Boring Like A Drill.

I’m listening to people playing instruments, making music. Are they playing with, or on, their instruments? It’s a trickier question here, as the musicians are performing scores composed for them by other people. If the playing here is to be understood as exploration, then it comes from the composer’s curiosity and from the musician discovering what can be made from the composer’s vision. Making music like this becomes largely a question of possibilities, balanced against the need for some level of restraint.

Both are solos, but augmented. Catherine Lamb’s piece, Point/Wave, is for guitarist. Accompaniment comes from the ‘Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer’: amplified ambient sound filtered into resonant frequencies. This is apparently the first piece she wrote using the device, which has since formed the basis of her Prisma Interius series of works. The sounds in Point/Wave are more clearly defined and separated here than in the later works; this would be partly due to the sole performer and to the bright, clear attack and decay of the guitar. The piece is conceptually clear, but with harmonic sophistication. The guitarist Cristián Alvear plays a cycle of chords over, or against, the passing harmonic clouds of the ambient synthesizer. Whether the two relate or not is a moot point: the interaction is one of two processes at work, each producing sounds of alternating clarity and complexity. The synthesizer’s changes are governed by the outside world; for the guitar, Lamb has composed an “infinite cycle” of chords related to smaller and larger prime numbers. Acoustic phenomena are explored and demonstrated, but in a lyrical, non-dogmatic way, rather like Alvin Lucier’s later works combining instruments with pure tones. I like that Lamb expresses her frustrations with the guitar through the piece, with the awkward tuning and quick decay turned into a virtue that adds extra colour to the sound. The piece was written for Alvear, a guitarist who has a knack of finding the space for potential shading and texture in the most seemingly reductive scores. He gives the piece warmth and presence, using a classical guitar to speak clearly, in a way Lamb thought would only be possible with steel strings.

Any play in James Weeks’ windfell is of a more serious nature. This hour-long solo for violin is also augmented: the musician is expected to sing vocalise from time to time. The piece was written for Mira Benjamin, so presumably her high, clear vocal tones are a requirement for anyone else attempting the piece. The inner sleeve of the CD warns listeners that the first five minutes or so are almost inaudible. The sounds are the most rudimentary type, the kind of inadvertent noises made in preparation to play. The home listener, already slightly apprehensive of what might follow (“resist the impulse to turn up the volume”) is then led through an open labyrinth, in which the path is marked but the ultimate direction never clear. After several hearings, it’s still hard to remember exactly where this path led. The piece doesn’t exactly build up from its near-silences, but transforms itself in ways which never seem a sudden divergence yet always efface the memory of what passed immediately before. Damndest thing. Pauses mark changes of direction; each section carries a tension with it, but the gestures are never hurried. Sounds are frequently sustained and repeated, with a restraint that always refuses to indulge the listener. Changes are marked by difference in pitch and intonation, rather than gesture and registration – just enough to be heard as new. The voice joins in at times, or whistling to blend in with the harmonics. Sometimes the voice provides three-part harmony with the double-stops – by this point in the piece, the music has become strongly present, perhaps even loud. Later, you notice things have become quieter again. Weeks (married to a violinist) demonstrates a deep understanding of the instrument, doubtlessly aided by Benjamin’s performance, a mixture of calmness and absolute control, the kind of heroic qualities that come from balancing contradictory impulses, as heard in her previous performances.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, James Weeks
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I’m listening to people playing instruments, making music. In these cases, they’re playing with their instruments, the verb used in the sense of exploration. Making music like this becomes largely a question of taste, of value judgements. It risks a dead end, making sounds that are pleasant but eschewing the potential for discovery and meaning. The temptation to recline into the comfortably tasteful is tempered by working with unfamiliar instruments, which won’t conform so readily to your expectations. Licheni is a relatively brief suite of pieces by Simon Balestrazzi and Nicola Quiriconi. Balestrazzi works with “objects and self built little instruments” while Quiriconi uses contact microphones and voice. The pieces are intricate and detailed without being fussy, maintaining a quiet consistency in sound like a protracted close-up, unflinchingly intimate. Acoustic and electronic merge, as does subtle uses of voice woven into the sound. Both musicians show a firm control over their media, allowing it to lead them into new areas of sound while also restraining it in the service of compositional development.

The duo A Spirale (Maurizio Argenziano on electric guitar, Mario Gabola on “feedback sax”) are joined by percussionist Chris Cogburn on Autocannibalism. The form is similar to Licheni: a similar suite of seven sections of similar dimensions, but the instruments present other difficulties. Jazz allergics like me will be relived to learn there is no noodling going on here; Autocannibalism is an extended study in feedback. Guitar and saxophone merge in sustained tones ranging from smooth to abrasvie, with a heavier emphasis on the choppy side as abetted by the percussion. It’s easy to describe things as sounding ‘organic’ and assume qualities of complexity and coherence, but the struggles of playing in such a way become clearer here, when listened to closely. The easily available range of feedback sounds is limited, requiring skill, invention and, again, taste to keep things interesting without the musicians repeating themselves. There’s less detail and depth than Licheni, but both albums offer a comparable musical experience, executed in different media. In both, it’s not clear if the sections are excerpts from a larger performance or otherwise assembled from various takes.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: A Spirale, Chris Cogburn, Nicola Quiriconi, Simon Balestrazzi
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Who would have thought that Messiaen needed rescuing? Yet all this time, in full view, his reputation has been in peril. Despite his secure position as one of the great figures of twentieth century music, he is often met with the Wrong Sort of apprehension – not for being “too modern” but for being too ornate and overbearing, loaded down with symbolism that he elaborates upon to an extent that tests the audience’s Sitzfleisch. He was teacher to a generation of avant-garde luminaries who waved off his radical techniques and gently dismissed him with the contempt bred by familiarity. Messiaen is now a double image that cannot be reconciled; he has been embraced by an audience at the expense of his modernity, while the more progressively minded continue to regard his modernity askance. We are only permitted to see him in part at any time. Advocating for him as an innovator is made to seem like a revisionist act.

It seems like a bold move for a new recording of Quatuor pour la fin du temps to be released by Another Timbre, a record label that’s made its name for working a rich seam of contemporary music while seldom straying beyond a range that extends from, say, John Tilbury to Wandelweiser. For those already familiar with this classic, this interpretation should come as a discreet but satisfying revelation. Rather than trying to reinterpret or (God forbid) ‘reimagine’ Messiaen, the musicians make a clear-eyed attempt to see his work plain. As with many twentieth century composers, first recordings of Messiaen have a rawness that comes with the strangeness of the new musical idiom and the need to emphasise the new, alien quality. A modern group taking this stark, ‘just the notes’ approach would be boring, uninflected and perversely colourless. For Another Timbre, the musicians are Heather Roche on clarinet, violinist Mira Benjamin, cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, and Philip Thomas on piano. I’m sure I’ve discuss solo performances and recordings by all four musicians many times before. They each excel at new and contemporary music, through both technical achievement and interpretive nous. They approach the Quatuor as a contemporary work, combining flowing virtuosity with an appreciation for grit, never taking the composer’s craft for granted.

This performance-based approach produces rhythms and phrasing that are more deliberate (not necessarily slower) than other versions I remember. It stays true to the complex emotional experience of hearing the sute of eight movements while giving clarity to certain points. The opening “Liturgie de Cristal” emphasises is strangeness through its abruptness, hammered home by the sudden contrasts in the following Vocalise. Messiaen comes across as prescient of current musical trends here, particularly in the glacially slow clarinet solo “Abîme des oiseaux”, played by Roche with a tone that’s both pensive and unyielding, and “Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes”. The latter, played by all four in unison, is the most arresting version I’ve heard: the lock-step precision produces a unique timbre and repeated phrases take on an urgency I haven’t heard before. Messiaen has the capacity to shock.

The Quatuor is paired with a piece for the same four instruments by Linda Catlin Smith, whose work has been presented on Another Timbre a couple of times before. Among the Tarnished Stars is an older work, from the late Nineties, which may be why it bears some more overt resemblances to other composers. In particular, it recalls late Feldman at his most extroverted, i.e. short fragments of lyricism in a tone that’s more wistful than claustrophobic. Piano plays against the clarinet and strings like a muted concerto. A less overtly dramatic work than the Messiaen, it still provides plenty of contrasts and incidents while still feeling compact at half an hour length. Heard alone, it could provide a fitting epilogue to the Quatuor, but in fact precedes it on the disc. It seems an unusual choice to have the later work first, but in this way it sets a new context in which Messiaen may be heard. Smith’s music is clearly a work of the present time without ornamenting itself with any overt signifiers of end-of-century fashions, whether cultural, social or technological. Messiaen’s connections with contemporary music may now be more closely observed.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Linda Catlin Smith, Olivier Messiaen
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(Part 2 here.)

The fiftieth Music We’d Like To Hear concert began with Séverine Ballon playing from her compositions for solo cello, which I’ve described before from a recital and her inconnaisance CD she released last year. These were followed by A line alongside itself, a new piece by Newton Armstrong which extended Ballon’s playing with electronics. By complete contrast, the second half the gig began with Michael Parsons’ 1995 electronic composition Tenebrio, an unusual piece quite unlike other pieces I’ve heard by him. Composed on a pair of Yamaha CX5M synthesisers (one such unit was on display for the audience to enjoy the authentic retro-techno vibe), the piece see-sawed between grainy drones and low-resolution noise.

I’m glossing over this stuff a bit because the final piece felt like a culmination of the entire series so far. The curators had flown over the American soprano Beth Griffith to perform John McGuire’s intricate vocal juggernaut A Cappella. Having presented a superb rendition of McGuire’s 48 Variations for Two Pianos two years earlier, this all-too-rare opportunity to hear his music was even more ambitious. A Cappella was written for Griffith in the mid 90s, weaving together brief samples of her voice with live singing, in melodic and spatial counterpoint between left and right loudspeakers. The piece unfurls with a steady, unyielding momentum, with the crispness and directness of rhythm and harmonies reminiscent of American ‘post-minimalist’ composers – without, however, any of the associated irritation. If heard inattentively, it resembles one of those 80s-90s pieces with a superficial brightness that quickly becomes inane and lethargic. That misconception soon disappears, as A Cappella continues to reveal new details and turns in expression without expanding upon the initial material. The piece is redeemed by this strong framework of compositional logic, resisting the need for subjective intervention while still being more sophisticated than simple bell-ringing patterns; there is also a suppleness to the rhythms engineered into the steady pulse. Griffith’s singing was essential to bringing out these shadings and depths in the musical texture to their fullest. Standing before the audience with a handheld microphone, she alternately led and followed the disembodied chorus that surrounded her, turning her head from one to the other, shifting effortlessly between registers, skimming the surface of the polyphony and then suddenly darting up to hover above it.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: John McGuire
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(Part 1 here.)

Music We’d Like To Hear‘s latest season continued their bold approach to reappraising recent music. The second concert began with a live performance of Timing by Phil Harmonic (aka Kenneth Werner) – a piece which had only existed up to now as a recording of a one-off, unscripted studio performance in 1979. Two performers on electric keyboards play chords, each telling the other when to change. It seems like nothing more than a simple excercise, but the performance revealed deeper implications. Each musician, and the music, is dependent on the other’s actions; yet neither can control what the other may do, only when they shall do it. Each knows what to do, but not when they may do it. In one way it is like one of Christian Wolff’s open scores where the musicians can only progress by consensus, but with an adversarial element. Each musician has the power, should they choose to do so, to subvert and disrupt as well as to collaborate. The spoken imperative to “change now” takes on a greater burden for the audience. Francesca Fargion and Tim Parkinson’s performance used a transcription of the same chords from the recording but in this piece, timing is everything.

I went to a fine performance of Alvin Lucier’s Chambers at one of these gigs a few years ago so it was slightly surprising to see it get another airing, except this was a completely different interpretation. The basic concept of filtering sounds through different, small acoustic spaces was reinterpreted by Rie Nakajima and Lee Patterson in a much broader way. Much of the sound was non-electronic and unamplified, particularly Nakajima’s. Any concave object or surface was considered as a potential acoustic filter for the transmission of sounds; even the sound of an open or hollow object against another surface is determined by the shape, down to a bottlecap pushed across the floor.

The gig ended with Enrico Malatesta performing Éliane Radigue’s Occam XXVI, circumnavigating a pair of cymbals with a violin bow, occasionally holding a frame drum to resonate above the cymbals’ surface. There’s a kind of meticulousness in these pieces in which the perfection of the player’s gestures in producing an immaculate surface of sound becomes fascinating in itself. Here, the music again seemed like a technical exercise but this time I struggled to find anything deeper. Radigue’s long history of work with synthesiser drones should mean that the apparently simple surface of harmonies reveal a more complex interplay of shifting overtones, but perhaps here the lack of precise control over the instrument’s harmonic spectrum and the overfamiliarity of bowed percussion sounds work against the odds of the listener finding an aural epiphany.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Kenneth Werner, Lee Patterson, Phil Harmonic, Rie Nakajima
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Summer has been cruelly disrupted, but not before I got to take in all of this year’s Music We’d Like To Hear season. I got to write about the 2018 season in more detail for last January’s issue of Tempo, but I still need to get a few things down about the concerts just passed.

It was the programme’s fifteenth anniversary and ended with their fiftieth concert. The 2019 series began with a recital for violin and piano by Mira Benjamin and Philip Thomas. The term ‘recital’ here perhaps ought to be used advisedly, but this gig was the most conventionally-formed ‘evening concert in a church’ out of the three – at least on the surface. MWLTH gigs, curated by composers John Lely and Tim Parkinson, always bring a combination of the brand new, the unfamiliar and the unjustly overlooked, often reviving works previously thought lost to live performance. Benjamin and Thomas ended their gig with a collaborative work, Marc Sabat and Matteo Fargion’s duet YOU MAY NOT WANT TO BE HERE (after Bruce Nauman). The words from the title phrase (taken from Nauman’s Poem Piece) were spoken in various permutations, or substituted with pitches on violin or piano. As twilight slowly faded through the church windows, slow exchanges between voice and instrument, instrument and instrument, untreated and prepared piano sounds inculcated a state of mesmerisation in the audience, subdued but held in suspense. I had to remind myself that Naumann was not directly involved in the composition of this piece – that impression may have been helped along by Parkinson worrying aloud in his introduction that the piece may rub some people the wrong way.

The concert began with Thomas Stiegler’s Inferner Park, a set of thirty-one slender pieces and fragments that skirted the boundaries between charming, obstinate and foreboding. The work is named after Paul Klee’s set of drawings. Works by Nomi Epstein, Tim Parkinson and Georgia Denham seemed to work together to form a sort of deconstructed violin sonata, each providing a distinct, isolated aspect of the players’ roles in the form. Epstein focused on gesture, attack and colouration, Parkinson on material with minimal interpretation, Denham on sonority and sentiment.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Marc Sabat, Matteo Fargion, Thomas Stiegler
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