceiving the music, you could lose yourself, your concentration on a sound so diffuse that your attention becomes a sort of dream state. Over a hundred years ago painters really started to pull apart the idea of what it meant to see something; we still don’t know what it means when we say we’ve heard something.
The crowd for the Ullmann gig was small, but maybe not as small as I remember.

All of this is leading back to my real defining musical experience of the year – hearing R. Andrew Lee play Dennis Johnson’s November at Cafe Oto. It was a satisfying culmination of many things, but also the start of many more.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H