Boring Like A Drill.

So why did my lovely companion F love Trans after the first performance on Saturday night, and hate it after the second performance? Saturday’s concert, the first in the Southbank Centre’s series of gigs dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, was a study of repetitions: two performances each of Harmonien and Trans, with an interval between.

The two versions of Harmonien, part of Stockhausen’s last, incomplete Klang cycle, were for bass clarinet and flute respectively, performed by their dedicatees and Stockhausen companions Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer. With their perculiar costumes and occasional twirling movements back and forth across the stage, they affirmed that for the last forty years of his life, theatre was an essential element of Stockhausen’s music. This has been a recurring theme throughout the series of concerts for the past week.

Another, less known theme that has become apparent over the week has been Stockhausen’s talent for melodic invention and development of his material – the actual ‘music’ part of the music. The transparent beauty and lyricism of many of Stockhausen’s later works have been overshadowed by his reputation for eccentricity and conceptual excesses. However, his earlier, more highly regarded works are no less hostage to reputation for their conceptual boldness – whether they be Gruppen, Gesang der Jünglinge, Mantra, or Trans.

(Is it my ignorance or is the discussion of the recent performances of Trans as ‘Classic Stockhausen’ a recent development? Is the dividing line between old, good Stockhausen and bad, new Stockhausen slowly creeping forward?)

F, herself a musician, was impressed with the performances of Harmonien. “You can’t write that down,” she observed, “you have to know the notes.” She also loved the Royal College of Music Orchestra’s performance of Trans. The performance and staging were excellent, with a strong sense of foreboding in the eerie red-violet lighting, the unseen winds and brass erupting from the darkness behind the string section which acted like automata, held in some sort of trance.

There are a few simple parallels in the deaths of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Both died unexpectedly soon before their 80th birthdays, each leaving a legacy of posthumous premieres for a series of readymade memorials. Both also left behind a substantial number of critics who doubted that neither their reputations nor much of their music would survive for long without the personalities of their creators to sustain interest.

The proliferation of recordings and performances of Cage’s music since his death seems to have put his myth to rest. It remains to be seen whether Stockhausen can also elude the same, undeserved fate. The celebrations-cum-commemorations may or may not have helped to preserve and regenerate Cage’s reputation, but they will surely play a role in reviving Stockhausen’s.

Stockhausen is still usually regarded as The Leader Of The European Avant-Garde Who Lost It Some Time In The Seventies. As one preview of the Klang series of concerts at Southbank puts it: “The point of these festivals is to see what can be rescued from the absurdity in his later work.” Only two sections of his monumental Licht cycle of operas are being performed, but most of the music in the series comes from the last years of Stockhausen’s life.

I’ve spent the past week dealing with flu, apathy, and the Karlheinz Stockhausen festival at Southbank. Normal service should resume tomorrow, with a violent disagreement between my girlfriend and most of the audience at the weekend performances of Trans.

It’s nice to know a piece of music nearly 40 years old can stir up as much debate now as it did at its premiere. We both went to the performance last year by a student orchestra (Trinity College?), which was a fine example of the low-road approach to presenting Stockhausen’s music. The weekend’s high-road approach brought up some interesting contrasts in how we react to ostensibly the same music.

Conceived as an 80th birthday celebration, now an unexpected memorial, the festival focuses on his last, unfinished cycle of works, Klang. Having witnessed a few more pieces from the cycle now (after hearing two at the Proms in August), what I wrote last year seems more appropriate than ever, to Stockhausen’s later work as a whole.

Audience and orchestra, equally lost in the purple fog, partook of the event in a state not unlike the suspension of disbelief required to embrace the enactment of a myth. Its alien weirdness and denial of rational meaning suspended judgement, the music and its theatre an unquestionable, unalterable fact to be experienced. We all deferred to the indomitable arrogance of Stockhausen, an arrogance that was necessary to trust that he could put across a work he could not understand, without a safety net of explanation or justification.

I’ve got the pictures back from the Hobart incarnation of the Redrawing show, and uploaded a new mp3.

In addition to the main elements of String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) installed in Melbourne, the Hobart version included an extra video, showing my live performance of the piece at the Melbourne exhibition.

I’ve also uploaded a spiffy new recording of the String Quartet, a 23-minute mp3 which gives a good idea of how the thing sounds in its present state.

The main projection and automated version of the audio still played live in the gallery, while punters could also listen to the recorded, human performance over headphones. Two similar but different performances of the music could be heard at once, thus adding a further layer of duplication and imitation to the work.

Eugene Chadbourne, “Ochre Ringlet” (1999).

First, a special thankyou to Blogger for breaking everybody’s browser icons.

Second, an extra special thankyou to Jodru at ANABlog. Remember a few weeks ago when I linked to a recording of this year’s Stockhausen Proms concerts? ANABlog now has the whole thing conveniently broken up into individual tracks, in smaller, more user-friendly mp3 form.

Out my window I can hear that it’s the time of year when fireworks start going off around the neighbourhood again.

I haven’t plugged Kyle Gann’s internet radio station, PostClassic Radio, yet. I really should because it’s an excellent stream of new music with a newly expanded playlist, which just happens to include *ahem* a couple of my own pieces.

Funnily enough, the bots that run the internet radio service can’t quite cope with the type of music being played on this particular station, and offer links to buy CDs by the likes of myself and “Uncle Morty” – the latter a necessary evil to skirt the bots’ inability to tell individual pop songs from subsections of a 3-hour work.

(Don’t bother clicking the “Buy” link for my stuff: it’ll just say “Title Not Found” and try to make you buy an Il Divo album instead.)

Dear Blog, I have an unclaimed council wheelie bin which has been standing on the pavement outside my front gate for four weeks, without being stolen, thrown into the street, tipped over, kicked around, or commandeered by kids for use in an impromptu chariot race. Is this a record? And why doesn’t anybody want the thing?

On the other hand, the Dormobile of Doom has vanished from outside my house, only to replaced by two more. The damned things are multiplying. On the bright side, these specimens have a more benign appearance.

Are you crazy about pianos? If you aren’t crazy about pianos, are you crazy about classic cars? You should meet raymanboy: he sells pianos and the occasional car on eBay, and he certainly seems pretty crazy.

Firstly, his listed prices for items change at random intervals, either up or down, by as much as £10,000. Then there’s his notoriety amongst piano and car afficionados. The listings themselves are typically illustrated with multiple photographs of what is presumably the object for sale rotated at various angles, inexplicably collaged in with pictures of airplanes, drawings of Mata Hari, and blurry photographs taken of a TV showing wedding videos and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The real giveaway, however, are his product descriptions. If you hurry, you can still make an offer for his VIDO. RED ROSENDORFER WHITE BARON RICHTOFEN GRAND PIANO. If you’re not a musician, don’t worry: that description doesn’t make sense to anyone, except maybe raymanboy himself.

Perhaps the detailed description will clarify things:

And it goes on, for another 8,000 words of quotations, word association football and meandering streams of semi-consciousness, all in a variety of fonts that arbitrarily change colour, size, and style. He obviously puts a lot of effort into these things; this particular item has been revised 13 times in six days. Towards the end he sounds like the love-child of Gertrude Stein and Christopher Knowles:

Otherwise strutted like the wings of an aeroplane that all rhymes curiosly previous reaons fly out and away and sound and symphony be one together. Hers or his more is more the confusion. This may grow like the piano into a form of anything born of a love and any construction. The greatest of these I find hard to contain; that which on pne hand you at the time deny or hide and detain by “etiquette” for those around. That it may be by this piano you may have experience. A future I only dream but do not have. The premise as heavenly I knew from just one meeting. And in another place than this piano that was the same to those sounds and attitudes which she displayed upon that. Attitude as it changed in one meeting is like a Flying Circus by force of surprise. That to have been at that greater stage of life wherefore I would wish to be again – as one viewer stated to experience beneath the mountain to stand with her alone. It is now as if I I have recoil I was as if I am still there. And there you to find I know to look upon this piano his and hers be there and their kingdon shine. Most time for the buyers of commodity there are two accounts for one crash. His account the real angel of whom we speak you are told is “The Red Baron” was not but he was bar-ren.

Et cetera. They seem to always end up being about the Red Baron. It’s a mystery that he manages to sell anything, let alone have a high customer rating.

Last week (yep, up-to-date as ever) I went to the UK premiere by the London Sinfonietta of the late Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques, a landmark work of late 20th Century music. The cycle of six compositions was begun in 1974 and completed in 1985.

What is it with the British coming so late, so often, to presenting major works by prominent composers across the Channel? Perhaps, in Grisey’s case, his reputation as the founder of the “spectralist” school of music did him more harm than good in British concert halls. The British are innately leery of the French habit of dressing up their creative inspirations as universal theories.

Perhaps that reluctance isn’t such a bad thing, much of the time. I’d heard a couple of Grisey’s pieces before but until now I’d never “got” him, having been distracted on previous occasions by trying (and failing) to hear his vaunted theoretical ideas at the expense of his music. Or else I was showing my British roots.

I became a believer after hearing Les espaces acoustiques, a rich, sensual, gorgeous work, superbly played by the London Sinfonietta, aided by orchestral ring-ins for the last sections, which require an orchestra of over 80 musicians. As well as working purely as music at face value, Grisey’s conception of music as a synthesis of harmonies and instrumental timbres was made very clear in Les espaces‘ explorations of sound. Conductor George Benjamin (a composer in his own right) allowed the sonic richness to saturate the performance without ever letting the music wallow in a shapeless, plodding indulgence.

Grisey’s music can be alternately subtle and dramatic, sometimes almost excessively so. He is praised for inventing a new language of sound, free from the stultifying elements of musical modernism, but in his limitations he is equally beholden to them. It is telling that the violist and composer Julian Anderson, who played the opening section of the cycle, says “It really was quite significant” that Grisey included a distinctive, hummable melody in a composition written in 1976. Outside the institutions of the European avant-garde and romantic traditions, discoveries (and rediscoveries) similar to Grisey’s had been going on for years, and pursued more radically and thoroughly than in Grisey’s music.

In America, composers as diverse as La Monte Young and James Tenney had spent the 1960s exploring tonality, the harmonic spectrum, new sounds, forms and structures. Europeans largely thought of them as amateurs, pranksters. Grisey, on the other hand, was the professional: he knew that a composer needed a computer laboratory, a symphony orchestra, and a tendency to disrupt his new sound world with conventional dramatic gestures to be taken seriously.

Charlie Louvin, “Cash On The Barrelhead” (1967).

It’s just about to close, so I finally got around to seeing the “Wyndham Lewis: Portraits” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. A quick walk through the permanent collection to find the show reminded me why I usually avoid the Gallery: wall after wall of British slebs-du-jour (wow, a photo of Kate Moss!) depicted in portraits alternately fussy and simplistic. The relative sizes of the print on the title cards gives away that the subject is more important than the artist.

In the case of Lewis, we have the unusual situation of artist and sitter frequently being equals. Fortunately, a survey of Lewis’ art restricted to portriature still includes many of his greatest paintings and drawings, and they’re well served by this exhibition. The punter is greeted at the entrance by the striking self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro, confronting the viewer in his frequently adopted persona of the antagonist, the provocateur, the Enemy. It looks cubist at first glance, but no cubist of the time would have accepted it. The stark colouring, aggressive composition, and grotesque characterisation stamp it with Lewis’ unique style of Vorticism.

Laura Cummings’ review of the show concludes, “No matter how much one admires these portraits, they don’t make one curious about the sitters so much as Lewis himself.” Lewis shunned the contemporary enthusiasm for psychoanalysis; knowing that art had no ‘inside’, he wrote “the lines and masses of a statue are its soul”. He believed in character, not personality. Examining prehistoric cave paintings in the south of France, he observed that “the artist goes back to the fish.”

Lewis’ portraits go back at least as far as Heraclitus’ statement that character is fate. His sitters wear the masks they have chosen to present to the public, and bear the burdens the masks impose upon them. Ezra Pound (above) presents himself as the still point at the centre of a cultural whirlwind; the background accoutrements, presented as conventially as the symbolic props that have littered portraits since the Renaissance to date, depict a confluence of historical forces that would soon swallow him up. More telling is the portrait of T.S. Eliot, his cultivated image of the anonymous, respectable bank clerk hemmed in by the organic scrollwork that surrounds him.

The final room of the exhibition includes several excellent portraits of Lewis’ wife Gladys “Froanna” Hoskins, in particular the haunting Red Portrait. The scene of intimate domesticity becomes a forbidding icon; Lewis never painted another face so expressive and so insubstantial.

Equally talented as painter and as writer, Wyndham Lewis is still grievously underrated as either. Despite his numerous books referred to and displayed in the exhibition, the large gallery shop had only a small corner of one table devoted to Lewis. Besides the catalogue and a welcome CD of Lewis reading from his works, the only two books available was a collection of his poetry and plays, and an eight year-old edition of The Childermass, quite possibly his most difficult novel. Everything else is out of print.

The Raincoats, “Lola” (1979).