Boring Like A Drill. A Blog.

I got to see two nights of the London Contemporary Music Festival, up at the top of that multistorey car park in Peckham. (I was also there on Sunday afternoon but ended up spending more time bumping into friends and drinking on the roof than paying attention to music, so I can’t make fair comment on that day.)

After that little kerfuffle about the piano’s demise at the end of the festival, it’s interesting to look back at the other pieces played on it in those preceding nights. One of the festival organisers mentioned that the instrument had taken too much of a beating over the two weeks to be much more use to anyone. I can believe that, after seeing Mark Knoop and Anthony Pateras respectively work it over on Friday night. The evening began with Knoop’s blistering performance of selections from Michael Finnissy’s English Country Tunes. At times the amplification used in the car park scarcely seemed necessary, although the passing trains did intrude during one rare moment of repose.

This was the “New Complexity” night, which took the predictable mix of Finnissy and Brian Ferneyhough, mixed it up a little with the very different complexity of Aaron Cassidy‘s music, then mixed it up a lot by throwing in improvisations by Pateras, Steve Noble and Russell Haswell. When Pateras’ solo set followed Knoop’s it felt like the gig was turning into a piano duel, with Pateras’ explosive improv style challenging the ferocity of Finnissy’s exacting notation.

Right from the start it was clear that the combination of the PA and the low, cavernous concrete space were contributing to bass-heavy overtones that lurked ominously behind much of the music played. This worked best with Haswell’s shattering electronic set at the end of the night, every bit as visceral and confrontational as his superb gig in Bexhill but with an added precision to the beat that both enticed and defied the possibility of a rave breaking out.

The venue naturally served Haswell’s music best, and the softer, more introverted pieces by Ferneyhough and Cassidy worst. The piano and percussion works seemed strangely appropriate, particularly with the urban brutalism adding another point of cognitive tension to Finnissy’s Country Tunes. The night before, the small bar at one end of the car park was used as a makeshift stage set. This was “Immersive Opera” night, with the singers planted amongst the punters milling around at the bar and the tables. Writing that made me cringe a little as I recalled how easy it is for this type of approach to feel forced and awkward, so it’s amazing to me (and my low threshold for vicarious embarrassment) that the whole thing came off naturally and effectively. The low-road, straightforward approach to the production and the obviously temporary venue helped the staging from drawing attention to itself.

The other factor was the strength of the music and the performers. The baritone Charles Rice, sweating in his light suit as he slumped over the bar in midsummer London, ensured he became the centre of attention as he prowled around spouting cod-philosophy in the premiere of Kate Whitley’s Roma, a setting of the bar-room soliloquy at the start of Glengarry Glen Ross. I only wished the immersion and the duplicitous undertone extended into Rice’s singing seguing into a sales pitch on some unsuspecting ticket holder.

Some punters had in fact taken up the offer to be served dinner, only to find themselves cast as extra’s for Allison Bell’s turn as Madame X in Gerald Barry’s monodrama La Plus Forte. Confronted by an unresponsive rival, innocent diners, curious onlookers and hipsters looking for a drink, Bell’s Madame X led us through her emotional crisis by the strength of her voice and physical presence in the crowd. The (pickup?) orchestra conducted by Chris Stark sounded pretty damn fine too. I think the low-end boost of the space helped bring out the menace of the wind section.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
2 Comments »

I didn’t see all of the London Contemporary Music Festival. On Saturday night I was at the South London Gallery for a talk by Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen about his father, Henning Christiansen. As part of the evening Christiansen showed the video of Bjørn Nørgaard’s Horse Sacrifice. I didn’t see the Sunday night performance at the LCMF of Philip Corner’s Piano Activities either. A cultural editor at The Guardian called the dismemberment of a piano “ugly” and “a violent act”, but when I compare it to Nørgaard’s ritual slaughter and dismemberment of a horse I can’t help but think Ben Beaumont-Thomas is being just a little bit precious.

I didn’t want to write about the Guardian article, because the arguments it purports to raise seem to originate only at the service of a fundamental dishonesty, typical of the lazy, pernicious attitude so much of the media takes towards what passes for “arts journalism”: that nothing is a worthy “story” unless it can be codified as a Scandal, a Controversy with two sides, For and Against. The Guardian presents itself as one of the more ‘cultured’ newspapers. The LCMF presented two weeks of free concerts with a wide range of music. None of it was reviewed by The Guardian until it’s outburst of righteous indignation over a “morally dubious” artwork.

I find myself writing about it because friends and others have been discussing some of the issues raised, but so much of the article’s argument is specious. The tone of outrage, swiftly followed by a disingenuous insistence that the whole affair is so passé, really while still obviously worked up about it is a pattern familiar to anyone who’s read critical reactions to Olympia, Ulysses, 4’33″ or The Naked Lunch. Beaumont-Thomas’ third paragraph begins “While censoring them would indeed have been wrong,” and you can probably guess the tone of the rest of that sentence. It is the argument of a critic who wishes a troublesome artwork would Simply Go Away. A similar attitude can be observed in music writers who express exasperation that people persist in playing Cage and Stockhausen even though the personality cults that supposedly sustained their careers have ended.

The common misunderstanding to all these works is that they were created simply to shock, and that once the shock has faded the work itself should dissipate, too. Many such pieces do indeed lose their relevance over time, but the fact that Piano Activities was programmed as part of a serious concert of music, fifty years after its composition, should tip off a cultural editor that there are deeper issues for consideration here. Beaumont-Thomas attempts to dismiss the presentation of the piece as “utterly conservative” on the grounds that it is “decades” old. Possibly, but it is not as conservative as the mindset that assumes anything more recent than Mahler but older than the new Daft Punk album has nothing to say to the world today.

For all its posturing, too often The Guardian displays a philistinism little different from that of the Daily Mirror when it belatedly noticed Carl Andre’s pile of overpriced bricks. Beaumont-Thomas has his own little if-they-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon moment when he rails at “welfare cuts, permanent environmental change, information overload, banality” as the real enemies de nos jours against which the Festival directors should devote their energies. It is a simplistic idealism which which can easily entice the enthusiastic into endorsing a new Zhdanov doctrine. No time for ballet, Comrade, the people of Maidstone need compost toilets; they just don’t realise it yet.

I just read back that last sentence and thought it might be excessive; but then I checked Beaumont-Thomas’ article again and noticed that he thinks the Corner performance was “indulgence bordering on immorality”. Remember, he’s talking about a piano being dismantled at a free concert held in a car park in “one of the most deprived areas in London”. Outside the car park, in the High Street there are kids paying through the nose for designer streetwear endorsed by Lil Wayne. On the Guardian website you can read the breathless coverage of the relative orgy of consumption that is Glastonbury, with a headline act as old as Piano Activities itself. The inverse snobbery is palpable. To use a very Guardian analogy, Beaumont-Thomas is criticising benefit scroungers while ignoring corporate tax avoidance.

(On the other hand, I had to laugh when I read “destruction is a privilege and comes from a position of luxury.” Practically every Guardian editorial on the subject desperately wants to convince us that it’s precisely the opposite.)

Since we’re talking about morality, this game of motes and beams played by Beaumont-Thomas, particularly as it purports to consider a wider social and economic context, is an intellectual sin; but not nearly so great a sin as the theme that runs through his article. “While censoring them would indeed have been wrong,” he can think of an awful lot of reasons why it might have been right. It’s a paradox that with the proliferation of debate through social media, accusations of “shutting down debate” are increasingly common. Yet this is precisely what the Guardian critique attempts to achieve: it doesn’t argue the merits or demerits of the Philip Corner piece (seriously, Philip fucking Corner is the ugly face of materialist excess!), it argues that it shouldn’t have been done at all. While claiming a wish to open a debate on what the piece means, he diverts discussion into a tedious argument over why we should be allowed the debate in the first place.

Like I said, I really didn’t want to write this; I wanted to write about the music I actually did hear at LCMF. Luckily, that can wait until another time, as the music won’t be going stale in a hurry.

Filed under: Journalism, Music by Ben.H
4 Comments »

I always have a reason to dislike summer. The past month has been crammed with Work and Real Work and Work Work, but I’ve had two great evenings out at the Proms this year: a killer performance of Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (played in the UK at last) and a reminder from Ex Cathedra of how Stockhausen never stopped being a great composer.

In between all this, I’ve been trying to finish off this unforgiveably large and unwieldy piece for piano. With luck it will be presentable sometime in August. It starts off pretty sparse…

… gradually gets more dense…

… then denser still, more quickly…

… until it reaches maximum density…

… whereupon it continues in the same vein for another eighteen hours.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »

I saw this tweet from UbuWeb last year and took it as a challenge.

John Cage's music will never be used to sell cars.

— UbuWeb (@ubuweb) November 15, 2012

Two things immediately came to mind: John Cage’s anecdote about his own brush with advertising, and the Volkswagen microbus which he bought with his winnings from an Italian TV game show, for the purpose of driving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from one gig to the next. The choice of host vehicle was obvious, and I found two suitable advertisements fairly quickly on YouTube. The only rules I set for adding music were (a) no editing and (b) post-1951 “chance” music only.

What was the point of this exercise? Now that it’s done, I realise it’s partly a tribute to Cage’s idealistic thinking, and his belief in the necessity of doing things previously considered impossible. More importantly, it’s about maintaining a true, critical measure of Cage’s achievements and assessing him properly as a composer, not as some supposed paragon of virtue.

Filed under: Film, Music, Television by Ben.H
4 Comments »

I don’t know why I was surprised by the amount of chatter over the Rite of Spring centenary. It was the perfect story, as far as Arts Journalism is concerned, combining sterile controversy and What Passed For Entertainment For People Before Television. What I find more interesting, even if they are little more than incidents for gossip, are the times when people walk out of shows these days.

The London Sinfonietta performance of Kagel’s The Pieces of the Compass Rose was a particularly satisfying example, with a small but steady trickle of punters throughout. Even after the interval, some people returned to their seats for a second helping only to walk out again one or two pieces later. If you’re enjoying a concert, there’s something particularly gratifying about seeing that it’s Not For Everyone (see also They Must Be Doing Something Right).

One of the finest nights out I’ve ever had was for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s performance of Ocean some years ago. This piece had a truly remarkable rate of attrition, which remained constant throughout the evening. Ten minutes in, twenty, the amount of exposure had no apparent effect on the less faithful audience members’ resolution to stay or go. At least one couple sat through eighty minutes or more, no interval, before chucking it in a few minutes before the end; even though (or because?) the stage was encircled with digital clocks counting down the seconds until it would all be over.

Last week I saw Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda play a two-hour improvisation at Cafe Oto. Their performance was largely a study of processes within an allocated span of time. You could walk in and out without thinking you’d missed anything, any more than if you’d departed from a landscape.

I walked out of concert, at the interval, a few weeks ago. Nothing wrong with the music; it was one of the very rare balmy summer evenings we’ve had so far this year and I suddenly did not want to be inside a recital hall. One of the rules I’ve always tried to remember when making music: Everyone has a reason not to be at your gig.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »

Just a quick update to say that I AM THE PRESIDENT OF CAPITALISTS INC. now has a proper page of its own on the website. An update with the thrilling sequel to this historical non-re-enactment will be coming as soon as I get my hands on a decent slide scanner.

Also, you can now hear for yourself This Is All I Need, my contribution to the Interior Design: Music for the Bionic Ear project. This was the concert of new music made especially for listeners with cochlear implants, who can understand speech really well but have a hard time making sense out of music. People without technological augmentation can enjoy it just as much. I’ve gone into some detail about the project and the thinking behind the music.

Filed under: Art, Film, Music by Ben.H
No Comments »

Almost forgot to say I had a nice day out last month at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, for the Editions Mego gigs. (As it happened, I was on the same train as that reviewer, but I was proffered disposable coffee cups of prosecco instead of cans of Bloody Mary.) Any cool cred I may have had was lost when I found a hardback of A Suitable Boy for 50p on the way from the train station to the Pavilion and lugged it around for the rest of the night. I was so preoccupied with it I forgot we got a free CD with the entry ticket. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.

I agree with most of the Quietus review, particularly for Russell Haswell’s set, but for me the Mark Fell set was the most disappointing part of the event. Everyone else seemed to love it. Why?

Fell’s set was unique amongst the acts at the event. While everyone else worked with noise, i.e. treating sound as a fluid, plastic artform which can be stretched, squashed, twisted and moulded, Fell’s piece was nothing but notes and beats. Synthesizer pads and drum machine claps, an assembly of prefabricated parts. There’s nothing wrong with that, but while everyone else enthused over the construction I got bogged down in details. The unvarying sounds felt dead and dull, the cheesiness of them seemed like self-congratulatory irony. It didn’t help that the shuffle play on my ipod that morning had served up some library music with what sounded like the exact same synth patches.

Some people went around saying it was a deconstruction of rave. I guess that’s also part of my problem and why the experience left me feeling flat. Raves suck. Don’t bother arguing with me, because you’re wrong.

As for the other musicians on the day, the whole event strongly reminded me of what should have been a very different gig the week before, when the Arditti and JACK quartets played together at Wigmore Hall. Even though the whole gig was acoustic, the pieces played by these two string quartets showed how pervasive the influence of electronics and computer-manipulated sound has become on modern composition. Each piece placed its emphasis on the same musical concerns as the electronic noisemakers in Bexhill: timbre over pitch, texture over harmony, a sculptural sense of balance. The musicians created densely interwoven glissandi, ground their bows into the strings to create complex tones. The concluding work by Mauro Lanza made this method of working explicit, creating a musical argument that crossfaded back and forth between coherent sound and incoherent noise, instead of the old drama of divergence from a harmonic norm and the inevitable return home.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »

“Cubism must have developed when the artist considered how much of his sketch must be finished. Finishing involves a stupidity of perception.” – Guy Davenport, Narrative Tone and Form.

“The raw, unexplained dream still has its power; the dream with legible symbols is a spent force. Hence the liveliness of Ernst, the dullness and triviality of Dalí.” – Guy Davenport, Ernst Machs Max Ernst.

True to one of Davenport’s recurring themes, that of the transformation of ideas across time and sensibility, I’d nailed together the above two quotes in my head some years ago. I only realised my mistake this evening, when I tried to look up the composite sentence that had never been written.

For all of its technical skill, there is a barbarity lurking behind so much mimetic art: a fearful reverence for “the real” has supplanted knowledge of the workings by which reality is created. Too many artists have tried to fill up every perceived hole in their work with “research” – pettifogging justifications for the audience’s disbelief, already held in suspense.

On Saturday night I heard the London Sinfonietta play Mauricio Kagel’s The Pieces of the Compass Rose in its entirety. Kagel disarmingly refers to this collection of eight pieces as “salon music”, pre-empting accusations of cultural appropriation or misrepresentation.

The music is playful and beguiling throughout, even at its most raucous. This deferential charm distracts from a second, more insidious game in play. The salon culture of misinterpreting artefacts from the four corners of the world has itself been taken captive and repurposed by Kagel.

Like a true inhabitant of the postmodern era, Kagel’s reference point for his compass keeps shifting to suit his subjectivity: the East is Slavic, the South is Mediterranean and the North-East is Brazilian. He reassures us that the Andean tribe’s procession in North-West is purely imaginary.

No salon band would have access to dozens of percussion instruments and found objects, culminating in the percussionist chopping at a log with an axe. At the end of each section descend into torpor, like a hand-cranked gramophone winding down. Even the artifice is artificial.

Is the joke on the musicians or the audience? Is this like one of Nabokov’s literary snares, where the better you are at decoding such situations, the worse you become entangled in it? While you’re kept guessing you’ll listen to a lot of rich, evocative music on Kagel’s terms, with no time to stop and check his cultural credentials.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
1 Comment »

For the past month most of my activity, such as it is, has been on Twitter. If you follow me then you’ll already know about this new piece I uploaded to SoundCloud, titled Tropical Ravine With Blackbird.

As previously mentioned, I have issues with the concept of soundscapes and field recordings. Tropical Ravine With Blackbird was recorded while I was at Sonorities in Belfast in late April. It is an amended field recording which tries to bring to the foreground the internal contradiction in so many field recordings: the use of technology to preserve authenticity.

Besides the questions of distortion and mediation so often ignored in soundscapes, there are implications in the reception and communication of a field recording to its intended audience; but I’m trying to think of a nice way of saying these things before I make that post.

I saw a few gigs in May – might tell you about them this week if I have time.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »

I’m back from Belfast and had a great time at Sonorities, even though I’d under-packed for the unexpectedly cold and wet weather. The theme at Sonorities this year was “Beyond Soundscape”, which I shamelessly pandered to by preparing a new mix of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue.

It was only at the soundcheck that it occurred to me, that every other presentation of this piece has been determinedly lo-fi. The original recordings, even though they were made on DAT, were dubbed onto cassette and played through boom-boxes in their original gallery presentation. Other iterations of the piece were highly compressed and played through small headphones in public areas. This mix was put together with only a pair of desktop speakers plugged into my laptop. Now at Queen’s University I suddenly got to play with this:

Forty-odd speakers in multi-level surround sound. Ordinarily I’d expect everything to sound fabulous in such an environment, but because it was my own stuff I was suddenly worried that a vast host of shortcomings would be revealed. Luckily, my piece also sounded (ahem) fabulous which at least meant I didn’t have to cringe so much when keeping tabs on the faders during the performance.

Now, for the confession: I have a real problem with the idea of soundscapes, and field recordings. Even with the new toy, there’s a whole bunch of issues around distortion and mediation which I need to think through before I go any further in working with it in the field. That video I posted starts to address these ideas.

In any case, here’s the mix I presented at Sonorities, now on Soundcloud for your home listening enjoyment.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
1 Comment »

I’m off for the boat train to Belfast tomorrow for Sonorities 2013 at Queen’s University. I’ve prepared a new mix of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue to present at the Sonic Lab on Thursday, 25 April.

In the meantime, I’ve received a new toy in the mail, delivered in an oversized, passive-aggressive box with a warning label defying me to bend it.

I was so excited with my new mini recorder I left it out on the window while still plugged into the speakers and turned it up a little too loud. Please enjoy this video I made by accident.

Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
1 Comment »

In a couple of weeks’ time I’ll be in Belfast for Sonorities 2013, presenting a new audiotheque mix of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue.

This is a piece which has been developing for over 15 years now. It started as a pair of field recordings, documenting walks through the city of Melbourne. These recordings were played simultaneously into a third space, Bill Fontana style, as a sound element in my first visual art exhibition. In turn, these sounds were used as raw material to be digitally manipulated, according to a set of instructions obtained from a new interpretation of the maps that determined the route of the original walks. This digitally-transformed version was used in a later exhibition.

I’ve presented later re-interpretations of this material, with subsequent additions and subtractions, but it’s been a number of years since I last worked with field recordings or audio documentation. I’m looking forward to the trip to Belfast as a starting point for resuming this activity.

The theme for Sonorities this year is “beyond soundscape”, so it seems like an appropriate venue for my approach to soundscape work. Third City: Walking on Red and Blue presents two types of artificiality, or synthesis, in its soundscape. The first is through the conflation of two locations into one; the second is through the intermingling of digitally-processed and unaltered sounds. On first hearing, the listener can distinguish certain ‘landmarks’ as belonging to one realm or the other, while other details remain disorientating or misleading.

A bit more about the history of Third City: Walking on Red and Blue is on the main web site. The new remix will be in the Sonic Lab, Queen’s University, Belfast on Thursday 25 April, starting at noon.

Filed under: Art, Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
No Comments »

Ever since first hearing about ‘the minimalists’ I’d been intrigued about other, lesser-known composers outside the three or four Big Names*…

In my last post I forgot to add the footnote to that asterisk. That’s okay, because part of my point was going to be that these footnotes should be elevated into the main body, at least from time to time. In fact, that post about Dennis Johnson is just such an example.

I particularly wanted to know about other minimalists, to find out whether such an ostensibly reductive approach to music was a viable artistic means, or just a term that could be applied to what Young, Riley, Reich and Glass were doing at the time. If you only followed the careers of the last three and their “successor” John Adams, you’d conclude that minimalism’s usefulness as a principle was limited. Perversely, the pervasiveness of minimalism as an influence in so many forms of music over four decades have reinforced the perception that this particular little group of composers are a Really Big Deal. In truth, minimalism’s potency is fuelled by a wide variety of musicians who continue to find their own ways of adopting its aesthetic values.

I was lucky that, immediately after first hearing a radio broadcast of the Philip Glass Ensemble, the announcer then put on Jon Gibson playing his own piece, Untitled. Straight away, I got the idea that there was more than one way to do it, and I wanted to find as many of them as I could.

This brings me back to Andy Lee’s two nights at Cafe Oto last month. The big event was his playing of Dennis Johnson’s November, but his first night’s recital of Paul A. Epstein, Jürg Frey and Alvin Curran was almost as significant. This was part of Lee’s “Minimalism in 12 Parts” tour, of which November was one more part of a larger statement about minimalism in music. All three composers on the first night take what they want from minimalism and apply (not dilute) in their own way.

Parts 2 and 8 from Curran’s Inner Cities cycle are long spans of harmonically, rhythmically and dynamically consistent music, written mostly through the 1990s. As Curran himself writes, “in all of these pieces the writing is instinctual, and obsessed with detail: how to use only two triads, then three, then none then one, then turn your back on the whole thing and use all the triads”. The reductive technique is used as a jumping-off point for a stream-of-consciousness flow of digressions, which in turn are reined in from excess by the reductive technique. Frey is best known as part of the Wandelweiser collective, and his Klavierstück 2 is appropriately focused on silence, isolated sounds, and a long stretch of obsessive repetition. I’ve heard only one other piece by Epstein, so it was good to hear some of his Drawings for piano and the premiere of his piano version of Landscape with Triads. These works gave the impression that the tonal and contrapuntal complexity of Milton Babbitt’s piano music had been digitised into a rhythmic and dynamic grid, with evident harmonic processes set to a regular pulse were developed into rich patterns just beyond full comprehension.

All these recent works had readily discernible connections to minimalist music at their heart. None of them relied upon an attachment to popular sentiments in the news or the cinema as a source of expressive power.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »

A lot of good things came together on the night of 9 March. A bit over five years ago I first heard of Dennis Johnson and his piece November, when Kyle Gann described it in some length on his blog: a minimalist piano piece written in 1959, which La Monte Young remembers being about six hours long but survived only as a wonky 2-hour tape from the early Sixties. Gann’s blog post gives a good rundown on what makes this forgotten piece of music so fascinating, particularly in the way it embraced so many neglected musical ideas that soon came to dominate new music over the next fifty years. Ever since first hearing about ‘the minimalists’ I’d been intrigued about other, lesser-known composers outside the three or four Big Names*, and Dennis Johnson’s mammoth piano piece sounded almost too good to be true.

Nearly two years later I heard a recording from a piano recital by R. Andrew Lee, which he’d uploaded, with a superb performance of Tom Johnson’s minimalist puzzlebox An Hour For Piano. I immediately became a fan and soon after started following his Twitter feed, largely in the hope of glomming onto some more mp3s.

Meanwhile, Gann announced that he had almost finished analysing and transcribing November. In 2007 he was trying out various, ultimately unsatisfactory methods of notation, lamenting that “we can’t ask Dennis Johnson about it: he’s disappeared.” By 2009 he’d discovered that November was more than “a kind of crazy, off-beat experiment… instead I’m thinking we’ll be unveiling a whole new formal paradigm that deserved to have more of an after-history than it’s had.” In the meantime, Daniel Wolf had provided a contact for Dennis Johnson, who in turn had sent the score.

Another two years later, I read some exciting news. Andy Lee has a copy of the score to November. I immediately forwarded it to a friend of mine, Mark Harwood at Penultimate Press, knowing that he gets excited about obscure and rediscovered artists, and wonky old piano recordings. We’d both heard and loved the recordings of November made by Kyle Gann and Sarah Cahill when the finished transcription was presented at a conference in 2009, as well as a rip of that old 1961 tape. The prospect of Lee recording November seemed unlikely, but tantalising.

On 9 March this year I finally got myself somewhere regular to live (still without regular internet) but I was more interested in being at Cafe Oto to hear and watch Lee play November in its entirety, as part of its joint release on CD by Penultimate Press and Irritable Hedgehog.

Over five hours, the music works a strange effect on the listener. The intervening decades of minimalist and ambient music have made us familiar with the concepts of long durations, tonal stasis, consistent dynamics, repetitions, but November uses these techniques in an unusual way. The sense of continuity is very strong, but there is no fixed pulse and few strict repetitions. The slowness, spareness and use of silence, with an organic sense of rhythm, make it seem very similar in many respects to Morton Feldman’s late music. The harmonic language, however, is very different. Johnson’s piece uses clear, familiar tonality to play with our expectations of the music’s ultimate direction, whereas Feldman’s chromatic ambiguity seeks to negate any feeling of movement in harmony or time.

The semi-improvised nature of November adds another element to a performance. It was interesting to watch Lee relax as he moved from the fully-notated transcription of the piece’s first 100 minutes, into the more open notation that made up the next three hours of playing. He seemed to go into a serene state of focused timelessness, perfectly matching the music he was playing. The music itself takes on the aspect of a musician feeling their way through the material, venturing into new areas then circling back onto familiar ground, adding new parts along the way to reveal older material in a different light. Lee’s interpretation of the open notation took on a similar character, meditative at times, almost casual at others, building up the strong impression of of a unified whole, gradually revealed. In effect, the music sounded like a inspired burst of improvisation, a fleeting run of chord changes and leading tones, slowed down 100 times to linger over every sensuous detail.

As I said before, it sounds almost too good to be true: a forgotten composer with a very short career (if it could even be called that), who disappears after writing a work of vast scale and great precedence, with said work languishing unknown for fifty years before it is rescued from obscurity, reconstructed and performed to great acclaim. The thing is that November is a truly great work, beautiful and captivating, which holds the listener’s interest more than could be hoped from a novel gimmick stumbled upon by a dilletante, and with far more substance and longevity than a piece of purely historical or musicological interest.

About twenty minutes into the performance Harwood held his phone out towards the piano for a while. He’d dialled Dennis Johnson’s number in California. Earlier that evening he’d told me a bit more he’d learned of Johnson’s career in mathematics: some of his work had gone into the Mars Curiosity rover programme.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H
2 Comments »

I’ve spent a couple of rootless months while finding a new permanent home in London, hence the lack of updates to the blog and the website. Some major bits of news will be going up over the Easter break, both about my own work and other people’s stuff I’ve seen. In particular, I need to set down my experiences from a couple of weeks ago, when I had the privilege of meeting R. Andrew Lee and hearing him give a spellbinding performance of Dennis Johnson’s incredible piece November.

In the meantime please enjoy some more blurry photographs of Berlin.

Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
No Comments »