Boring Like A Drill.

Electronic music tends to polarise even the individual listener, where the extremes of appreciation and disdain map out like an inverted bell curve. For each piece that realises the potential for new, exciting and unheard sounds and forms, there is at least one that utterly fails to reward your attention. (I blame the formative French tradition of exquisitely crafted snorefests – a fetish of technique and finish.) I’ve got a stack of recent releases of electronic music here which I’ve been meaning to deal with so I’m going to run through them quick, with this jaded attitude in mind.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and once you’ve dabbled with electronics a bit yourself you get surprised by how much music starts to resemble your own preliminary doodlings. That’s not to say that just anyone can fool around with software and be as good as, to pick a name at random, Dumitrescu, but that a lot of it lives or dies upon the question of what to keep and what to discard. Taku Unami’s Takuroku album Stardust is “100% computer programmed music” and it’s fairly pretty but I think you could be just as pleased by downloading a copy of Coagula. Madalyn Merkey’s Crushed Shells, on the other hand, is gentle and playful, while using the fashionable analog Eurorack modules and a Waldorf Blofeld with a capriciousness that never sounds stiff or heavy-handed. Both kind of slip back and forth between being less or more than they seem, with Merkey’s set of pieces having greater resilience.

The synthesiser duo of Richard Stenton and Zach Dawson have put out their debut release 7balcony. It sounds like a lot of effort went into making something both conceptually grating and sonically ingratiating. As such, it falls between two stools and is excessively dependent on the goodwill of the listener. This could go over better with a live audience, where all the activity seems to mean something, especially if the venue is licenced. The last track ‘microphones hanging from tall buildings’ is apparently just that and is the most confident piece here.

Another debut duo is Alex Christie and Ryan Ross Smith’s acres, which carries the sensation of improvised electronic music, both in its strengths and weaknesses. Nice crunchy electronic noises kick in and out with a pleasing arbitrariness but occasionally things come to an impasse and it sounds like the musos are struggling to make the music do something, in the hope that things will stay tastefully harsh. Unlike the two preceding albums, Paul Abbott’s Deorlaf Z (version) for XT Deorlaf X Live sounds like an artistic struggle without pulled punches. An extended live reworking of prerecorded materials using electronic (and real) percussion, excitement builds, then ebbs away only to resurge later, with the longeurs becoming excusable as a necessary part of a larger process. The live situation and the attendant materials of popular music form the substance of this piece, as opposed to simply clothing it.

Simon Balestrazzi (electronics) and Paolo Sanna (percussion) have put out a set of Disrupted Songs made from sonic found objects. They are exercises in serious play, making or taking nicely-defined sounds that would suit an earnest lower-case improv session, but then they repeatedly interrupt each other, creating a more complex structure of continuity and discontinuity. Each piece takes unexpected turns without ever descending into a free-for-all, placing the unfocused into sharp relief.

Finally, I have to mention John Chantler’s Eli Licking Ice, a glorious 25-minute slab of synthesisers spun through mobile speakers in resonant space. It drops us in media res with a wonderfully clear but chaotic mix of electronic sounds that are truly diverse and discrete. At first it seems as though things are about to go out of control but events settle into a wayward flow of their own course. As the piece continues the sound opens up and you hear acoustic events within the room, particularly a snare drum that buzzes along in sympathy. Even as sounds loop and swoop or swing from side to side, both sweet and cutting, or both at once, everything seeks out a harmonious balance, although perhaps in ways that are not readily obvious. Also, it’s a welcome addition to Takuroku’s guest dog series.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: 7balcony, Alex Christie, John Chantler, Madalyn Merkey, Paolo Sanna, Paul Abbott, Ryan Ross Smith, Simon Balestrazzi, Taku Unami, Takuroku
No Comments »

What do you do for a follow-up? It seems like Adrián Demoč’s Žiadba was a bit of a sleeper hit last year for Another Timbre: kind of haunting but kind of beguiling all at once. A second album was released earlier this year, another set of chamber pieces titled Hlaholika. Mostly recent pieces, they’re harder to get a handle on, even as their means of construction seems simpler. Ma fin est mon commencement is a trio for clarinet, viola and piano in which Heather Roche, Reiad Chibah and Mark Knoop play a slow, tentative melody in unison: viola high, clarinet low, piano a single, reiterated note in between, harmonised by the other two instruments. All three blend into a gonglike sound that plaintively circles around a static point. It sets the tone for the rest of the collection, with ensembles moving as a single voice, the brightness and interplay heard in Žiadba now subdued. The final piece, a duet for violin and double bass played by Mira Benjamin and James Opstad, falls into two sections. In the first, both play soft, slow harmonics together; in the second, the same but slower and too soft to sound fully. The musicians here are Apartment House alumni, who give these faint gestures full significance. (The one exception, the earlier Lešenie k zahĺbeniu, is played by students of the Janáček Academy of Music in Brno. It’s a larger ensemble work consisting of hazily repeated cluster chords.) Even after multiple hearings, I still haven’t mentally pinned this music down. It can seem so slight that it feels like that frailty is meant to reify either the sound or the silence, but nothing about it comes across as didactic, or even as Cagean parable.

It gets a bit clearer in the context of hearing Dotyky. Za zrkadlom, Demoč’s hour-long piece for solo violin composed last year for Milan Pala. It seems like an intimidating prospect for the listener, as an idea but less so in practice. Pala feels out two alternating notes, one high, the other harmonic. The notes move, but inadvertently, as though the musician is finding a particular resonance in the instrument, testing out its effects little by little. Having listened to that box set of Cage’s number pieces I start thinking about how much we understand of Cage through Morton Feldman, how the latter composer holds so much sway today over what we understand by the imperative to “let the sounds be themselves”. Demoč makes an instrumental gesture the subject, heard as itself without being employed towards a more abstract compositional programme. There is context, but only in terms of the sounds’ means of existence. It may well be a single sound, played and heard in multiple perspectives. Sounding intuitive, free of external processes or pressures to change, Pala makes the piece as much his own work as Demoč’s.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč
No Comments »

There’s an alien character common to all quarter-tone piano music: the claustrophobially close intervals spelled out in clear tones once so familiar to the ear can’t help but call up the air of other planets. The big personal discovery on this night was Mildred Couper, whose ballet music Xanadu was composed in 1930 for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. It’s a thrilling piece of flashing exotica and wide-eyed wonder, appropriate to the setting and the times (the piece was composed for the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s satire Marco Millions and apparently not used again). It has a bright, burlesque beauty to it, with any traces of tongue-in-cheek Chinoiserie validated by contemporary American modernism, effectively deploying steady pulses and stacked intervals that rose and fell giddily. It was the first of many microtonal pieces Couper composed and it made me feel sorry that I hadn’t known of her before this night.

The night was part of the year’s second series of Music We’d Like To Hear concerts at St Mary-at-Hill. Still working its way back from Covid, seating was reduced for these events and I’d stupidly left it too late to book for the July concerts. Friday was dedicated to piano music in quarter-tones, ably performed by Mark Knoop and Siwan Rhys on electronic sampler keyboards tuned a quarter-step apart. Thankfully, samplers these days are mostly adequate so as not to be a distraction, despite some harshness and incongruous sound location from the PA. As the concert series title reminds us, the important was that we can hear Couper and other composers played live and played well, despite current circumstances. The concert began with the obligatory Three Quarter-Tone Pieces by Ives, which on this hearing starting to make an impression on me for its compositional qualities over the pure sonic novelty which usually dominates. The free-associating patchwork of allusions to different musical styles came over well here, enough to make me wonder how securely each piece is held together.

Where Ives, like Hába, used quarter-tones as an extension of harmonic language, Couper’s Xanadu treats the microtonal scale as something new. Georg Friedrich Haas’s early set of three Hommages for quarter-tone pianos treat the base material of the scale as the subject. In each, a sole pianist is required to play both instruments at once, one hand each. The second piece was played here: in Hommage à Josef Matthias Hauer Knoop produced a continuum of arpeggiated clusters, ascending rapidly in constant repeated motion while rising in pitch only incrementally, producing a slowly varied cloud of overtones. Start and end points appeared to be arbitrary, the whole reminiscent of Ligeti’s then-uncomposed Coloana fără sfârșit, Ligeti having been the dedicatee of the previous Haas Hommage.

In the second half the lights were extinguished, but not for Haas, as Knoop and Rhys tackled Clarence Barlow’s daunting Çoğluotobüsişletmesi. This half-hour piece from the later 1970s used computer programming to calculate and distribute its arrayed masses of points, lines, layerings and trajectories across the piano keyboard. Barlow has postulated it as a work for solo pianist but performance typically employs four pianos to share out the layers. Two parts were pre-recorded here and played back, with Knoop on real piano and Rhys on sampler keyboard: four of the pitches in the scale are lowered by a quarter-tone. Even in this more practical form, each pianist was required to perform extreme leaps of register back and forth while reeling off unwieldy strings of single notes or involuted rotations around a clustered gamut of pitches. The voices enter one by one, at first sounding angular and ungainly but steadily acquiring a monumental presence. One or more striking details leap out for the ear at any given moment, suggesting other fleeting movements simultaneously passing beyond one’s attention. The retuned notes alert one to changes in material and pitch organisation, even within that welter of pianos. It’s ultimately overwhelming in its impersonal generosity, never exactly bludgeoning the listener because it is always clear that there are explicable principles of organisation at work for every moment, even as those principles remain opaque for the time being. I doubt we shall ever hear it as perfectly as we might imagine it, regardless of the forces involved, but this will do very nicely.

Saturday was given over to a single work, the premiere of Matteo Fargion’s String Quartet No. 5 ‘the nobby saddy quartet’. Written last year in lockdown and commissioned for the concert series, it’s an hour of affectionate indulgence of gentle melancholy. The slow, single movement, episodic structure, restrained timbre and extended sequence of cadences near the end all recall late Feldman, who indeed gets namechecked by the composer. The difference comes in the treatment of material, directed towards a self-aware caution of taking authenticity of musical expression for granted. All pizzicato at first, a repeated line descends chromatically over a fifth. It’s an inauspicious opening that stays around for long enough to start to feel comfortable. Like the best kinds of melancholy, it finds pleasure in its sadness and in doing so starts to forget itself; it deviates, lingering over one thought before flicking to another, then back again. As you would hope and expect, it cannot treat itself entirely seriously, even as it holds the idea of melancholy in reverence. This premiere was by Apartment House, in the same quartet manifestation last heard at Cafe Oto in May. They played it like Schubert, cold and tender. Punters claimed it felt like less than an hour; they always do, when it’s good. What struck me most about Apartment House’s playing was how slow each they could make each moment pass, without seeming too long or to be broadening out.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Charles Ives, Clarence Barlow, Georg Friedrich Haas, Matteo Fargion, Mildred Couper
No Comments »

It’s slowly but steadily sinking in how vast a legacy John Cage left us. Another Timbre’s new box set of Cage’s late number pieces, performed by Apartment House, was immediately received with widespread wonder and gratitude. Critics have suggested that this is a landmark release that will redefine Cage’s reputation, but this has happened before, more than once. Cage’s gradual acceptance into the musical pantheon has been a process of repeated adjustments into how the audience perceives him, a view of ever-widening horizons as more aspects of his art are brought to light. For the next stage, many critics will realise that, as with all great artists, no interpretation of Cage will ever be definitive.

In his generous sleeve notes, producer Simon Reynell observes that many of the pieces presented here have not had a new recording in close to a generation. This was a shock, as it made me realise that (a) I’m that old, (b) Cage’s oeuvre is that big, and (c) my much-loved recordings of these pieces need a fresh perspective. [The Number Pieces are a collective name given to a series of forty-odd works Cage wrote over the last five years of his life. They share the same basic principle: flexible time brackets without coordination between parts, more or less filled with more or less specification. Each is titled for the number of performers needed to play it. Cage could write them quickly, typically to fulfil commissions – he referred to them as his “watercolors” – but he was genuinely fascinated by the almost effortless variation and beauty that could be produced by his skillful employment of this simple premise.] Of course they come out differently each time, but as the ensemble Apartment House show in this collection, there can be great variation in larger-scale matters of interpretation, not just in detail. Several of the musicians here have recorded other late Cage works, particularly for Another Timbre, always finding new perspectives to what may have once been considered stable essays in random patterns. (The other great lie about Cage is that his aesthetic breakthrough was adopting chance, when the true breakthrough was his reason for adopting chance: his aesthetic judgements were now framed as questions instead of answers.) The five-plus hours of music in John Cage: Number Pieces both underlines and extends their work in expanding our appreciation of Cage. This set collects all the works written for larger ensembles: five to fourteen musicians.

One of my formative new music listening experiences was with a CD of Cage’s last completed composition, Thirteen, played twice by the ensemble who commissioned it. Both were dull as ditchwater. I’d read about how Cage had had to change his conception of what the piece should be while composing it, but still believed that the poor music was due to the ensemble taking liberties with interpretation, a top-down approach at odds with Cage’s musical instincts. Years later, I was releived to hear a far superior recording made by The Barton Workshop. Apartment House also take liberties, some quite pronounced. Almost all music requires some deviation from the score, however minor it may be; it’s a question of whether that deviation brings the musician closer to or further away from the spirit implied in the letter. Five4, composed for two saxophones and three percussionists, appears here with Heather Roche playing clarinets and only the duo of Simon Limbrick and George Barton on percussion. Limbrick and Barton also overdub themselves three times to produce the brief Six for unspecified percussion, making an oblique collage of timbres that unexpectedly appear and disappear. Five4‘s clarinet tones recall the light, clear sound of soprano sax.

The most questionable choice here is to almost completely avoid Cage’s allowance in most pieces for the possiblity of short sounds and the concomitant permission that they may be played loud or soft. Almost everything here is soft and sustained. It seems like a needless restriction to the variety these compositions allow and also threatens to limit Cage’s expressive range as a composer. Listening to hours of it should become numbing. Strangely, it just about works, to the credit of composer and interpreters alike. The opening three pieces, each five minutes long for five musicians, suggest we’re in for an extended survey of subtle differences. This changes with the longer Fourteen for bowed piano and ensemble, as the expanded colouration with piano strings and brass highlight the way Cage manipulated the parameters for his chance-determined time brackets to produce distinct changes in texture, phrasing and pace. There’s some wicked low-end sounds throughout this whole set which reward the indulgence of playing it loud, in contrast to the post-Feldman ambient haze sometimes assumed for these pieces. It’s about knowing what liberties to take.

Fourteen minimises the timbral novelty of the bowed piano strings, setting it back amongst the ensemble instead of being a de facto soloist. Conversely, the group’s approach to Seven presents a more concertante approach to the piano in the ensemble, using its more active part as a striking contrast to much of the other playing throughout the set. In other performances I’ve heard, this piece’s emphasis on wonky intonation has turned it into a buzzing microtonal cloud. Apartment House’s approach to Cage’s use of microtonality is subdued and undemonstrative. In the lengthy Five3 trombone and string quartet don’t so much clash as colour each other in fine skeins of sound that separate out, a piece that slowly breathes. In the ambitious Ten Cage envisioned an ensemble engaged in microtonal melisma until they lost sense of exact pitch. Apartment House play it without momentum, effacing pauses and changes in pace to produce one frozen moment in which tonal certainty is never a given, even with occasional interjections from a piano.

So far, my one disappointment has been Eight, an hour-long work for winds and brass. Cage gave greater leeway in expression and dynamics for this piece, which the ensemble here employ but once. Having never heard this piece before, it feels like the score’s expectation for a distinctive contrasting quality in this work was passed by to make something that, by comparison, too similar to the other works. On the other hand, the next longest piece, the fifty-two minute Seven2 for low instruments, makes a virtue of eschewing abrupt notes by emphasising the layering of soft, low tones into complex sounds that are transparent and indelible, with each instrument’s enforced absence made all the more notable. Coming back to Thirteen: The Barton Workshop’s version made full use of the ebb and flow permissible in the varied amounts of activity assigned to each instrument, all within a pitch range of a major sixth, creating a strange beauty out of inert materials. Apartment House remove the unsynchronised ebb and flow, but in doing so manage to transform the work into a lush and sonorous work of understated grandeur as they steadily unroll each new change to the gamut. It makes for a remarkably dignified commemoration to Cage’s passing.

The download comes with bonus alternative takes of several pieces and Reynell’s notes are also posted on his website: it’s recommended reading to learn more about these works. One final thought: the Number Pieces are frequently compared to Morton Feldman’s late music, particularly with the observation that Cage started them after Feldman’s death. I wonder if there’s another connection, besides that of slow, soft sounds. The scores (parts really, without overall scores) give freedom to the musician within greater bounds allowed by chance, but it places a burden on the musician as to how that freedom is to be used. Does a conscientious performer take a Cageian approach of impartiality when deciding entrances and exits, or should they play intuitively, with regard only for the strictures of the time brackets? Should the ensemble play as a group, accounting for each other’s choices, or as individuals. The Number Pieces could accommodate either approach but the pros and cons of both are unresolved. The possible indulgence of taste is a marked change in Cage’s scores, and it brings with it an anxiety that is seen throughout Feldman’s scores, where each of his manuscripts was a constant probing of the musicians’ psychology. Was this another patch of Feldman’s ‘turf’ that Cage felt he could now explore?

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: John Cage
1 Comment »