I left the house for once, then twice, then three times for the Music We’d Like To Hear concerts at St Mary at Hill. It was their twentieth anniversary, which is both wonderful as they’ve provided such a consistently wonderful and important service to exposing new music in London, and a little sad that it hasn’t launched a small horde of imitators that have been able to last anywhere near as long (despite several noble efforts). The scant institutional support in a city the size of London is telling. Enough whingeing cos this is a celebration of music. The series began with repeat performances of works from the very first concert in 2005: Angharad Davies adroitly tackled Thomas Stiegler’s violin solo sonata facile (1993), an audacious work that employs the guttural avant-garde language of multi-stopped strings and aggressive glissandi, executed by holding the instrument upside-down between the knees and wrapping a rosined string around its neck. Beside the thick sonics, the piece plays off a cognitive dissonance of the apparent simplicity of its technique and the complexity of its results, while also realising that Davies is making the topsy-turvy approach look a lot easier than it is. Curator (forgive me) Tim Parkinson showed off his piano chops with a strangely evocative rendition of Markus Trunk’s Riten der Böotier (2005), a calm and austere set of miniatures that recall ancient Greek music – an entirely speculative concept. It was nice to hear a performance of Chiyoko Szlavnics’ string trio (violin violin cello) Freehand Poitras (2008), with its pure harmonic intervals expanding into combinations that seem to both perturb and resolve a drifting equilibrium. The evening ended with a live performance of Laurence Crane’s Events (1997), originally conceived for radio. It’s the most overt expression of the deadpan quirkiness that lurks within Crane’s music: a singer intones a small set of select nondescript facts related to the date 7 February 1997 – people’s birthdays, foreign exchange rates, weather forecasts – accompanied by a trio of clarinets and some small sounds from the piano. Melanie Pappenheim was the singer, reprising her role from the 1997 original broadcast; the clarinets sounded lovely, even as you wrestled with the idea of the material used to make the piece being informationally valid in one sense yet entirely null in another.
That’s about as nostalgic as things get in these concerts. The first gig also included two new works, with singer-guitarist Maddie Ashman premiering her reflective, folkish song cycle Otherworld and a piano trio by Chris Newman titled Things of Slight Interest, which is also folkish in its own way with his typically gruff but passive phrases piling up upon each other with apparent casualness, a particularly British mode of individualistic expression. For the second concert, Parkinson returned to the piano for a crisp interpretation of Tom Johnson’s late work Pairs and Pairs (2020), a charming piece despite its apparent reductiveness, ringing changes on complimentary pairs of dyads to produce exhaustive combinations of pitches by a method that is rigorously serial without sounding anything of the sort. Juliet Fraser gave luminous presentations of two slightly older works composed for her, Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments for voice and electronics, and Cassandra Miller’s Tracery: Hardanger. I’ve discussed both of these before (see links) but Fraser and Miller’s collaboration on Tracery continues to evolve over the years; this performance began with Miller’s one-time spoken guidance to Fraser on how to interpret the piece being made audible to the audience.
How a composer can prepare an audience as much as they can a musician is a subject too little explored. The performance of Niels Rønsholdt’s Song II, Melancholia III (2017) applied Miller’s principle in reverse. The piece is an extract from a larger work titled Until Nothing Left, scored originally for accordionist with various objects and the involvement of the audience. It appears the punters were not necessarily expected to contribute to the sound as such, as to contemplate their role in music-making. As a concert piece arranged for small ensemble and voice, shorn of its context of expectations of audience reflection, it came across as a diffuse narrative with a conventionally contemporary subjectivity of mild grievance. Piano with faint synth tones were the medium for Leo Chadburn’s pretty early work A Secret (2000), which was even milder in expression than the Rønsholdt but carried by tersely controlled material contained in a form that is simple but oblique. It makes an interesting comparison as part of his recent collection The Primordial Pieces, which I’ll write about separately soon. The big shock of the second evening was hearing Lily Greenham’s tape piece Traffic (1975), its cascading blizzards of tiny vocal shards sounding vivid, cutting and entirely contemporary even today, potentially moreso today than it did half a century ago, the acidity in its societal observation becoming more obvious as its zeitgeist has faded away, unable to be dismissed as “a trip”.
For the third evening, Angharad Davies and Tim Parkinson performed duet versions of pieces from Laura Steenberge’s Seven Poems (2024), an unusual work in that it differs from other music I’ve heard by her. On a smaller scale, with the ritualistic actions reduced to tasks that seem self-contained to their own means of making music, stripped of gestures that allude to a wider, unknowable meaning, the pieces became studies in playful process. In one, Davies and Parkinson rang toy bells muted by magnets, gradually unmuting them by tossing the magnets one by one over their shoulders, where they may or may not have hit various pots and pans scattered on the floor. In the other, the magnets are collected and thrown on top of large cardboard boxes where they may either roll away or clump together. The playfulness and modest means made it seem rather British. Bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval performed Alvin Lucier’s Same and Different (2021), a late entry in the elemental pieces he composed for soloist with pure sine tones. Off to one side in the church she played a single high pitch, using different fingerings to produce the same note, only never quite the same due to small variations in tone and intonation, producing a series of liminal episodes in texture and activity as each note interfered with the pure tone in slightly different ways. This still, ringing centre of the concert was given its own segment, unpaired with other works. The two Steenberge pieces were each partnered with a work by John McGuire, a composer repeatedly championed by this concert series. Twelve Circles (2022-24) is a solo piano work reminiscent in style to his monumental 48 Variations for Two Pianos (1976-80). In single notes, cycling through perfect fifths in alternating octaves, the music seems open and transparent but never sounds simplistic. The interlocking of cycles and their dependence on shifts in tempo creates an elastic, elusive texture in which the presence of a method is obvious but its workings cannot be anticipated, a satisfying combination of intellectual integrity and imaginative whimsy. Pianist Mark Knoop expertly managed the deceptively difficult contrapunctal implications in the frequent tempo changes, much as he and Roderick Chadwick had done with 48 Variations back in – gosh – 2017. Ensemble Plus Minus played McGuire’s double string trio Playground (2016-20), a work which trades off greater harmonic and instrumental colour for the more immediate pleasure of remorseless precision. The meshing of distinct but related material suggests an efficient approach to musical complexity, at odds with the admonishments for simplicity that usually accompanies “minimal” music and hints at why he may be considered unique (and overlooked): seeming to belong on a clearly defined turf that is yet shared with everyone and no-one.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Cassandra Miller, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Chris Newman, John McGuire, Laura Steenberge, Laurence Crane, Leo Chadburn, Lily Greenham, Maddie Ashman, Markus Trunk, Newton Armstrong, Niels Rønsholdt, Thomas Stiegler, Tom Johnson
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Juliet Fraser Sings Lucier, Armstrong, Crane
Monday 19 June 2023
All That Dust has released its fifth batch of recordings, three of them as downloads in binaural audio. I went to the launch concert on Wednesday to hear live performances of some of the solo pieces by Rósa Lind and Soosan Lolavar, as well as a spatialised electronic piece by Aaron Einbond. I’ll get round to them later, but for now I want to mention the two binaural releases featuring soprano and label co-founder Juliet Fraser. The first is a performance of Alvin Lucier’s Wave Songs, a piece I don’t think has been commercially available before now. There are eleven short, wordless songs accompanied by two sine wave oscillators close enough in frequency to create beating tones that can be counted. The singer is required to sing tones precisely specified above or below either electronic frequency. Exact pitch is hard to discern when the interference of close frequencies create pulses, and with each successive piece the difference between the two sine waves narrows, from 48 hertz in the first piece down to 0.5 hertz in the last. To stay as accurate as the score requires is an excercise in futility, yet the pursuit of an ideal is as much of what makes us human as our failure to achieve it. As with much of Lucier’s work, the musical interest comes from the discrepancies between scientific perfection and human intervention, with no need to exaggerate the degree of their deviation. Fraser sings in a way which mixes precision with a softer edge (compare and contrast her rendition of Morton Feldman’s Three Voices with the version by Joan La Barbara, who first performed Wave Songs) that makes each song pulsate and shimmer. I lied when I said it’s wordless; the penultimate song sets words by Lee Lozano, the artist whose paintings inspired the piece, on the human limitations on transforming science into art. Despite all this, the music doesn’t rely on a romantic notion of imperfection: if someone were to sing it perfectly, it would be as stupendous as Giotto drawing a circle freehand.
Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments is one of a set of pieces Fraser has commissioned that draw on the writings of Rachel Carson for inspiration. Armstrong’s use of electronic shadowing of introspective melody is reduced here to essences, focusing on fragments of text reiterated in slowly rising patterns while overlapped by microtonally-tuned electronic sounds. The comparison with Wave Songs is instructive, with some 25 years of history intervening between the two works. At first the impression is that of a more developed Lucier piece, as solid tones beat against each other and Fraser’s calm recital of charged words, but the sounds from the speakers steadily grow more complex, sounding more and more like acoustic instruments before crackling, scattered rain-like sounds cover everything. The theme of the piece is accretion, as one layer replaces another, and the ending does not suggest a final state has been reached, just that observation of the process has concluded.
Another of the Rachel Carson works recently released, this time on Another Timbre, is Laurence Crane’s Natural World, an odd and affecting work of some duration. Fraser and pianist Mark Knoop wend their way through song and field recordings with a pacing that’s too slow to be considered relaxed and too deliberate to be dreamlike. After a lengthy introduction of descending piano phrases and unresolved cadences, Fraser enters with nature observations sung in repeated, gradually rising lines. The pairing with genteel chordal accompaniment makes it all seem rather stately, in a quaint and English countryside way. The qualities of Fraser’s voice come to the fore here, imbuing the words with a mixture of simple dignity and melancholy. The tone is reminiscent of Crane’s earlier European Towns, also premiered by Fraser, both in its cycling of lists and its wistful atmosphere. At times, human music gives way to recordings of nature, before resuming on a slightly different tack from before. Natural World falls into two long sections, ‘Field Guide’ and ‘Seascape’, with a briefer chorus as an interlude, making a piece nearly an hour long. The Chorus is a vocalise of descending glissadi, accompanied by birdsong and somewhat bluesy piano chords. Before ‘Seascape’ begins, the piano has given way to a small, portable electronic keyboard which plays high, reedy drones. The voice alternates between recitation and folksong-like refrains as the subject transitions from land to water. It’s a difficult piece to pull off, with its strange construction, loose seams and surface naivety, requiring confidence in the resilience of the slight materials to hold the listener in suspense as it wanders from one passage to another. Fraser and Knoop laregly succeed by maintaining seriousness without demonstrative earnestness, investing faith in the tangible phenomena depicted in words and on tape while refraining from introspection as a poor substitute. In this approach as much as the slightly awkward, almost apologetic candour that prevails throughout, it comes across as a distinctly English work.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Juliet Fraser, Laurence Crane, Newton Armstrong
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Newton Armstrong, Judith Hamann: go out, collapse
Monday 1 February 2021
Until recently I’d mostly known Newton Armstrong’s work only through his technological contributions to other people’s music, but thankfully that’s been changing lately. The way to go out is a solo release through Another Timbre, with three of his compositions for live musicians and electronics. I’d heard the premiere of A line alongside itself at Music We’d Like to Hear a couple of years ago but didn’t say much about it at the time. A work for cellist Séverine Ballon, echoing her instrument around gentle electronics, it felt a little tentative inside the church at the gig, dwelling in the space without filling it. This recording, made shortly before the public peformance, can seem too restrained in one listening and then much more revealing and emergent on another hearing, so a lot seems to depend on my mood. The musical material is a lot more stripped back than in the two earlier pieces on the disc, suggesting that Armstrong is looking at ways of further refining his language and his compositional techniques to work with his electronics. He’s explained that “all of these pieces are made from deformed, non-strict canons” and it’s not a process that is obvious to the listener, although you do detect the recursiveness and tail-chasing in the earlier ensemble pieces. (The Hunters and Collectors reference is further obscured.) Mark Knoop conducts the Plus Minus Ensemble for the two chamber works that bookend A line alongside itself, each with melismatic lines that become intricate without ever feeling precise. Armstrong’s electronics are not immediately noticeable, other than through blurring and refracting the ensemble’s playing; less a dazzling hall of mirrors, more an intriguing shimmer of heat haze. Someone on social media described all three as “lush”, which seemed odd at first but made sense as I thought it over, even for the long line of the cello piece.
Speaking of people getting long-deserved exposure for their own compositions, I make this to be the fifth release by Judith Hamann over the past year, adding to her previous total of, well, none. Created during her attenuated residency/lockdown on Suomenlinna in Finland last year, Days Collapse builds on her recent work combining her cello with field recordings and electronics. The five tracks form a suite of nearly fifty minutes, but it’s easy to take in at a single sitting. Each track’s pacing and changes in timbre, distinct without being jarring, seems to allow things to happen in their own time while always drawing the listener further into its world. Besides its length, it’s a more complex work than her previously-heard montages and brings the darker shades of her music to the fore. The field recordings are less identifiable, unable to be reconciled to a specific time or place outside the imagination; sustained sounds start as bowing and mutate into voice, wind and electrical hum, an abstracted keening. By the time you’re halfway through you’re wondering when you last heard the cello, as music-making falls away to silences and less structured sounds. If the instrument is present in these moments, then the sounds are deeply internalised, scraping and rumbling inside the body, hollow resonance. Its sombre, distressed inarticulacy makes it one of the most eloquent musical statements to date on the past year’s pandemic and personal loss, reflecting on how to continue when each facet of life has been diminished, each opportunity more indeliby circumscribed.
