Boring Like A Drill.

I’m getting Wandelweiser from all over. First Sheffield, then Bilbao and now St Petersburg. Intonema sent me a nice little package and it’s taken me too long to write about it. There’s a Michael Pisaro disc I want to discuss a bit later, but my attention was first taken by a new release of Stefan Thut’s music.

Again, pretty much everything I’ve heard by Thut is from the Wandelweiser und so weiter box set Another Timbre released a few years back. un/even and one is a work Thut first performed and recorded with an ensemble in St Petersburg last June. At first, it seems a type of performance art, a theatrical activity whose fugitive sounds have been caught on tape as with the recent recording of Manfred Werder’s 2015/3. Cardboard boxes are being shifted, manipulated. The effect is reminiscent of some of James Saunders’ scores which call for scripted activities with sheets of paper or found objects, a sonic arte povera. The plot thickens as these sounds are coloured with musical instruments: saxophone, violin, cello, bowed guitar. With no visual cues to reveal the theatrical elements, sounds emerge, accumulate and fade as though produced by a slow but powerful force of nature. This sense of organic process, and the feeling of sourcelessness given to the sounds, evoke a feeling reminiscent of John Cage’s last works.

Thut’s piece takes this musical idea into a weird, ambiguous realm with his use of electronics. The cardboard and other sounds are recorded and played back through a small speaker attached to the largest box. The sounds blur between live and recorded, instrument and object, with an attenuated rumble. Any clear sense of activity, cause and effect is lost, leaving us with a mysterious, unknowable music. It’s one of the richer, dirtier examples I’ve heard from the Wandelweiser school and recommended for those who worry about this music getting too precious and ethereal.

The most delightful surprise so far from this package has been the CD credited to Songs, a Berlin-based quartet of composers and musicians. 1 & 2 features two compositions by the Australian trombonist Rishin Singh, who I haven’t heard before. I have heard and enjoyed the composer Catherine Lamb, who plays viola and sings here, so I put the disc on. The first piece, Six Scenes of Boredom, features a trio playing slow, almost quaint chord changes, occasionally enlightened by a female voice singing brief, pithy phrases. There’s an air of eccentric decay that’s quite English in character. I mean it as a compliment when I say it would fit nicely on a 1970s LP released on the Obscure label.

The real revelation here is Three Lives, a work almost half an hour in length for two female voices, bass clarinet and trombone. Long held tones, very little movement in pitch from one breath to the next. It feels like a single reflective moment, frozen in time. Strangely, any development in melody goes almost unnoticed when I listen, as though it were a lesser concern, until one quiet but significant shift. The two voices, each apparently untrained, sing as though a single voice echoed or multiplied. Clarinet and trombone play beautifully together, the latter almost unnoticeable, perceived only as a soft echo. In contrast to this stillness, the recording makes no attempt to conceal blemishes. The recording is obviously live, with faint background sounds audible, locating the music in a place and time. Against this background, four musicians briefly hold time in suspense.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Rishin Singh, Songs, Stefan Thut
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Managed to make it to the latest Kammer Klang gig at Cafe Oto (it’s available in streaming audio for the next few weeks). For years they’ve been putting on regular nights featuring a clash of eclectic genres, mixing High Art Modern Music with improvisation, live electronic performance, pop etc. It’s a neat combination which manages to avoid labouring a theoretical point or trying to force one genre to somehow validate another. The big events this evening were the performance of Michael Finnissy’s chamber violin concerto “above earth’s shadow…” and a live electronic set by John Wall.

I just read a statement by Peter Rehberg that “laptop music stopped being interesting when the computers stopped crashing”. It’s a stupid, sentimental thing to say, up there with saying Hendrix wasn’t so great because he used effects pedals. I’ve been to a number of Wall’s gigs now, all improvised sets with his laptop and superb examples of what a devastating sonic and compositional tool the small computer can be when in the right hands. I’ve always been impressed by the way he holds in suspense the conflicting demands his music makes: the free-ranging spontaneity of sounds, an intense technical focus on details and a constant awareness of an overall compositional shape.

The Kammer Klang night was unusual in that Wall started with one of his ‘fixed’ compositions, Cphon from 2005, followed immediately by an improvisation. (The two are played separately in the radio broadcast.) In Cphon the sounds leak out as though under some pressurised constraint, with isolated sounds in narrow frequency ranges – often very high – and occasional brief activity slipping through thin, sustained pitches. This sound-world steadily mutates over time, revealing more depth and detail but still with everything kept on a short leash throughout, allowing the sounds to be intimately revealed without ever being fully released to let rip in a sensory outburst.

The following improvisation was immediately noticeable for the change in sonic materials but with no easily noticeable enlargement of possibilities permitted by the intervening decade of technological advances. The sounds became wider in range, producing an inexhaustible variety of tones and colours throughout the piece. Seemingly influenced by Cphon, a similar attitude of restraint was applied, extending and elaborating on the previous work instead of drawing an obvious contrast.

Making music live is always very different from working with a recording, whether on paper or on tape. There’s a theatrical element, and a social element which must always be addressed to be sure that the music has gotten over with the punters. Wall perhaps minimises this by typically sitting behind the audience and focusing on the music coming from the PA. In any case, listening back to the radio broadcast I’m surprised at how well it works as a recording, with its own musical internal logic and free of the unspoken dictates of entertaining a room full of people with booze.

Earlier in the night, violinist Oscar Perks with an ensemble conducted by Mark Knoop did justice to Michael Finnissy’s “above earth’s shadow…”. Finnissy is one of Britain’s foremost living composers; he turns 70 this year so the performance was a fitting tribute. Although the piece is now over 30 years old, this seems to have been only the third time it has been played in the UK, so it may as well be new to us. In 2012 the Proms held a matinee concert in Cadogan Hall which included the British premiere of his 2nd Piano Concerto, written some 35 years earlier. I think Finnissy has had one piece played at the Proms since then. For this year, the usually anniversary-happy Proms have programmed sweet F. A.

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Tags: John Wall, Michael Finnissy
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I’ve been listening to a lot of music which I should talk about, both live and on CD. The CDs will come up later; for starters I’ve been thinking about this concert at the BBC Studios in Maida Vale a couple of weeks ago.

Brett Dean was conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra on a programme of modern Australian composers. It’s the type of programme I’d normally shy away from – because of, not despite, being Australian and having heard concerts organised on the same premise back home. When a large institution is involved – an orchestra, a national broadcaster – things usually attempt to be overly safe and overly “representative”. The latter principle manifests itself in trying to cram in a number of slighter, lesser works by a broad variety of composers which don’t really gel together. Like new music in the UK, Australian music in Australia still needs to defend its own small space.

Regardless of any national slant, Dean’s programme of works was beautifully focussed, illuminating a particular thread of musical thought found in a group of diverse Australian composers working today. The introduction to the programme notes made this intent clear, to look beyond the customary identification of Australian art with the unique nature and landscape it inhabits. More importantly, the concert portrayed Australian music as being distinguished by an engagement with the rest of the world, building an increasingly complex dialogue with other cultures.

For a long time, the question of identity in Australian art was often framed as a debate between two sides, pro- and anti-. On one side, “internationalists” would deride parochialism (and imitate any new avant-garde trends in Europe and America) while “nationalists” would chauvinistically promote a local vernacular (and imitate one particular trend in Europe and America). It’s a mindset that’s hard to shake off, particularly if you make decisions for a funding body.

The concert opened with one older work, Richard Meale’s Clouds Now and Then from 1969. It’s a significant work, with its musical language derived from Messiaen and its static, contemplative form inspired by Basho’s poetry. Incorporating ideas from Europe and Japan, it floats between worlds rather than seeking dependence on one or the other. This give-and-take continued through the concert, both musically and biographically. Some of the composers – Thomas Meadowcroft, Anthony Pateras, Lisa Ilean – now live in London or Germany, while Georges Lentz was born in Luxembourg and moved to Australia in his twenties.

Ilean’s Land’s End drew upon a similar sound-world to Meale, enhanced with microtones. Meadowcroft’s Peacemaker Tattoo and Dean’s own Engelsflügel confronted European composers directly, Mahler and Brahms respectively. With Dean, it was a passionate exploration of musical ideas; with Meadowcroft, a modest, somewhat deflating side-step, equal parts deference and aversion. Lentz’s Caeli enarrant… III is an eclectic procession of disparate elements unified by the composer’s personal spiritual vision, combining Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, astronomy, serialism, chance and silence.

Both Meadowcroft and Pateras in his violin concerto Immediata appeared as performers, using an open-reel tape deck to record, play back and manipulate sounds in real time. (I’m an old friend of Pateras so I’ll try not to get too enthusiastic.) Immediata was built out of an eclectic, disruptive improvisation, elaborated by divergent combinations of instruments. Pateras recorded soloist Thomas Gould’s amplified violin and proceeded to speed, slow, warp and distort the sounds, at times going off into cadenzas of his own, in a manner reminiscent of the electronic interpolations of Varèse’s Déserts. There’s a tension between the music that’s fixed and that’s ephemeral, between the notated and improvised both in origin and performance, and of preservation and loss where, perversely, the tape recording is discarded and the piece must persist through performance of the written score.

I think BBC Radio 3 expects to broadcast this concert in August this year.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Brett Dean, Georges Lentz, Lisa Illean, Richard Meale, Thomas Meadowcroft
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You get a funny crowd at Wigmore Hall on a Saturday night. Some punters come just because it’s am awfully nice venue and they fancy an evening of refined entertainment. There was a slight but steady rate of attrition throughout Apartment House’s programme. The visiting American and her English hosts in my row were bemused at first but in the end seemed to enjoy it enough.

At least they didn’t have to deal with any stereotypical “ugly modern music”; nor did they have to appreciate any efforts by “accessible” contemporary composers which they could say were nice enough but not as good as the real 19th century thing. The gig started in a puzzling enough fashion, with the première of Luiz Henrique Yudo’s 2007 piece A QUARTET FOR CLAUDE MOLLET. Like the Yudo piece I heard at the last Apartment House gig, it’s a grid of not-quite-exactly-repeating figures. This time, a string-quartet see-sawed back and forth between notes, gently but obstinately. The patterns seemed to change a bit between pauses. Probably. Later in the evening, another Yudo piece, A QUARTET FOR FRANÇOIS MORELLET from 2012, apparently made use of chance and presented a smoothly shifting web of overlapping chords.

This is why I keep writing about these guys; they play stuff I’m interested in hearing for myself. There’s the emphasis on music as an artform, in which technique (both in composition and performance) is not an end in itself but a means to eliciting a profound response in the listener without appeals to literature or drama. There is the element of discovery and of rediscovery. Apart from giving first hearings to the two Yudo pieces, each several years old, the programme included three other world premières and a couple of older, obscure works. The older pieces, by Henning Christiansen and John White, were redolent of the cultural context in which they were created, Fluxus and the Scratch Orchestra, respectively. Both represent schools of composition too often dismissed today as historical relics, fit for discussion but not to be experienced.

Christiansen’s Modeller were written in the mid-1960s but not performed in Britain until now. They seem strangely ahead of their time: short fragments, provocatively simple. Mostly performed by a solo pianist, with occasional interruptions from the strings, harmonium and percussion near the end. One part, of unadorned oscillating thirds, effectively anticipated Philip Glass’ piano music by 20 years. The familiarity was an odd sensation, but that didn’t last long. The Modeller never stayed around long enough for the listener to get fully comfortable. At the end, the ensemble repeated an ascending arpeggio in unison, whether by accident or design imitating the beginning of the Blue Danube Waltz without ever progressing, with an increasing sense of finality.

White’s Newspaper Reading Machine (circa 1971) amused my neighbours, being pretty much what the title implies. Any sense of the piece being a dadaist stunt was tempered by a musical system clearly underpinning the performance. They also liked Egidija Medekšaitė’s Pratiksha. The new works all suggested a common heritage of assimilating the more vital musical philosophies from the last century and synthesising them into something different. The use of systems, of chance, awareness of visual arts, of music as a social activity, the rejection of dogmatic allegiance to a particular system of organising pitch and harmony, all appeared in various guises.

I’d never heard anything by Martin Arnold before. The way people were talking about him before the gig suggested that I’d been missing out. They were right. His new piece Stain Ballad is incredible; striking in its mysterious ambiguity, fragile but indelible. The music shared an aesthetic that Morton Feldman aspired to, of “having mood” without being “in a mood”. As I typed this, Philip Thomas, the pianist that night just tweeted he was listening back to the piece and is “in tears… fresh, complex, meandering, intricate, lovely.” Looking back, I’ll still remember this piece as one of the highlights of the year.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Egidija Medekšaitė, Henning Christiansen, John White, Luiz Henrique Yudo, Martin Arnold
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Looking very Goth, something else I received in the swag from Nueni Records. I’ve only heard a couple of pieces by Bryan Eubanks before, both at last year’s Cut And Splice festival. Both were kind of reminiscent of Alvin Lucier. This is not.

The Bornholmer Suite is a set of 50 pieces, each one minute long. The music is made from electronic feedback on a circuit board. According to Eubanks, each configuration of the circuit is left alone to sound for one minute, with “slight changes” made between each piece. As a composer who has worked a lot with feedback circuits of different types over the years, the types of sound were immediately familiar. I’m too close to this type of music so I can’t review it dispassionately; it just flags up all sorts of problems I have when working with this medium.

Feedback can produce a wealth of detailed sounds, but it’s hard to figure out what to do with them. It gets too easy to turn out sound and become too absorbed in the process of making it, or just get caught up in a bunch of different timbres without considering them as part of a coherent musical experience for the listener. With The Bornholmer Suite Eubanks seems to be attempting a way out of this dilemma by presenting the set of pieces as an objective, experimental process. Each configuration gets one minute, with no privileging of material. Each piece is presumably a modification of the preceding circuit. It carries a type of logic, but it does feel a bit like Eubanks is dodging the whole question of how the Suite may be considered as music.

Most of the feedback circuits produce a sound that remains fairly constant, with little sense that they would show any greater variation, instability or mutability if left for a longer period of time. This kills any feeling of momentum as the number of pieces rack up. My personal prejudices kicked in a few times when certain sounds cropped up that I’d produced in the past and instinctively rejected. I’d like to know more about how simple the circuit is. The CD really presents a dilemma. Do you hear it as a disconnected catalogue of technical exercises, or as a suite of etudes elaborating on a common theme?

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bryan Eubanks
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More text scores and more original Wandelweiser, from Manfred Werder. For the past ten years Werder has been composing music in which the score consists of a found text object, a quote from a poem or from philosophy. Nueni Records from Bilbao has just released a first recording of one of the most recent in the series, 2015/3. The music is actualized by Regler, the duo of Mattin and Anders Bryngelsson. It seems that Werder composed the piece for them.

The text is from Walter Benjamin’s essay “One-way Street, Halt For Not More Than Three Cabs”:

through excessive fatigue i had thrown myself on my bed in my clothes in the brightly-lit room, and had at once, for a few seconds, fallen asleep

The CD comes with no sleeve notes, but the quote (and thus the score) is printed on the front cover. We get as much information as the musicians did, with no post-facto explanation. Already, we’re dealing with appropriation as art: a common enough practice in visual art but still unfamiliar to music. (Sampling and quotation are forms of collage and a different matter.) We’ve all heard music inspired by philosophy but Werder’s piece is philosophy, even though it might be through some strange, cannibalistic understanding of the concept.

I’ve heard a couple of other pieces from Werder’s series, as part of the cryptic Rosetta Stone Wandelweiser und so weiter released by Another Timbre. There’s an excerpt from 2011/4 on Youtube. There’s the foregrounding of silence and ambient sound, with the musicians adding light and shade.

Apparently art is supposed to make us perceive things differently, but then there is art where we have to change our ways of perception before we can recognise it for what it is. This situation isn’t the exclusive preserve of the avant-garde. We can’t look at, for example, mediaeval woodcuts and see what their creators and intended audience saw in them, except through intellectual exertion. Regler’s actualisation of 2015/3 is something we almost cannot hear, even if we listen, even if we register the sounds.

The two photos inside the CD cover, once again, reveal everything and explain nothing. They reinforce the unmistakeable impression you get when you first play the CD. Mattin and Bryngelsson take a nakedly literal approach to the score: they set up their equipment in their studio then fall, or try to fall, asleep. Any unintentional sounds that can be heard sound truly accidental. The musicians may be engaging with the score but they are evidently, resolutely refusing to engage with the listener.

The CD is ostensibly silent, in the way that a performance of Cage’s 4’33” is. But there are disruptions (the dynamic range on this recording is very wide) and any musical silence here is obviously the result of necessary activity in actualising the score. The extreme quiet in this performance is harsh, and a provocation. Are we listening to it the right way if we feel provoked?

Mattin, at least, has a reputation for provocation. In 2004 I witnessed him give one of the best silent concerts I’ve heard.

I thought I’d heard the piece after playing it once. Then I played it again and realised I’d been listening to something else. The distant, muffled sound of sawing wasn’t there. It must have been a neighbour doing some repairs. The very faint sound of stacking dishes is, I think, on the disc but I’d rather play the disc again another time than rewind to find out.

This piece can’t be listened to as a field recording or a version of 4’33”. It’s a performance with an uncompromising objectivity, much in the way that recordings of avant-garde music from the 1950s and 60s sound forcefully radical today when compared to more polished recent performances, which can often seem too aestheticised in comparison.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Manfred Werder, Regler
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A few months ago I noticed the change in Jürg Frey’s music in recent years, when discussing two contrasting but very fine albums of his earlier and later music. A similar impression was made by the concert of his 2nd and 3rd string quartets by the Quatuor Bozzini in Huddersfield last November: that Frey is moving away from ideas and towards music. Frey has long been associated with the Wandelweiser collective, but his recent music has been compromising the “purity” Wandelweiser’s reverence for silence. With this supposed loss of aesthetic purity, Frey has embraced a purity of sound.

After releasing the quietly beautiful Grizzana album, Another Timbre released a CD of Philip Thomas playing Frey’s recent piano music at the end of last year. I previously wrote of his third string quartet that Frey was joining Morton Feldman as a fellow master of non-functional harmony, adapting some of the more rhetorical elements of classical and romantic music, but piecemeal, on his own terms and his own ends. In this piano music, most of it composed between 2010 and 2014, there is a similar sense of exploration, without any perceived goal, to that found in Feldman’s “middle period” before he discovered the tenuous equilibrium found in repeating patterns.

At that time, Feldman was also moving away from abstraction and responding to the need to create melodies (“big Puccini-like melodies”). An interview on the Another Timbre website shows Frey seeking a common solace in a material understanding of music, and in negotiating the paradoxes that arise when wanting to compose without disturbing the music’s material.

When composing for the piano, the notion of harmony is more prominent – although we know all the (lovely) extended techniques that have been developed for the piano, to make it sound unlike a piano. But yes, the piano remains the instrument to represent harmony…. When I write for piano, I shouldn’t rely on the piano itself, but on the composition. The piano gives single notes, dyads and chords too easily. Also, if I write consonant dyads, it could suddenly sound wrong, ironic, like a quotation rather than the real sound. In this context to compose means to build a basic confidence in the clear and restricted material that you are working with.

The shorter pieces have a meditative quality, alternating between pedal tones and chords. The longer pieces take on a resemblance to a journey through a succession of musical terrains. Sometimes progress is slow, tentative, with long periods stranded in one particular harmony or register, before unexpectedly moving on. It becomes clear that the journey is its own destination. If there is a structure underneath it all, Frey does his best to conceal or disrupt it or render it irrelevant to the listener.

The album begins with a much older piece, the brief In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew from 1993, with a tonal palette that anticipates the later works. Has Frey allowed a space for emotional expression in his new music, however abstracted? It’s interesting that when philosophy is raised in the interview, he demurs but admits that he feels “a closeness” to Deleuze and Spinoza, two Western thinkers who tried to reason without a dichotomy between mind and body.

The piano is close-miked on this CD, focussing on the grain of the instrument’s sounds. Thomas’ playing is softly-spoken but full-voiced – well suited to the quiet but indomitable character marking out a trail through an empty expanse, as in the longest piece on the album. It’s titled Pianist, Alone (2); a title which seems nakedly descriptive at first but takes on a narrative aspect after hearing it. This time, the protagonist is a little more experienced.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jürg Frey
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Other than hearing a performance of his piece wyoming snow on the radio last year, I really knew nothing about Joseph Kudirka before receiving this new CD in the mail.

That performance of wyoming snow was for multitracked cello, played by Anton Lukoszevieze. The same piece appears twice again on the Beauty and Industry CD, but played by different ensembles. Lukoszevieze is the founder of the ensemble Apartment House, which has done so much lately to present new and neglected music. This disc dedicated to Kudirka’s music is probably the latest.

As previously implied, Kudirka writes pieces open to interpretation and several of them are played two or three times during the course of the disc. An informative interview on the Another Timbre site reveals that, although his scores are typically “open”, Kudirka is leery of the term “text score” and his musical education was grounded in playing and instrument before composition became a major concern. (“I’m great at playing music that I hate.”) He’s another one of the generation of composers taught by James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts, although he did not appear on the rather wonderful and surprising West Coast Soundings album I reviewed in 2014.

The scores for the pieces played here range from introspective variations on George Brecht’s terse Fluxus scores, to general instructions determining the form, structure and materials for the piece, to music notation that leaves unspoken questions of interpretation, instrumentation and intonation. They can also be seen on the Another Timbre web site, with audio excerpts.

The music reflects Kudirka’s background as a performer. The text scores allow a music structure and character to emerge through the musicians’ choices. In that respect they ingeniously operate in a manner similar to early Feldman or late Cage, but in a looser and more generalised way. It can’t be entirely a coincidence that this music shares a similarly slow and soft atmosphere.

When I think of other text scores (good ones) they seem to concentrate on setting into motion an overall process governed by a set of conditions, either internal like Aus den sieben Tagen or external, like Cardew’s Paragraph 7 or pieces by James Saunders. Kudirka’s seem unusual in that they focus on defining and arranging details. There’s an elegance to their simplicity, and the music emerges fully defined and subtle. The repeated takes on this disc shows that each piece has depth beyond an interest in compositional technique.

Repeated listenings reveal an unexpected variety. It’s a nicely-balanced selection of works: 14 tracks in a little over 50 minutes. Enough to be absorbed by without getting entirely lost. Some pieces are barely 30 seconds; the longest reaches beyond 8 minutes. The small scale allows attention to details and gestures. Pieces like Grey and an orchestral fantasy have a sombre formality compared to the sustained tones of Beauty and Industry or the more polychromatic wyoming snow.

A large part of this is down to Apartment House musicians, who play with great sensitivity and fidelity to the score. On each track they present interpretations which are distinctive without needing to resort to extremes, setting a consistent mood that still shifts in shading from one piece to the next.

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Tags: Joseph Kudirka
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Been listening a lot to two new CDs on Another Timbre: a new album of Jürg Frey’s piano music played by Philip Thomas, and a collection of pieces by Joseph Kudirka played by Apartment House. I need to talk about these soon but I’ve got left over business from the London Contemporary Music Festival last month. It was an incredible programme that mixed old and new, familiar and obscure in a way that took risks simply by being such an eclectic jumble of different practices and backgrounds: a true portrait of the state of “contemporary music” at the start of a century that still hasn’t a defined identity.

A long blog post by Lawrence Dunn gives an excellent analysis of many events from the LCMF, as well as the La Monte Young and other gigs at Huddersfield. (Dunn also discusses Philip Thomas playing Frey’s piano music live.) The latter part of his post goes into detail about the LCMF night “To a new definition of opera”, which still strikes me as the stand-out event in the programme. The first half of Tim Parkinson’s Time With People, which I’ve talked about before, re-appeared and its stage detritus persisted amongst the audience throughout the whole programme.

The evening ended with Stockhausen’s Pietà finally getting played in this country – a prime example of his later music being quite mad and quite wonderful. It began by plunging the audience into the verbal and visual assault of Ryan Trecartin’s video Center Jenny. Dunn’s blog links to the video and makes the excellent observation that this work connects to the legacy of Robert Ashley’s operas, in a deep and disturbing way. I can’t really agree with Dunn’s feeling that it’s the work of “the worst sort of antifeminist”. It seemed more to me that the video is about misogyny than of it, or worse, that it dispassionately picks up one unsavoury aspect of current social anxieties which, salvaged as a remnant in a post-apocalyptic future, is arbitrarily selected as the model for a future society. It could have been racism, but that’s too heavy now. The gender and social roles depicted in US sorority life are still presented as cheerfully benign, and exist in a curious cultural vacuum: through movies and TV they are familiar to everyone around the world, but unlike McDonald’s or basketball they remain utterly alien to even the most pro-American Anglophone. The average age of the audience on this night was noticeably older, and they generally seemed to find Center Jenny amusing.

I presume the older people were an equal mix of Stockhausen fans and Pound fans. The night was my chance to hear Ezra Pound’s music played live, with a potted version of his opera Le Testament de Villon played for the first time in the UK in its “un-revised” phrasing. Pound’s music is seldom heard and even when scholars of Pound the poet bring it up there’s much lip service and little critical discussion. It tends to get pigeonholed as a passing phase, one of the less harmful of his many eccentricities. On paper, it has often been dismissed as crude and amateurish: irregular meters and phrasing, no pauses, introductions or conclusions, any polyphony usually an accompanying instrument moving in parallel with the voice. It’s clear he set Villon’s words line by line to melody, determined by the intonation of a speaking voice. Pound himself suggested that the opera was instigated by the impossibility of satisfactorily translating Villon into English.

One critic has sniffed that the opera is “less a foray into modernism and more a half-baked retreat into pre-operatic archaism” and so misses the point. It’s of a piece with much of Pound’s poetry to that time, of reclaiming and revitalising old cultural forms, “making it new”. “Early music” as it is appreciated now was barely known in 1920s and Pound had advocated for it before (going as far as to buy a clavichord from Arnold Dolmetsch in 1915, despite not knowing how to play it) and after (microfilming unpublished Vivaldi manuscripts in the 1930s).

Those strange, meandering vocal lines of irregular length are now familiar to audiences through the resemblance to plainchant, albeit with a minimal accompaniment (often just solo violin) and a strange, not-quite-modal intonation. The baritone Robert Gildon and mezzo Lore Lixenberg sang without the vibrato that would have been hard to expunge in Pound’s lifetime. The piece begins with an overture on solo cornet de dessus (think a valveless trumpet the size of an alphorn), the interludes are brief, spare taps on a kettle drum. When Virgil Thomson heard it he presciently noted that “it bore family resemblances unmistakable to the Socrate of Satie” – another overlooked masterwork by a composer yet to be appreciated. The pared-down simplicity of the opera recalls John Cage’s reduction of Socrate, but his Cheap Imitation was written over 40 years later. The haunting motet at the end of the opera carries the same blurring of familiar and strange, in the same manner of Cage’s arrangements of 18th Century American hymns – achieved, again, by erasing. Cage’s last operas also reduce the elements of opera to the barest essentials. I haven’t read anything that suggests Cage was knowledgeable about Pound as a composer.

The LCMF programme specifically links the Pound and the Stockhausen Pietà as “two neglected masterpieces of modernism”. When Stockhausen died I connected him to Pound in terms of how much their work remains misunderstood and will probably stay that way. The LCMF concert felt like a first step for treating Pound’s music as more than a curiosity.

Filed under: Film, Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ezra Pound
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I’ve spent the last three nights at the London Contemporary Music Festival and plan to spend the next four there, too. No time to put any of these thoughts into a coherent form, so this will have to do.

It’s an incredibly ambitious programme, with an eclectic array of big names and obscurities. The venue’s pretty cool and allows for acts to follow each other pretty much immediately without longueurs.

Friday night didn’t come off. Very short sets for live electronic musicians Tom Mudd and John Wall didn’t allow them enough time to get going. Other pieces tended to be awkward, self-conscious exercises in performance art, which was a bit of a downer. Sets by Shelley Parker and Visionist suffered from being dance music freeze-dried as art.

Saturday was great, focusing on composers who are from or passed through California. Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick each got to noodle around and soak up the acclaim they deserve. Some old favourites (Cowell, Cage), a couple of twists (Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study No. 2, Otis O’Solomon reciting poetry). The highlight was the UK premiere of Catherine Lamb’s duo for bassoongrand bass recorder and (microtonally-intoned) cello, Frames.

It was good to hear Maggie Payne getting some exposure, alongside the Carl Stone piece. I’m still not sure exactly what the fuss is about John Luther Adams.

The space is huge, benches and standing room. There is a cash bar in the adjoining room. Not everything played (e.g. Lamb) is amplified. Everyone keeps quiet and pays attention. Ellen Fullman’s long string instrument was set up in advance, stretching diagonally across the floor. Staff and punters do a sterling job of keeping anyone from falling into it.

Wednesday started with Ellen Fullman premiering a new work, The Watch Reprise. Copies of the score are dotted along the floor for reference as she walks back and forth playing the strings. The tuning system gets progressively crazier; in this cavernous room the bass sub-harmonics come out particularly strong.

Bryn Harrison’s Repetitions in Extended Time is another disorientating labyrinth of interweaving patterns. For forty-five minutes the instruments act as if alone, yet always rubbing up against each other in a passive-aggressive state of forced co-existence. Imagine a late Feldman piece, or the opening of Haas’ in vain, boiled down into an absurdist drama.

Tim Etchells repeats pithy phrases, turning them over like Wittgenstein overhearing gossip on a bus, while Aisha Orazbayeva taps and scrapes away at her violin. This is dumb, I think. But it’s an improvisation, of sorts, I remind myself. A weird kind of improvisation, so I kind of like it. The violin sounds nice, even though it’s making the most meagre of gestures. Maybe the words mean more by the sounds than by what they say, too. I try to listen to it differently, put them together. I’ll need to hear it again.

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Part One is here. If you want a better of what was actually happening at the HCMF this year, go over to 5:4 for detailed reviews of practically everything.

I arrived in Huddersfield just in time to hear the Quatuor Bozzini play Jürg Frey’s second and third string quartets. Both nearly half-an-hour long, the second quartet was composed over the turn of the century, the third a decade later. The second quartet sustains a constant mood and method – hushed, isolated chords are played in unison, with recurring harmonies partially obscured by the whispering of the bows against the strings. We’re back in the musical world of toying with extremes.

The third quartet reveals a clear and immediate contrast, with Frey’s recent style. It’s almost “classical music”, albeit on its own terms, within a very attenuated space. Isolated chords appear again, but speaking more fully. More prevalent are the passages of harmonic sequences. Some counterpoint emerges, through long-held notes sustained over an accompaniment of alternating chords. There is phrasing and variations in dynamics, from soft to very soft. Every now and then, a long-held chord acts like a cadence by means of its simple consistency, with tiny variations in timbre and balance becoming perceptible. All this variety suggests a teleology, a functional structure, but the start and the end sound arbitrary – as indeed does all of the middle. Like Morton Feldman, Frey has become a master of non-functional harmony.

Frey’s found a path of moderation away from some of the extremes of his earlier music. Moderation is too often seen as a bad thing in itself, a deviation from a pure ideal*. The night after hearing Jakob Ullmann’s solo IV, I was at the premiere of his 90-minute sort-of concerto la segunda canción del ángel desaparecido. Once again, I find myself wondering if I’m listening to this the right way. It’s always disturbing when an artist delivers you something other than what you expect. Hearing Ullman’s Son Imaginaire III at Huddersfield a couple of years ago was a concert-going experience that still looms large in my memory. la segunda canción was a surprising moderation of his usual aesthetic, albeit again within a narrow range. Two percussionists did a superb job of adding detail and texture without disrupting the typically fragile surface of Ullmann’s music. Even more surprising was the distinct layering of different dynamics, with a trio of winds (bassoon, basset horn, flute) sounding out above the string quintet. For Ullmann, it was almost strident. The strings would periodically burst into soft, agitated chatter.

I had problems listening to this. The difference in dynamics seemed to separate out the winds and strings too much, with little interplay between the two groups (which were also physically separated, horizontally and vertically). Too often the strings sounded like accompaniment, and when the winds were silent the material they had to play increasingly sounded repetitive and dull. It may have been just because I was hoping to hear something else, more of what I was used to. Again, I got worried I was listening the wrong way.

* What’s really disturbing is an apparent narrowing of aesthetic parameters, where approaching an extreme seems like the only way out of the current impasse. Moving away from an extreme comes across as a pulled punch, like the more famous minimalist composers who were unable to develop their signature style beyond diluting it. Listening to the more “conventional” compositions at the HCMF, there’s a general sense of being trapped where expansion beyond the new seems to be just like a return to the old. (Might expand on this later.**)

** This paragraph was jotted down after a few quick whiskies between gigs, as fortification against the weather.

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First night in Huddersfield for the HCMF I went to the first UK performance of La Monte Young’s The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (1962), which seems a good place to start as a point of reference; not just for the music prominently featured throughout the festival, but also an overt attempt to create an idealised context for reception of such music. As well as the incense and the specially prepared lighting by Marian Zazeela, there were instructions for audience behaviour (no applause) and a sheaf of briefing notes with extensive descriptions of the music, related pieces of music and the thinking behind such music. There wasn’t time to read all the notes before the music started but luckily we weren’t set a test on it afterwards. You could possibly read the notes while the music played although I expect this would be frowned upon.

Those elements that Young introduced into modern music – stasis, non-linear time, a deep awareness of acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena – reappeared throughout the festival this year. With it, the need for different ways of listening arise. Young addresses this explicitly, while other composers raise it in less direct, but not necessarily more subtle ways.

The Huddersfield punters encountered musical extremes. The premiere of Jakob Ullmann’s solo IV for double bass was almost inaudible, by design. Almost like an Onkyo performance, a thirty-minute silence with only the lightest of inflections, allowing a sublime subtlety to emerge, of the type that John Cage admired in Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings. All through the trip I wondered if my ears were working right, or if my brain was getting in the way. Can the people up the back hear anything at all? Bassist Dominic Lash ekes out each tiny sound with such care and tenderness, but does the whole thing come across as slightly precious? Of the half-dozen or so works of Ullmann’s music I’ve encountered, this seemed the one closest to relying on a conceptual basis over a musical one.

Later that same day I heard Zbigniew Karkowski’s Fluster for solo electric bass with electronic processing. Earplugs are offered to the punters, signs are posted warning it will be loud. It is. And piercing, or otherwise penetrating. Karkowski’s image seems so much like a caricature, pictured in the programme pointing a handgun, making loud, abrasive noise, railing against “bullshit”. Fluster forces the listener to confront three successive fronts of sound as brute force: a low bass that rattles the speakers, the listener, the building; a relentless blast of white noise; a shrill chatter and screech of high-pitched static. It all goes on for a while, but time has no function here other than to establish the sounds’ physical presence. Virtuoso bassist Kasper Toeplitz becomes increasingly agitated by the demands of executing such precise actions to produce seemingly indifferent noise. The crackle of distorting speaker cones and buzzing of roof beams must be part of the music but who knows for sure? There’s a welter of tiny details within the high-pitched noise, but how much of it is really there and how much of it just the ears struggling to keep up? Extreme loudness guarantees an immediate visceral shock which can soon fade, but Karkowski’s music is not so superficial. The real shock is that people haven’t yet worked out how they are meant to listen to it, or whether in fact they heard it at all, behind all the noise.

This post has already gone on longer than I expected about less than I wanted to say, so I’ll post the rest of it later.

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I got a shock when I first put on this album. It was kindly sent to me by the composer. I opened the package to see an album from Phill Niblock‘s Experimental Intermedia label, cover art by Niblock, sleeve notes by “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Knowing nothing about Waller, all signs pointed to music that would be right up my alley: minimal (if not ascetic), with an underlying logic readily perceptible (if not rigorous). I hit play on track 1 and got mugged by something unambiguously… pretty.

Two CDs, 21 brief compositions of new chamber music, all with the same shamelessly “romantic textures”, to quote from the sleeve notes. It’s relentless, as if the double-length playing time is meant to reassure you that the sweet, modal harmonies and melodic fragments are truly guileless. The avowed simplicity and directness of intention and execution for each piece would like to be seen as disarming, but it put me on my guard. It’s like one of those cultural games that Nabokov played in his novels: the more you know about the subject, the worse you get entangled in his snares.

Those sleeve notes open by describing Waller’s music as “a welcome and rare alternative to the tempo and noise of modern life…. Waller’s music convinces us by its honest emotion, which avoids any artifice that would dramatically pull us toward some effect.” As I listened to each piece I kept waiting for the angle to emerge, the conceptual scare quotes. It didn’t happen. The initial impulse is to compare the music to Howard Skempton’s, but there’s a tangible difference. Skempton also writes tonal or modal miniatures, but his music is reduced to the barest essentials. Waller’s music is clearly informed by the past few decades of “minimalist composers” and the “new tonality” but even in this restricted scale of composition there’s always a suggestion of something grander, a romantic excessiveness of expression.

It’s a dangerous aesthetic no-man’s-land in which Waller has staked out his musical territory, where artistic merit lives or dies by the sureness of the artist’s grip on prevailing aesthetic tastes. At this time such an enterprise seems so foolhardy that I kept my ears pricked for the slightest lapse of sincerity, some cultural or ironic distancing. Tyranny’s notes for each piece seem to invite a disingenuous reading: “I do feel the almost neo-Baroque sensation taking me back to my own trips across Italy.” “There seems to be a mixed emotion in this piece that hints at a troubled memory arising in the morning.” The word “uplifting” is used to describe at least two pieces. We would appear to have entered a post-postmodern aesthetic, of new sincerity.

Other reviews have described this album as gentle, poetic, lyrically beautiful. I found myself listening to music that teetered on a knife edge, threatening to slip at any moment from sweet clarity to trite sentimentality. The starkest moments are usually the most effective: the concluding “Arbitrage” pieces for solo clarinet and bass clarinet with gongs, for example. The Variations for Quintet with its canons and repetitions are pleasingly reminiscent of some of John Cage’s beguilingly blank music from the mid to late 1940s.

Of course, Cage at that time was struggling with finding his true compositional voice. Much like e. e. cummings, whose poetry Cage occasionally set to music, his attempts at disarming directness could sometimes lapse into fey affectation. This happens in some pieces in this collection, such as the piano solo Pasticcio per meno è più, which sounds a little ingratiating. It will be interesting to hear how Waller’s music develops and whether increased confidence in his craft will make his music more self-effacing or more extroverted.

I keep listening for the angle, trying to trip it up, catch it out. Maybe I want a darker undercurrent to throw the lighter shades into relief. Maybe I’m too cynical, too sophisticated in the pejorative sense.

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Tags: Michael Vincent Waller
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The question is not whether or not what Cage is doing is art. I’m convinced that it will be art without even hearing the piece, only because he does it. The question is, and it is because of John we must ask this question: Is music an art form to begin with? Was it always show biz? And by show biz I mean Monteverdi…. What I mean by show biz is fantastic show biz. That a new piece of Boulez, perhaps, presented in a classy hall in Paris is like Sarah Bernhardt doing a monolog. Without the histrionics, of course. That’s what I mean. By holding the moment. By capturing the moment in every sense of the word.

— Morton Feldman, in conversation with Peter Gena.

I often say to people I’m not interested in music, I’m interested in art. And I still believe that; I can point to a composer and say, “That’s an artist,” and I can point to someone else and say, “Well, they’re just a composer.”

— Anton Lukoszevieze, in conversation with Robert Worby.

It’s probably this commitment to music as art that makes me go to Apartment House gigs whenever I can. I was going to say that it’s their commitment to playing unjustly-neglected composers, but sadly the state of the arty end of the music business often means the two are the same thing. I got to go to their 20th anniversary gig at Cafe Oto last month but never got around to writing about it. Luckily, the whole thing (almost*) is now on the BBC web site for the next month.

What struck me most at the time was how well the programme flowed, presenting diverse types of music with a strong defining character for the whole evening. The playing order is different on the radio but the strength of the music remains. Listening again, you can hear how each piece alternates between two extremes of musical language – the minimal and the seemingly anarchic. There’s a shared way of thinking behind each of these two extremes: the predominant compositional thought given to the organisation of material, the innovative use of structure and the careful handling of sonic materials to present them in a new light. As art, each piece touches the listener through its own intrinsic qualities without relying on a narrative, a mood, a subject, or other high-falutin’ appeals to sentimentality.

There’s a mix of new composers (Luiz Henrique Yudo, Jennifer Walshe), old stuff (John Cage) and revelations: a new chamber ensemble arrangement of Henning Christiansen’s fluxorum organum (different from the one I heard in Huddersfield in 2013) and George Maciunas played at least as well as Mozart. Maciunas, he’s supposed to be essential, right? Every textbook mentions him, but nobody plays him. He might as well be Josquin. (I’m reading that Feldman interview again. “This whole business of accessibility is a lot of baloney.”)

The radio show also plays a couple of pieces from that Apartment House CD of Maciunas’ music I wrote about early this year, so you get to hear that, too. You also get to hear composer Laurence Crane messing around with various found objects and Lore Lixenberg singing John Cage’s Aria together with his Concert for Piano and Orchestra – a particularly fine rendition of each.

* To recreate the full concert experience at home, break for a couple of intervals and play The Fall** while having a few drinks.

** First Brix era mostly, I think.

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I won’t search for it but a few years ago I made the passing remark that if Morton Feldman’s music can be compared to Rothko (as it often is) then Howard Skempton’s can be compared to Morandi. The use of melody and conventional harmonic patterns creates a beguiling sensation of familiarity. That initial impression is deceptive, precisely in that it doesn’t try to deceive: representation in one and functional harmony in the other are left exposed, revealed as artifice – yet they still convey their effect (or affect).

Late last year I heard Jürg Frey and a small ensemble play a concert of his recent music. At the time I wrote that:

Some of Frey’s music that I’ve heard seems, to some extent, a provocation in its refusal to yield to an implied, wider palette of sounds. (This is particularly after hearing R. Andrew Lee play Frey’s piano music.) On this occasion, there were also some surprisingly rich sounds, with an almost playful (on Frey’s terms) exploration of harmonies and instrument combinations.

The album of Frey’s music that was recorded around the same time as that concert has now been released by Another Timbre as a double CD, titled Grizzana and other pieces 2009-2014. After hearing the concert I said that, “It will be interesting to hear the music apart from the theatre of performance.” It sounds even more tender and yielding than I expected. Is Frey mellowing with age, or am I just getting acclimatised?

I listened again to Lee’s excellent first CD of Frey’s piano music. There’s a striking contrast between those earlier works and the newer pieces on Grizzana. There’s that notorious passage in Klavierstück II where the same perfect fourth is repeated 468 times. When repetitions appear in the newer music they provide a sense of continuity, not of stasis or impasse. The music alters the listener’s perception of the world through its complex sensory effect more than through any aesthetic dialectic. (Morton Feldman distinguished his own music from John Cage’s by highlighting the didactic tendency in Cage: “Most music is metaphor… I am not metaphor. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.”)

I’m reading that interview with Frey about the new CD and – what do you know? – he’s talking about Morandi:

Morandi’s painting is figurative painting, but at the same time, he works with aspects of abstract painting. So you can see him also as an abstract painter who works with objects. To make a link to music (and sorry, I have to simplify it now, but in the daily process of my work, this reflection develops the whole richness of complexity), I can understand a melody as like a figurative part of a painting. Similarly to how you can remember melody as a “thing“, as a motif in music, you can see on the canvas a bottle, a house (and some painters speak about “working on the motif”). So on the other hand, in music the sound (just the sound) can be seen as an equivalent to abstract colour.

I could have just read further and quoted that instead of typing all the above.

Frey’s recent music is imbued with a quiet sophistication – the sort that doesn’t need to display its radical nature, its erudition. Where it was once necessary to make statements (like in the six-hour, almost inaudible electroacoustic collage Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit) it is now possible for these values to be affirmed as a given. The piece Ferne Farben, for example, uses field recordings in a way that may not even be noticed on casual listening, giving additional life, space and colour to the otherwise very slow and quiet playing of the acoustic instruments. Or perhaps, listening to it yet again, it’s the other way around.

As might be expected, the performances by Frey himself and his “personal army” are beautifully clear and evocative. Aspects of this album recall last year’s double CD of Laurence Crane’s music, released on the same label: a sustained mood of ambiguous detail, unbroken surfaces over hidden depths. Frey’s music here, however, creates a strange double image in which each sound feels tentative yet inarguable, like a delicate organism. In the trio Area of Three, sustained sounds are inflected with the quietest, briefest notes that pass almost like accidents, silences pass like clouds. Appropriately, another of the pieces is titled Fragile Balance.

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