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.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Still Number One!
Monday 30 November 2009
Too busy to post words and stuff right now, but stay tuned because this blog is No. 1 FOR HIP|HOP & R’n’B!
Filed under: London by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Thursday 26 November 2009
Jon Rose, “Spare Body Parts” (2000). Jon Rose, violano.
(4’57”, 6.44 MB, mp3)
(4’57”, 6.44 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Valencias from Valencia
Thursday 26 November 2009
Filed under: Art, Travel by Ben.H
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Website Update
Tuesday 24 November 2009
Yeah, yeah, I know action’s been pretty spotty here over the past few weeks. The good news is the website is fully functional, and all the files should now be back in place.
Instead of finishing off the Dumirescu article I’ve been dicking around with WordPress with a view to upgrading this blog, but editing the templates has turned into a frustrating way to expedite procrastination. Regular posting should resume now I’ve realised that shiny new blog look won’t happen in a hurry.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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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.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy LXXV: What the Hell Mouth?
Monday 16 November 2009
After the ceremony there’s a dinner hosted by the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose name is Rocco. He wears handcrafted alligator cowboy boots with his black tuxedo. Marcel [Proost] asks him about the boots, which are, of course, a major conversation piece.
“You wrassle that ‘gator yourself?”
No, says the Chairman. He bought them in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had not known that they had alligators in Jackson Hole, but it could be they’ve migrated there to work in the hotel or food service business.
The Chairman is reputed to be a very wealthy man and a fan of theater, baseball, horse racing and country music, in other words our indigenous American beaux arts, our native Kunstwerke. Someone there tells me he contemplated buying the Cincinnati Reds but thought the asking price of one billion too high. Perhaps he could just buy the NEA for half that amount and not have to deal with the flamers in Congress. That would be an exemplary form of the great American tradition of privatizing.
That’s an excerpt from a recent entry in John Adams‘ blog, Hell Mouth. Yes. John “Nixon In China, Short Ride In A Fast Machine” Adams. (Note to self: check out some music he’s written in the past fifteen years or so.)
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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The Return of Please Mister Please
Tuesday 10 November 2009
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Please Mister Please is up and running again, with your old favourites and a welcome return by Mister Buddy Greco. Beats me why there’s a blank space above this paragraph, so let’s just say I was trying to build up suspense. |
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Also re-uploaded, Real Characters and False Analogues: twelve pieces for microtonal piano, all available for streaming or download.
Blogging is ready to recommence, and the rest of the music will be up again shortly. Everything else seems pretty much intact, but there should (hopefully) be some improvements coming soon.
This includes the long-promised writeup of the Dumitrescu gigs from, oh, a month ago now.
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Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Under Construction
Thursday 5 November 2009
Apologies if the site went down at the end of last week. I was on a long weekend in Brighton and came home to find an email saying that my site had used up its bandwidth allocation.
I’ve now switched to a larger server which allows more traffic, but the music files have not yet been uploaded. They will be soon. In the meantime, to commemorate the closure of GeoCities last week, please enjoy this page of about eight billion Under Constuction icons.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Okay, that’s definitely it for now
Wednesday 28 October 2009
No updates for a week, while I back things up and move stuff around.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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“Wait till they find out / where you took most of “your” poetry”
Monday 26 October 2009
Paul Zukofsky, violinist, conductor, son of poet Louis Zukofsky, has declared war on pretty much everybody who gives a rat’s ass about Louis Zukofsky:
In general, as a matter of principle, and for your own well-being, I urge you to not work on Louis Zukofsky, and prefer that you do not. Working on LZ will be far more trouble than it is worth…. Finally, when all else fails, and you remain hell-bent on quoting LZ, but you really, really REALLY do not want to deal with me…
And that goes for you so-called academics and conniving dissertation students, too!
Unsurprisingly, there are now half-a-dozen scanned copies of LZ’s masterwork “A” circulating teh interwebs. Don’t worry Paul, I’m sure they won’t stoop to reading it!
Funny thing is that Louis Zukofsky was something of a virtuoso in the art of appropriation, as the above quote from PZ, quoted by LZ in “A”-12 (p.214) shows.
Filed under: Writing by Ben.H
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Whoa there a second…
Monday 26 October 2009
Regular update-type stuff is on hold while I change servers. It seems like several million Chinese punters made a common mistake and have eaten up just about all of my bandwidth. Enjoy the piano music, guys!
Also, RIP Maryanne Amacher – the link’s worth it for the photo of what I always imagined was a typical audience reaction. I mentioned this on Twitter but haven’t had a chance to write anything substantial. (Also haven’t had chance to put Twitter link on my website.)
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Friday 23 October 2009
John Cage, “Eight Whiskus” (1984). Joan La Barbara, voice.
(4’37”, 3.40 MB, mp3)
(4’37”, 3.40 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Apologies for not writing lately
Thursday 22 October 2009
But I’ve had one of those double doses of flu that go away and come back again a few days later for another crack at you. In the next day or two will post something about last week’s odd little Dumitrescu festival in town, and an impromptu GCTTCATT reunion gig in someone’s flat.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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How to save 45 pounds on the Frieze and Zoo art fairs
Saturday 17 October 2009
First, tell yourself that “too much new art in London looks like high-falutin’ tchotchkes created for investors with at least one eye on the auctions,” and that what with the Current Economic Climate the faint stink of desperation is only going to make things worse before they have a chance to get better.
Then, get a friend to go bunk into the openings of both art fairs and get loaded on the free drinks, before reporting back to you the next day that pretty much everything she saw there confirmed your prejudices.
