Some physicists hope that evidence will be found that contradicts the Standard Model, opening up an entirely new understanding of how the universe works; in the meantime, the theory remains disappointingly consistent. At times, it can seem that a vast swathe of electroacoustic music over the past sixty years has simply been a matter of spinning off variations of elements from Stockhausen’s Kontakte. Alternative pathways are investigated, but Kontakte persists as its own standard model. Its brilliant use of sound and space, its theatricality, the innovation born of thorough application of an elaborate internal logic make it irresistably seductive to a composer; perhaps dangerously so, for with its appeal to the imagination comes the implication that its methods are irrefutably correct. The last time I heard it live in its piano/percussion incarnation was in a concert in Berlin last year, and when it came up while describing my holiday to a friend she sighed “Not that again.”
A new recording has now been released as download only by All That Dust. This follows up on their previous download releases of works by Babbitt and Nono, which suggests that this Kontakte shares a mission to re-examine and renew works from the past. The GBSR duo of percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys play the instrumental parts, accompanied by the four-channel electronic tape. This is a binaural recording, so even in this stereo presentation the spatialisation of sound is notable. The sound quality is wonderfully clear and detailed, which suits Barton’s and Rhys’ playing style admirably.
When I’ve listened to recordings, it’s almost always been one from the 60s (Caskel with Tudor or Kontarsky) so my judgement might get clouded here. The technology of the time makes it almost inevitable that one of the ‘contacts’ referred to in the title is in the connections between the electronic and acoustic sounds – certainly to modern ears. GBSR have described their own approach in detail, describing it as “the key work in the piano and percussion duo repertoire.” It’s a telling remark, placing the focus firmly on the instruments over the tape part that gets so much attention. They proceded to ‘internalise’ the piece, playing from memory; an approach that Stockhausen himself came to demand with regularity over the following years. The result is strongly theatrical despite the absence of visuals, combined with an immensely detailed and colourful sound. Details I hadn’t focused on before, even in live performances, stand out here. Perhaps the playing approach allows for a slight but significant feeling of spontaneity to the instruments, even though the tape cannot really allow it. Wood or skin sounds come out distinctly organic in contrast to the electronics; piano and metal have their own unique characteristics, too.
It almost feels a little weird, finding these little flecks and splashes of new colours in the once familiar texture. (Even in the concert hall, the piece can tend towards homogeneity in parts, owing to the composer’s passion for constant activity at the service of a theory.) If Barton and Rhys are somehow taking liberties, then I’m for it. Stockhausen built a career out of finely-judged transgressions, so it’s nice to keep him weird.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
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Cassandra Miller: Songs about Singing
Tuesday 22 October 2019
I’ve been waiting a year for the next batch of releases from All That Dust. The first bit of great news is that one of the new CDs is dedicated to Cassandra Miller’s works for voice. Last year’s pair of Miller albums on Another Timbre took a great step in addressing the need for her music to be more commercially available and this addition gives us some important details of the bigger picture of her music, casting her work into a different light.
Songs about Singing focuses on the voice, particularly the soprano Juliet Fraser, one of the co-founders of All That Dust. Two of the four works on the disc were premiered by her, the results of a continuing close collaboration. I was lucky enough to hear the premieres of one, plus another of these pieces at Kammer Klang a couple of years ago, where they left an indelible impression. I may as well quote my impression of Traveller Song pretty much in full:
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.
The new recording, again with the Plus-Minus Ensemble, benefits from the cleaner acoustic conditions of a studio over a crowded bar in Dalston. The listener’s more sober surroundings and the performers’ greater familiarity make the piece seem more confident and accomplished in the adoption of its various guises. It may sound a little more disingenuous now and more of a pose (but then I’d forgotten that I invoked Kagel in my first write-up) but those themes and issues raised by the first hearing are now more focused; more importantly, the emotional content of the ensemble accompaniment is also clearer, more powerful and coherent, even as it plays upon the listener’s consciousness with its contradictions. The simple sentimentality, so pervasive in other found-voice-swathed-in-strings compositions, is affectionately and cruelly lampooned.
For the remaining pieces, the voice is presented live by Juliet Fraser. Tracery: Hardanger and Tracery: Lazy, Rocking are part of a continuing project between Fraser and Miller, where the singer is accompanied by tapes of herself. Hearing Tracery: Hardanger live, I commented that “if there was a process, it seemed to be part of a meditative rite.” It is, indeed, a type of ‘automatic singing’ in which Fraser “performs a body scan meditation whilst listening on headphones and (perhaps) responding vocally to a piece of source material.” The multiple takes add another layer of complexity to this feedback loop. In recording, more attention can be paid to the harmonising, drones, microtones and inadvertent canons that emerge from the weave of vocies. Fraser’s voice has the right mix of vulnerability and resilience to call up an equally complex array of potential meanings and interpretations from the listener.
The thing I hadn’t picked up before is that both Tracery works, like Traveller Song, are made out of other music. The reflexive title of the disc starts to make sense. Hardanger, unsurprisingly, uses Hardanger fiddle tunes as the ‘input’ for the vocalising feedback process, while Lazy, Rocking takes a movement from the late Ben Johnston’s Eighth String Quartet. This unusual form of musical quotation underpins a lot of Miller’s music, but wasn’t so evident on the Another Timbre discs except for the string quartet About Bach. The use of quotation and of cultural transmission through distortion of a pre-existing model comes here through direct experience, subjectively interpreted through the act of singing itself, whether by the performer in the Tracery project or the composer in Traveller Song.
The oldest work in this album, Bel Canto from 2010, takes a similar approach. Fraser is joined by the Plus-Minus Ensemble, playing as two distinct trios, each independently playing in response to the soprano as she adopts the vocal affectations of Maria Callas. She swoops and sighs, and each little group of instruments sighs and swoons in sympathy. The sliding tones are falling, seemingly always falling, in a presentation that is both mournful and noble – in ways that the singer may not have expected. (To hear the piece in this way is to acknowledge that Fraser is playing Callas as a character, or a type, adding another layer of meaning to the musical texture.) As a composition, it works simultaneously as a clear-eyed exercise in analysis and as a study in pathos, in the same way that Berio’s Rendering presents such a troubling double image; but again, the emphasis here is placed on the interpretation over the message. Understanding can reveal so much, without ever explaining.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller
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Federico Pozzer: Breaths
Tuesday 8 October 2019
Been listening to this repeatedly over the past couple of months but not writing about it; just enjoying it*. Don’t know anything about composer Federico Pozzer, other than what comes with this CD. Breaths is a collection of three pieces for small groups of instruments that take composition into that nebulous world of improvisation, but in a different way from the usual connotations. Pozzer describes his early musical interests as starting with free improv before switching to Feldman, Bunita Marcus and Cage. This gives a superficial idea of what this disc sounds like, particularly the late works of Cage.
There was a short period in his last years when Cage became interested in the idea of a musician’s “internal clock” being a sufficient regulator and coordinating factor of musical time. This notion seemed to fade pretty quickly, briefly flirting with mutual supervision before giving over wholly to the impartiality of the stopwatch. I’m not aware of any “internally timed” performances of Cage’s orchestral piece 1O1 having taken place, but given his history of working with orchestras I suspect he would have been disappointed. Where Cage apparently failed, Pozzer clearly succeeds: the musical material is more or less defined, with the manner of playing determined by the musician’s breathing.
The disc opens with Breath II, a half-hour duet for guitar and piano played by Lucio Tasca and Pozzer, recorded in the composer’s living room in 2017. Each musician plays a single gesture with each inhalation, exhalation, and pause between. The piece is structured, with repeats and an emphasis on ninth intervals that makes the opening resemble the start of Schoenberg’s Opus 11. Each musician, however, plays independently and the sonic palette soon expands into percussive and frictional sounds. In the abstract, the ostensibly regular pulse of breathing would make a recipe for tedium, but the induced self-awareness and the interaction of sounds produces a strange effect on how the musicians breathe. Time slows down. The music ebbs and flows intriguingly, a variegated mosaic of sounds that seems larger than the two instruments.
For the two other pieces, Tasca and Pozzer are joined by Kathryn Williams on flute, Dejana Sekulic on violin and Brice Catherin cello. Noises and Meetings are also regulated by breath, in slightly more involved and interactive ways. Noises requires the musicians to play in an open space, responding to external sounds heard with a given set of possible reactions. In this recording, the ensemble plays in a delicate, serious way that never seems too self-conscious or too “free”, either of which would make the music arch and stiff. It works here, and shares the ambient field recording atmosphere of Breath II that gives these pieces their own subtle colouration.
Meetings also allows extraneous sound into the music, as the musicians are, at times, required to respond to each other’s breathing instead of their own. The simple scales played by the ensemble become blurred by the overlapping interplay of each performer’s bodily rhythms, concentration and intuitive communication. As an act of collective consciousness, it takes the concepts heard behind Christian Wolff’s ‘consensus’ pieces and elaborates them into something simultaneously more corporeal and more ephemeral.
* Last couple of months have been kind of hectic so not enough writing going on. Soon to change.
