I left the house for once, then twice, then three times for the Music We’d Like To Hear concerts at St Mary at Hill. It was their twentieth anniversary, which is both wonderful as they’ve provided such a consistently wonderful and important service to exposing new music in London, and a little sad that it hasn’t launched a small horde of imitators that have been able to last anywhere near as long (despite several noble efforts). The scant institutional support in a city the size of London is telling. Enough whingeing cos this is a celebration of music. The series began with repeat performances of works from the very first concert in 2005: Angharad Davies adroitly tackled Thomas Stiegler’s violin solo sonata facile (1993), an audacious work that employs the guttural avant-garde language of multi-stopped strings and aggressive glissandi, executed by holding the instrument upside-down between the knees and wrapping a rosined string around its neck. Beside the thick sonics, the piece plays off a cognitive dissonance of the apparent simplicity of its technique and the complexity of its results, while also realising that Davies is making the topsy-turvy approach look a lot easier than it is. Curator (forgive me) Tim Parkinson showed off his piano chops with a strangely evocative rendition of Markus Trunk’s Riten der Böotier (2005), a calm and austere set of miniatures that recall ancient Greek music – an entirely speculative concept. It was nice to hear a performance of Chiyoko Szlavnics’ string trio (violin violin cello) Freehand Poitras (2008), with its pure harmonic intervals expanding into combinations that seem to both perturb and resolve a drifting equilibrium. The evening ended with a live performance of Laurence Crane’s Events (1997), originally conceived for radio. It’s the most overt expression of the deadpan quirkiness that lurks within Crane’s music: a singer intones a small set of select nondescript facts related to the date 7 February 1997 – people’s birthdays, foreign exchange rates, weather forecasts – accompanied by a trio of clarinets and some small sounds from the piano. Melanie Pappenheim was the singer, reprising her role from the 1997 original broadcast; the clarinets sounded lovely, even as you wrestled with the idea of the material used to make the piece being informationally valid in one sense yet entirely null in another.
That’s about as nostalgic as things get in these concerts. The first gig also included two new works, with singer-guitarist Maddie Ashman premiering her reflective, folkish song cycle Otherworld and a piano trio by Chris Newman titled Things of Slight Interest, which is also folkish in its own way with his typically gruff but passive phrases piling up upon each other with apparent casualness, a particularly British mode of individualistic expression. For the second concert, Parkinson returned to the piano for a crisp interpretation of Tom Johnson’s late work Pairs and Pairs (2020), a charming piece despite its apparent reductiveness, ringing changes on complimentary pairs of dyads to produce exhaustive combinations of pitches by a method that is rigorously serial without sounding anything of the sort. Juliet Fraser gave luminous presentations of two slightly older works composed for her, Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments for voice and electronics, and Cassandra Miller’s Tracery: Hardanger. I’ve discussed both of these before (see links) but Fraser and Miller’s collaboration on Tracery continues to evolve over the years; this performance began with Miller’s one-time spoken guidance to Fraser on how to interpret the piece being made audible to the audience.
How a composer can prepare an audience as much as they can a musician is a subject too little explored. The performance of Niels Rønsholdt’s Song II, Melancholia III (2017) applied Miller’s principle in reverse. The piece is an extract from a larger work titled Until Nothing Left, scored originally for accordionist with various objects and the involvement of the audience. It appears the punters were not necessarily expected to contribute to the sound as such, as to contemplate their role in music-making. As a concert piece arranged for small ensemble and voice, shorn of its context of expectations of audience reflection, it came across as a diffuse narrative with a conventionally contemporary subjectivity of mild grievance. Piano with faint synth tones were the medium for Leo Chadburn’s pretty early work A Secret (2000), which was even milder in expression than the Rønsholdt but carried by tersely controlled material contained in a form that is simple but oblique. It makes an interesting comparison as part of his recent collection The Primordial Pieces, which I’ll write about separately soon. The big shock of the second evening was hearing Lily Greenham’s tape piece Traffic (1975), its cascading blizzards of tiny vocal shards sounding vivid, cutting and entirely contemporary even today, potentially moreso today than it did half a century ago, the acidity in its societal observation becoming more obvious as its zeitgeist has faded away, unable to be dismissed as “a trip”.
For the third evening, Angharad Davies and Tim Parkinson performed duet versions of pieces from Laura Steenberge’s Seven Poems (2024), an unusual work in that it differs from other music I’ve heard by her. On a smaller scale, with the ritualistic actions reduced to tasks that seem self-contained to their own means of making music, stripped of gestures that allude to a wider, unknowable meaning, the pieces became studies in playful process. In one, Davies and Parkinson rang toy bells muted by magnets, gradually unmuting them by tossing the magnets one by one over their shoulders, where they may or may not have hit various pots and pans scattered on the floor. In the other, the magnets are collected and thrown on top of large cardboard boxes where they may either roll away or clump together. The playfulness and modest means made it seem rather British. Bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval performed Alvin Lucier’s Same and Different (2021), a late entry in the elemental pieces he composed for soloist with pure sine tones. Off to one side in the church she played a single high pitch, using different fingerings to produce the same note, only never quite the same due to small variations in tone and intonation, producing a series of liminal episodes in texture and activity as each note interfered with the pure tone in slightly different ways. This still, ringing centre of the concert was given its own segment, unpaired with other works. The two Steenberge pieces were each partnered with a work by John McGuire, a composer repeatedly championed by this concert series. Twelve Circles (2022-24) is a solo piano work reminiscent in style to his monumental 48 Variations for Two Pianos (1976-80). In single notes, cycling through perfect fifths in alternating octaves, the music seems open and transparent but never sounds simplistic. The interlocking of cycles and their dependence on shifts in tempo creates an elastic, elusive texture in which the presence of a method is obvious but its workings cannot be anticipated, a satisfying combination of intellectual integrity and imaginative whimsy. Pianist Mark Knoop expertly managed the deceptively difficult contrapunctal implications in the frequent tempo changes, much as he and Roderick Chadwick had done with 48 Variations back in – gosh – 2017. Ensemble Plus Minus played McGuire’s double string trio Playground (2016-20), a work which trades off greater harmonic and instrumental colour for the more immediate pleasure of remorseless precision. The meshing of distinct but related material suggests an efficient approach to musical complexity, at odds with the admonishments for simplicity that usually accompanies “minimal” music and hints at why he may be considered unique (and overlooked): seeming to belong on a clearly defined turf that is yet shared with everyone and no-one.
[…] ascending, scale-like figures over a background wash of synthesiser tones. A Secret, heard at the Music We’d Like To Hear fest last month, is presented here with electronics acting as a background wash -the importance of that role should […]