Went to the latest Kammer Klang gig a couple of weeks ago. It was recorded by the BBC and is on their website for the next month. Which is good, because I need to hear it again.
For me, the big event of the night was two world premieres by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller. I’ve heard only a few pieces by her – including a dizzying performance of her choral piece Guide by Exaudi last year – and liked it all a lot. There are times when you discover an artist and you need to hear more; more of that good thing that won you in the first place. Then there are artists whose work you find yourself exploring like an unknown island, kept in suspense over what you might encounter next.
In Tracery: Hardanger, singer Juliet Fraser sang against a recording of herself, doubling and approximating microtonal drones, one breath at a time. If there was a process, it seemed to be part of a meditative rite. This was followed by Traveller Song, in which the Plus-Minus Ensemble accompanied a tape of ragged, keening voices. Again, it seemed to be a documentation of some vocal ritual, with Western musical tropes laid on top. She’s from Canada, it must be something indigenous so I guess we better put up with those scratchy voices. But the ensemble – first just piano four hands, then clarinet, violin and cello, finally just an accordion – were playing some sort of game. At times deferentially minimal, then fulsomely mournful, astringently avant-garde and then, at inopportune moments, flamboyantly romantic. It just seemed to keep going, trying out different costumes and poses. By the end, I didn’t know if it was amazing or terrible.
Tonight I pulled up the programme for the concert for the first time and holy guacamole if the whole thing isn’t a headtrip that would do Kagel proud. The voices are Miller’s own, singing along to Sicilian folk-music without being able to hear herself, then attempting to accompany herself. She describes it as an attempt “to explore my own bodily impulses related to melody” and admits it sounds like “quasi-shamanistic keening” but the whole work is a tour de force in the creative potency of cultural transmission and reproduction. More than any simple cross-pollination from an “exotic” culture, the act of transmission itself is a necessarily distorting process; in which imitation becomes a transformative act that creates something strange and new.
