Christopher Fox: Unmeasured
[Huddersfield Contemporary Records]. Stupid here missed the Christopher Fox recital at City University this week, so I’ve been compensating by listening to his Unmeasured, a set of three recent piano pieces expertly played by Kate Ledger. There’s an intellectual playfulness lurking behind Fox’s music, to a greater or lesser degree, and it’s a little more conspicuous here, exposing a constructivist game that underpins each work which tilts the conventionally expressive into the realms of the uncanny. The album title points to the compositional theme in these three works, that of rhythm, or perhaps timing. Opening with the most recent piece, Figures of Light takes ambiguous, chromatic chords and staggers them into slow arpeggiations that are left to resonate; the result strikes the ear as a single melodic line that erratically loops and folds upon itself, stopping and starting at unpredictable moments, freezing time to reveal the particular harmonic content in each segment. Tension builds through the steady pulse of notes, broken by irregular phrasing and pauses. As mentioned above, it’s more about timing than rhythm, and Ledger’s playing adroitly tests and teases how far the disruptions to continuity can be stretched. This aspect of playing has an increasingly important role in the next two pieces. Es war einmal requires Ledger to silently read excerpts from Grimms’ fairy tales as an internal guide to the phrasing and expression of the music on the page. It takes on the surface musical appearances of animated narrative speech, yet without any conscious attempt to mimic the human voice or illustrate semantic meaning; the rhythmic cadences paired with Fox’s colourful musical material function as a story on a deeper, subverbal level, as one told to you while falling asleep. The longest and oldest work here, senza misura, gives Ledger licence to determine both the ordering of the twenty-odd sections that make up the piece and the durations given to each event. It’s mostly chordal, with Ledger choosing how the relative density and dissonance of each successive sound may be reconciled through judicious timing, treating notes on the page as a plastic material to be stretched and shaped into a complex but balanced musical sculpture. Ledger’s performance acts as a superb vindication of Fox, whether intentionally or not, composing a virtuosic rejoinder to Ezra Pound’s Great Bass theory.
Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 [Another Timbre]. Antti Tolvi has a background of playing various instruments in experimental jazz and free improvisation, so he has a flexible sense of timing too. He takes this to an extreme in his realisation of Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6, a piece composed in 1953 for either one or two pianos. It’s one of Feldman’s most open works, despite specifying pitches: just fifteen single events notated onto fragments of staves, haphazardly scattered across a single page. The brief instructions begin “Composition begins with any sound and proceeds to any other.” This opens up all sorts of questions which cannot be easily answered, as James Pritchett has noted when he played the piece. “Can you repeat any of the sounds? and how long the piece should go on?” The suggestion of a second piano permits further speculation on how freely the piece may be interpreted. It’s a thought that has occurred to me, too, but I lack a keyboard and the ability to test it for myself. Fortunately, Tolvi has given us one answer, in the form of a solo performance that lasts a little over seventy minutes. His phrasing and articulation are unconventional, with Feldman’s usual performance note of “as soft as possible” given some leeway, allowing for a piano with recalcitrant dynamics. I’m relieved to say it’s not one of those recently-fashionable slow interpretations that treats Feldman as a pioneer of ambient music; Tolvi uses silence and near-silence as a motivating force, creating a torqued stasis that keeps the listener alert. (To answer your anticipated questions: (a) Yes it’s Feldman, but not as we know it, and (b) Great work! Don’t do it again.) The material is relatively simple even by Feldman’s standards, which does provide a lot of the strangeness; that transparency also suggests extended repetition is permissible, and Tolvi demonstrates that you can sustain this music with almost nothing.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christopher Fox, Morton Feldman
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A Big Day Out with Apartment House (Part One)
Tuesday 16 April 2024
Only Music Can Save Us Now was the title for the three concerts presented by Apartment House at Wigmore Hall last Saturday, led as ever by Anton Lukoszevieze, where morning afternoon and evening they love-bombed us with new and unfamiliar compositions. As usual, there was no evident compulsion to justify the audience’s attention by way of a curatorial (read moral) theme, only music that it was believed would reward our fresh attention. The morning concert began with Kerry Yong giving the UK premiere of Marek Piaček’s Canzonetta, a piano piece written some thirty years ago. It’s almost as light and lively as the title implies, but offset by a contemporary interest in aggressively repeated patterns and worked with snippets of movie themes and ad jingles (“sound smog” as Piaček calls it) which might be considered po-mo except for the typically East European quizzical attitude to pop culture that realises parody is a two-edged sword. A second work by Piaček was played later in the day, his 5 Studies for piano quintet completed in 2022, where a similarly breezy approach added glossy varnish over sour humour. Šarūnas Nakas’s Cenotaph for piano trio, from 1995, may have been the most conventional work heard on the day. Composed in memory of anti-Soviet resistance fighters in Lithuania, it managed to alternate between dark and light, the tender and the brutal, with each seemingly contradictory impulse contributing to a single statement of emotional complexity. The two world premières of the morning were Christopher Fox’s Heaven as a scroll and Adrián Demoč’s Zamat (Velvet). The Fox piece is a characteristically strange piece; his music floats in the grey zone between the conventional and the experimental, so that hearing his stuff can be an elusive experience. A string quartet is accompanied by a set of bells, which had been hanging at one end of the stage all shiny and alluring all morning. The strings play with tunings to match those of the bells, with the natural harmonics and resonances guiding the musical substance beyond its usual intonation. Zamat is a spare and elegant piece, with clarinet and bass clarinet, viola and cello playing short melodic cells in unison. The strings are pizzicato throughout, slightly out of step and adding percussive colour to the two clarinets, whose timbres combine to add subtle disturbances to the pitch.
I have now also heard a slightly less weird and more approachable piece by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. His Sitt hvoru megin við þilið uses his computer animated scores and friable material, but in this case the instrumentation is for string quartet instead of homemade instruments and the piece is contained within a single movement. The frayed scraps of sound fall into fleeting patterns that never sit still. It’s an intriguing experience as the ear can never settle on any moment; my failure to hear what’s in front of me becomes a problem when confronted by my expectation that I should tell each movement apart. The first concert ended as it began with Yong solo giving the first British performance of David Mahler’s Only Music Can Save Me Now from the late 1970s, a piece firmly located in the minimalist ethos of the time: an ostinato cycles throughout, forming the basis for a type of open-form chaconne as right hand harmonises upon the left, playing tropes that make small but significant changes to the rhythm and phrasing. It’s a reminder of the fecundity of minimalism in its later blossoming, before the style was subsumed into its present monoculture of soundtracking pageantry.
Besides the additional Piaček, the afternoon concert included a string quartet by Dubravko Detoni, a composer who presence amongst Western music geeks seemed to fade away with the dawn of the CD era. Forgotten Music presents 27 slips of music, each relating to a different style or genre but distorted almost beyond recognition by subjecting each to intense but brief scrutiny. Multiple contradictory meanings proliferate as each moment passes, both overzealous and dismissive in interrogating the music’s contents, with possibilities for misinterpretation rife. It takes on extra significance when you remember Detoni was a Yugoslavian writing the piece in 1981. In some ways, a more acute statement of the predicament described in the two Piaček works. My personal highlight was Michaël Lévinas’s string quintet (extra viola) Les lettres enlacées IV, an enthralling work of grainy micropolyphony and spiraling scales, made out of modal figures transposed upon each other and transformed by a method derived from computer modelling of Doppler shifts in spatialised sound. A sterling example of how access to all the toys at IRCAM can pay off handsomely when used with probing, analytical thought. The afternoon’s premiere was Kerry Yong’s arrangement of Jem Finer’s album Hrdy-Grdy for reed organ and string quartet. The art of transcription here is complicated by Finer’s original being made on hurdy-gurdy with electronic processing, layering the curious instrument with delay loops and other forms of self-accompaniment. Yong and Apartment House handled these masterfully, with sampled organ blended into a multicoloured acoustic chorale with the strings. This was a different musical language to that heard the rest of the day, with direct melodic playing as the base, even as it was compounded by technical elaboration. In a curious way, the method used in presenting Finer’s collection of pieces as a live ensemble work was analogous to that of Lévinas composing his quintet.
