I’ll be one of the performers of Dan Goren’s new group piece Sum Over Histories, as part of Music Orbit Showcase 3: 7.30pm on Wednesday 24 February 2010 at The Forge, 3–7 Delancey Street, Camden Town NW1 7NL. More info here – should be an interesting night of electroacoustic group improvisations and more. I’d tell you more but even I don’t know exactly what’s going to be happening.
What Was Music?
Thursday 18 February 2010
Rescreening: String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta)
Sunday 14 February 2010
When String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) was exhibited as part of Redrawing in 2008, I added a video component to it, as a structural gesture to the work’s origins, and acknowledgement that it was being exhibited in a show of visual art. Fiona Macdonald kindly made me a video of a blank, white screen, which played on a continuous loop in the room while my cheap Malaysian laptop sat on a shelf and performed the music.
When I was asked to play the Quartet at the Vibe Bar last month I was also asked if I had a copy of the video to go with it. Even though I didn’t, I said yes, figuring that (a) it surely couldn’t be that hard to make a video of flat, solid white and (b) however bad it turned out it couldn’t be worse than having some random VJ doodling crap all over the wall behind you while you’re trying to play some music.
As it turned out, (b) the lovely people at Music Orbit don’t pull that gratuitous VJ shit, and (a) about as time consuming and frustrating as I thought it might be. There’s a video button on my little digital camera, which I’d never switched on before. I balanced the camera on a stool, pointed it at a flat white panel on a door, and let it roll.
You’d think there’d be nothing simpler, but it took a few goes and some playing around with the settings before I got something slightly acceptable. The gloomy English skies of January didn’t help much either, and I got 10 minutes of fairly solid grey. I played this back on my computer and made a handheld video of the screen. After too much time messing about with the movie editor software that came free with the laptop I got the final product, a soft grey that complements the muted monchromaticism of the music.
As the resulting video is a remake of a pre-existing work (originally made for an exhibition about remakes), and is itself a video of a video, the title Rescreening seemed apt. The 10-minute duration of the Vibe Bar performance makes it an ideal fit for YouTube, where you can play it to your heart’s content.
Doppelgänger Blues
Wednesday 10 February 2010
Thanks to another one of those wacky mixups that keep happening to me, I found out that some people have been listening to my music on Last.fm, presumably by accident. By “some” I mean “fourteen”.
Enticed by the prospect of doubling the size of my audience, I took responsibility for my artist page and have now started uploading stuff there too. At first, under the “Similar Artists” tag on my page they listed Max Neuhaus and I was chuffed. Then they changed it to People Like Us and I was sad. Now they list a bunch of guys I’ve never heard of so I’m OK with sharing with you again.
There are only a few tracks up right now, but I’d like to put up some pieces I don’t have room for on my website. Will give you a heads-up when new material appears.
I met Tony Buck with a flashing red bike light stuck in my mouth outside the old Brisbane Museum.
Monday 8 February 2010
I met Tony Buck with a flashing red bike light stuck in my mouth outside the old Brisbane Museum (download, 23′24″, 23.43 MB, mp3)
Having set a neat little process in operation, I repeatedly find myself in the dilemma of whether or not to then break it in some way. It’s not a question of worrying about being ‘composerly’ enough, and I still find that there’s a lot to be said for letting the process do its work without further human intervention. In fact, it’s this disinclination to interfere that makes me wonder if I ought to do something to disrupt it. The question becomes one of how sounds can be heard when they become alienated from the system that produced them.
In November 2003 I wrote some simple scripts in a MIDI editor to generate a sequence of the most common cadences in Western harmony, each one continuing from where the last left off. Eventually, the sequence went through the entire circle of fifths, with every note in the octave being used as the tonic for every cadence. Rather than have this cycle repeat itself as infinitum, I made a retrograde inversion of the entire sequence, sending the whole thing back to where it started (despite it having gotten there already), only upside down.
I met Tony Buck with a flashing red bike light stuck in my mouth outside the old Brisbane Museum is performed on an organ which is very slowly going out of tune, with the higher notes gradually sliding down a semitone during the course of the piece, while the lower notes gradually slide up a semitone. To complement the sense of entropy, I patched in the cheap, nasty soundcard built into my computer and amplified the line noise (continued.)
Back in the rut. Lessons learned etc.
Tuesday 2 February 2010
Hopefully there’ll soon be some photos or videos to show from the gig last week. It was a fine evening, all round. Here’s a few things I learned from the experience, in roughly chronological order:
- On Windows XP: System Properties, Hardware, Device Manager, Disable Wireless Network Adapter. Nothing else seems to kill the bugger.
- How to make and edit a video on my laptop, sort of. (“Do you have a video to go with your piece?” Sure!)
- Always check that you haven’t been unplugged from the PA before you start playing.
- Switch off your phone before playing with audio technology.
- Even if the phone miraculously refrains from interfering with the audio signal, nothing can prevent you from unexpectedly receiving a text from Australia halfway through playing your piece.
Gig tomorrow + World Class Anxiety (Slight Return)
Wednesday 27 January 2010
No updates the last few days ’cause I’ve been busy preparing for tomorrow night’s gig. Also, I’ve been gradually upgrading all of the main website to the new design, in the hope that it, too, may soon be a World Class Facility like this bucket in Melbourne:
UK première: String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta)
Saturday 23 January 2010
I finally get off my bum and play some music in London. After wowing audiences in Melbourne, Paris, and Hobart, String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) finally gets a live performance locally.
It’s part of Music Orbit’s Vibe Bar series, this Thursday, 28 January*, 7.30pm at the Vibe Bar in The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. £7 on the door. The rest of the night includes performances by other string instruments, both real and imaginary, films, and more, probably. If you want to catch my act you better get there early.
* Yeah, I know it’s short notice. I just found out myself.
Filler By Proxy LXXVI: Poème Electronique
Tuesday 19 January 2010
Jodru at ANABlog went to see the virtual recreation of the Philips Pavilion from the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and has posted a fascinating summary of little-known aspects of the project.
The design of the pavilion, which housed a presentation of Edgar Varèse’s tape composition Poème Electronique, was attributed to Le Corbusier at the time. The title was in fact Le Corbusier’s idea: “I shall not create a pavilion, but a poème électronique. Everything will happen inside: sound, light, color, rhythm…” He then got Iannis Xenakis, his assistant, to design it for him.
At ANABlog you can see a photograph of the World Fair site, showing the size of the Philips Pavilion, compared to those of the USA and the USSR, along with surprising photographs of the pavilion other than the iconic image on the left. There are also more details about how Varèse tried to exploit the acoustic properties of the pavilion’s interior to the fullest, creating an immersive, spatialised sonic experience (and nixed Le Corbusier’s plans to lecture the audience over the top of his music.)
Plenty more goodies at the Virtual Electronic Poem site, including a Dutch documentary made at the time of the pavilion’s construction, and photographs of the other pavilions at the fair. There’s a lot of retro-futuristic architecture, but there are also the names: Atomium, the USSR, the Tobacco Pavilion, Kodak, Pan Am. Watch the film, and see the world in which the pavilion was built, and the fact that this all happened over a half a century ago really hits home. This temple to modernity was planned by hat-wearing men, built by workmen driving creaky lorries and spraying asbestos like it was whipped cream. It’s a future that never happened, but it’s amazing that it got as far as it did.
“…since they are dead are ghosts and as such inhabit the same world we do.” — John Cage
Monday 11 January 2010
Mystery Glass Pieces
Tuesday 5 January 2010
The rather wonderful Other Minds Archive has put up a concert by Philip Glass in San Jose from 1978:
This program include [sic] a number of pieces for organ, written in Glass’ trademark minimalist style, as well as a piece for orchestra and electronics.
You may have noticed that the wording of that sentence is a little bit slippery. The information page for this recording is of no real help, listing an “unidentified piece for orchestra and electronics” by Philip Glass, followed by four “unidentified pieces” for organ, also by Glass.
I find it hard to believe that the first piece is by Glass at all – in that style, for those instruments – so both what it is and who wrote it are mysteries to me. The organ pieces are obviously Glass: Music In Contrary Motion, “Bed” and “Knee Play 4″ from Einstein on the Beach, Fourth Series, Part 2 (aka Dance No.2), and, and….
What the hell is that second piece? None of the descriptions in the list of compositions on Glass’ website seem to fit. Is this a solo arrangement of a piece I’ve never heard, or some of his theatre music? It’s too cold to go out to the library, a few minutes’ googling was no help at all, and listening to free samples of likely candidates on Amazon drew a blank.
Here are excerpts from the two mystery pieces:
- unknown piece probably not by Philip Glass, halfway through its 24-minute duration
- unknown organ piece by Philip Glass, start of a 13-minute performance
I presume the organ is being played by Glass himself. Having grown up on his glossy studio productions from the 1980s, it’s sort of nice to hear him hitting all those bum notes here.
Ignorance achieves wonders.
Sunday 20 December 2009
I’d like to apologise for a fundamental error in my review of the Crumb Total Immersion day. I mistakenly referred to the composer as George Crumb throughout. George Crumb is, of course, the famous cartoonist. The composer’s name is Robert Crumb, as correctly identified by BBC Radio 3.
It’s good to see Radio 3 diligently pursuing its remit to “inform and educate the audience about music and culture”, although when you try to follow the BBC’s own link to its Radio 3 website it in fact takes to you BBC Three, a television station dedicated to programmes like Bashing Booze Birds and Britain’s Most Embarrassing Pets.
There seems to be a webmonkey at the Beeb who gets easily confused over names.
Total Immersion: George Crumb
Monday 14 December 2009
George Crumb turned eighty in October, and so was dragged across the Atlantic for the BBC to make a fuss of him for one day of the year. Actually, he probably came willingly, as the night concluded with what must be a rare concert of his orchestral music. He seemed pretty cheerful, seated up in the stalls doing that Rat Pack style double-pointing to the performers at the end of each piece.
I wrote a bit about Crumb’s music earlier in the year after hearing the Nash Ensemble perform it at the Proms:
Crumb’s music really needs to be heard live to appreciate it, not only for the theatrical elements of its performance, or for the spatial placement of sounds (more than once the musicians had to relocate from the stage to one of the balconies to achieve an elusive, distant quality to their sound), but for the subtlety and complexity of the sounds he specifies.
The Proms gig included Claire Booth singing Ancient Voices of Children, also played here by the Guildhall ensemble, with the soprano Anna Patalong (and a real, live boy this time), in between Joanna MacGregor playing the piano works A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 and Volume 1 of Makrokosmos.
The last time I heard Makrokosmos it was part of an ill-judged mix of music and visuals by Michael Kieran Harvey. Witnessing it performed again reminded me the extent to which Crumb’s music seems to be held together almost by the sheer force of his personality, and how dependent it is on musicians to hold the greater purpose of its disparate elements in focus. MacGregor’s performance was much less theatrical (or histrionic) than Harvey’s, but found and sustained the drama in the music.
The evening gig was a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra of Crumb’s orchestral music – in fact the only three mature orchestral works he has written – culminating in the massive Star-Child. Pure logistical difficulties aside, it seems clear why Crumb tends to keep his music on a more intimate scale. The often episodic nature of his music can be difficult for such a large group of musicians to follow without losing momentum.
The 1967 piece Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II) is a processional of varying sounds and textures produced by small, discrete groups within the orchestra, to the extent of moving some of the percussionists and brass players on, off, and across the stage in various configurations. In effect, Crumb was attempting to work with the orchestra to his usual scale, while taking advantage of the wider pallette of available sounds. The slow choreography of the musician’s movements added a theatrical, ritualistic aspect that was only slightly more awkward in reality than it doubtless was in the imagination.
A Haunted Landscape (1984) must be more successful in combining all the distinctive facets of Crumb’s music into a seamless whole, because I always remember it as being more conventional than it really is. On the other hand, Star-Child (1977) works hard to present a semblance of cohesiveness between its seven continuous sections. The piece is often referred to as Ivesian, and amongst the many parallels you could make out were the cosmic scope of the music, and its seemingly rough-hewn structure.
The entire 35 or so minutes is suspended from a repeated “music of the spheres” played by the string section throughout, oblivious to all the other goings-on; they form a separate orchestra, with their own conductor. The remaining sections of the orchestra, plus a truckload of extra percussion, half-a-dozen brass players in the balcony, a male speaking choir armed with handbells, and two children’s choirs, require between one and three conductors between them to keep everything together, depending on the music’s complexity. Oh, and there’s a Vox Clamans In Deserto recited antiphonally between a soprano and a trombonist.
Star-Child boldly reaches for profundity with its Latin texts and massed voices and bells, and for once Crumb uses the full force of the orchestra for emphatic, dramatic power. It’s an anomaly in Crumb’s canon, the way he uses brute force and awe to move his audience here, particularly in the apocalyptic middle sections. Thankfully his musical allusions never get too overt or too literary, but the piece is really left to stand or fall on the message Crumb wishes it to convey. The performance itself couldn’t be faulted, but in experiencing it I felt like I was witnessing an attempt to make manifest a grand vision best realised in the imagination, brought to life as best as one can.
Dumitrescu/Avram – Radical Amateurism (part 2)
Tuesday 1 December 2009
I have to admit I’m not crazy about the music of Iancu Dumitrescu, Horaţiu Rădulescu, or any of the other Romanian spectralist composers (and I’m sure someone will berate me for lumping those two names together in the same movement). It all has a general tendency towards the shrill and self-important. But a lot of people think it’s Very Important and love it very much, and who am I to doubt them? The week of Spectrum XXI concerts brought together local musicians, the Hyperion Ensemble from Romania and the Talea Ensemble from New York, all extremely capable musicians. That’s part of what makes the amateurism of the whole enterprise almost endearing.
Some of the amateurism was pardonable. The first thing you saw when approaching a Spectrum XXI concert was a bunch of musicians huddled around a rental van with Romanian plates smoking like chimneys (Ana-Maria Avram borrowed my friend’s lighter, and never gave it back). Then there was the trombonist at the final concert, taking snapshots of the audience with his digital camera after the show. And between each piece. And during the music, when he didn’t have anything to do.
Other aspects were less so: the first ten minutes of the first concert was spent messing around with the lighting. Trying to set an appropriate mood, Dumitrescu and a couple of other musicians eventually managed to turn out all the lights in the hall, before turning them all on again, one by one. The fears raised by the large number of world premieres announced in the programme were largely founded. Across the concert series it seemed that the strongest pieces were usually the oldest ones. Works like Dumitrescu’s percussion trio Multiples (VII) from 1972 displayed a unique and innovative approach to sonority, compositional method and structure. Many, but not all, of the new pieces sounded like little more than undifferentiated dabbling with a particular instrumental effect, with a focus on timbre at the expense of all other considerations.
These weaknesses were most obvious in Dumitrescu’s world premiere Sound Sculpture (II) for solo piano. Prefaced with a short talk by Avram explaining how difficult the piece is to play, it sounded uncannily like the fabled Three Discontinuous Movements by Rose Bob, as performed at its world premiere by Madame Berthe Trépat (Gold Medal, Grenoble): a long, tedious series of unconnected chords and clusters separated by elaborate pedalling gambits to filter the piano’s resonant overtones.
The notorious false starts were present and correct. The ensemble would begin, only to be halted by an aggrieved Dumitrescu a minute later, then try again. This behaviour wasn’t limited to his own music. His disrupted Avram’s world premiere of Telesma VII for percussion and electronics because he wasn’t happy with the sound mix, and wasted several minutes of everyone’s time futzing around with the faders, producing various distorted noises until he was satisfied.
The world premiere of Dumitrescu’s Infinity (II) for bass clarinet and ensemble lasted right up to the entrance of the bass clarinet itself, whereupon Dumitrescu broke off from conducting to engage clarinettist Tim Hodgkinson in a brief but vehement argument on stage, before storming out past the audience announcing that the performance was cancelled. The expression on the ring-in cellist’s face was priceless. A little while later Dumitrescu returned, then excused himself again to pace the courtyard for a few minutes more, finally coming back inside to conduct the next item on the programme.
At one point between pieces he gave an impassioned speech to the audience about the importance of creating new forms of expression, and that despite their limited funding he and his fellow musicians were forging the music of the future. This is the most pernicious aspect of Dumitrescu’s amateurism: the confusion of isolation with supremacy. Judging from the music and the attitude on display, his increasing exposure to the world has only entrenched his insularity within a growing circle of acolytes. Such insularity leaves an artist vulnerable to their greatest weaknesses, to which Dumitrescu is evidently succumbing and which he must address, unless he is content to remain nothing more than the figurehead of his own cult.
Dumitrescu/Avram – Radical Amateurism (part 1)
Wednesday 18 November 2009
It was hard to shake off the feeling that I was in the midst of a cult when attending last month’s Spectrum XXI series of concerts. Before and during the gigs, which were essentially a vehicle for the composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram, little things kept niggling at my consciousness.
Dumitrescu’s scrappy, free-hosted website welcoming you to “the great experimental composer’s home page” conjures up memories of Madame Berthe Trépat (Gold Medal, Grenoble) from Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. The programme announcement – on a different free-hosted website – makes the rather suprising promise of “World and UK premières by Dumitrescu, Avram, Diaz de Leon, Hodgkinson, Pape, Tsuda, Scelsi, Xenakis”, but in a bait-and-switch move favoured by many cults the actual gigs featured nothing by the last four composers. That’s OK though, because the link to the London programme from the main page doesn’t work.
If you look on the web for reviews of Dumitrescu’s work, you’ll probably first find panegyrics from Harry Halbreich and/or Ben Watson; two critics whose tastes tend to the cultish and whose praise tends to the fulsome. Watson himself was in the audience for a couple of the gigs, and occasionally stepped up front in his green suit and tennis shoes to recite some sound poetry to the faithful. This did not help to elucidate the music much.
More frequently, Ana-Maria Avram would introduce each piece in an attempt to convey to the punters just how important the music was, that they were about to hear. This well-intentioned but misplaced advocacy also brought back memories of Madame Berthe Trépat (Gold Medal, Grenoble), and her introduction to the stage by Valentin (“it represented for contemporary music one of the most profound innovations to which the composer, Madame Trépat, had given the name “prophetic syncretism.”)
As in Madame Trépat’s recital, there was a high proportion of world premieres: I count a whopping seventeen across the four London gigs in the programme, from a tour which had already been to Brussells and Paris. This doesn’t inspire confidence, not in either Dumitrescu’s or Avram’s quality control nor that all the performances will be as polished as they could be. In this and other ways, their enthusiasm would sometimes undermine their strengths as musicians.
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