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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The Canadian Composers Series on Another Timbre: Sabat, Ceccarelli and live
Tuesday 9 May 2017
Three nights last week at Cafe Oto to hear concerts dedicated to The Canadian Composers Series on Another Timbre. As always, you get new perspectives on hearing and seeing music performed live, compared to what’s on the record. In their performance of Linda Catlin Smith’s Dirt Road, Mira Benjamin and Simon Limbrick revealed just how sparing, yet quietly decisive each gesture must be. The music’s language is pared back to the bones, yet never consciously feels empty or repetitive.
It was strange how different Chiyoko Szlavnics’ During a Lifetime sounded on the night. I’ve already noted how Szlavnics’ use of sine tones mixed with live instruments differs from their usual exploitation of psychoacoustic phenomena. This distinction became clearer in concert: the electronic tones act as an instrumental voice in their own right. At times, the musicians stop playing altogether, revealing harmonies – even chords – in pure tones before the instruments come in again to compound the sound. The music took on a poignant, melancholy aspect. The Konus Quartett reproduced their clear, pure tones beautifully.
The series ended with a world premiere, Lutra for solo cello, by Martin Arnold. I’ve drawn comparisons with Morton Feldman’s music before so I’ll add another here: the elevation of instrumental timbre as a compositional element, coupled with the determined restriction of that instrument’s sound. As with much of Feldman’s solo cello writing, Lutra remains constricted to harmonics and the highest registers throughout, without any of the instrument’s famous sonorous qualities. A long aria for countertenor, unaccompanied save by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze humming (intentionally) for several passages. Taking sound at its most frail and revealing how it can endure.
The series began with a set of what were apparently largely improvised duets by Isaiah Ceccarelli and Katelyn Clark. Clark played organetto while Ceccarelli played percussion, a small keyboard or, unexpectedly, sang. Two such duets open and close his album Bow, while the rest of the disc contains compositions for string quartet and trio and two more semi-improvised duets, for violin and percussion. All of them share a strangely rustic aspect, with gently rocking, slightly ragged harmonies that, on occasion, give way to brief lyrical exclamations of utmost restraint. The subdued and homespun atmosphere kept reminding me of the British avant-garde in the early 1970s and, in a similar way, these deceptively simple pieces are staring to grow on me.
As a fan of James Tenney and Ben Johnston I was eager to hear more of Marc Sabat’s music. The two string quartets on Sabat’s CD, simply titled Harmony, share a soundworld closer to Tenney’s music for string ensembles, while combining both composers’ interest in making music for tuning systems outside of conventional Western equal temperament. The JACK Quartet gives nicely studied readings of 2012’s Jean-Philippe Rameau, in which Sabat uses just intonation to add a subtle torsion to an unbroken chain of chords, and the earlier, austere duet for violin and cello Claudius Ptolemy. In the latter work, sustained, isolated sounds brush up against each other like a piece by Webern in slow motion.
The other quartet, Euler Lattice Spirals Scenery, is a longer and more varied work with occasional passages of more hurried activity. The tuning is based upon applying Euler‘s concept of the Tonnetz to pure harmonic intervals, without the need to restrict them to a palette of 12 fixed tones. The phrasing and some of the harmonies used are often reminiscent of Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, with added piquancy from the microtonal shifts in intonation. At Oto, members of Apartment House played a 2015 work, Gioseffo Zarlino, where Philip Thomas joined in on piano to make an oddly charming combination of tempered and untempered sounds. The night before, Thomas’ solo set included two more of Sabat’s works. Without having to wonder about tuning theory, Nocturne and Ich fahre nach Köln allowed me to admire the way Sabat could get lopsided figures to loop and intertwine without sounding congested, like an irreverent Scelsi, relieved of a spiritual burden.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Chiyoko Szlavnics, Isaiah Ceccarelli, Linda Catlin Smith, Marc Sabat, Martin Arnold
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In its own quiet way, this is one of the major events I’ve been looking forward to in 2017. Over the past year or so I haven’t been alone in noticing how much of the freshest, most intriguing and affecting music has been coming from Canadian composers. This week, there are three nights of music this week focusing on new music by these composers and more at Cafe Oto. The gigs are to launch the first five releases in a ten-disc Canadian Composers Series on Another Timbre. I’ve had all five on heavy rotation at home the last few days and will need to write more about them during/after hearing the live shows.
The double CD of works by Linda Catlin Smith, Drifter, opens with a duet for viola and vibraphone. Cantilena‘s instrumentation recalls the magnificent 70-minute violin and percussion Dirt Road Another Timbre put out last year and is a brighter, briefer work with fewer complications to mull over. Any suspicion that the album would offer diminishing returns are evaporated by the 2014 Piano Quintet and Drifter itself, another odd pairing of instruments, guitar and piano.
The Quintet presents a hothouse atmosphere of lyrical flourishes in the strings, framed by restive, unresolved harmonies in the piano. It’s like a passage from romantic European chamber music at its ripest, held in suspense, their details enhanced while their function is diminished. When the strings finally break into sustained drones against the piano, it serves only to maintain the cool tension already achieved. In Drifter, the two instruments play in turn, the guitar as an echo of the piano, the same chords but transformed by the change in timbre and decay, surprising the unsuspecting listener with the way the harmonic material appears to be subtly transformed. Eventually, each takes turns in leading on the other, or playing in unison, an unhurried interplay of two partners sounding out each others’ qualities.
Over ten pieces, Apartment House and Quatuor Bozzini present Smith as a composer capable of finding great diversity of expression within a single, coherent compositional voice that focuses on depth more than breadth. Suggestions and traces of other music styles are recalled, but never in pastiche. Those string arpeggios in the Piano Quintet relate equally to folk playing as to a salon. The clearly delineated phrases of the Ricercar for solo cello are modelled on Baroque music but do not imitate. Unexpected shifts in mood come in the strange processional Moi Qui Tremblais and in the final string quartet, Folkestone, a cycle of introspective fragments in fragile diminuendo.
A small book of interviews has been published together with the CDs. From what I’ve skimmed so far, some common themes emerge between composers: the isolation, allowing them to work in blissful ignorance of more common theoretical hang-ups occupying colleagues’ minds in the US or Europe, is spoken of approvingly more than once. There’s also a repeated referral to the legacy of John Cage, particularly via Morton Feldman. Previous generations who might have claimed such an influence would frequently be stridently avant-garde, often more in style than in substance. While never sounding derivative, distinct traits can be observed that show a firm understanding of Feldman’s music. Ambivalence of mood, the embrace of traditional harmony while simultaneously rejecting its traditional structural function. The allowance of stasis, a musical ‘surface’ of sustained dynamics, typically tending towards the quiet. A careful consideration of instruments’ attributes, enabling otherwise unusual combinations of instruments to be heard in new ways, in contrast or in complement.
Another echo of Feldman can be heard in Martin Arnold’s album, The Spit Veleta. The three works on this disc comprise a sort of extended suite. In each of them, the music continues in a slow and seemingly aimless way, yet always with a faint suggestion of a waltz. There’s always the sense of something a little faded, diffuse, of what might have once been a more rigid order. If the music that is left is more elusive, then it is at once more free yet more sophisticated. In Points & Walzes for solo piano and then in Slip Minuet for solo violin, each with titles referring to dances in triple rhythm, the musician (Philip Thomas and Mira Benjamin, respectively) circles elegantly, if a little erratically. The two combine on the final, title work.
In each piece, a change occurs halfway through. The delicate counterpoint of Points & Walzes gives way to a relentless tessitura of chords in the piano’s lower register. Slip Minuet suddenly turns to pizzicato, articulating a downbeat to a dance otherwise inaudible. There is more silence than sound, yet the underlying shape of the music is still clearly perceptible. It sounds like the violinist is accompanying a tune heard only in her head. In The Spit Veleta, the duo build a slow, complex rhythm of intertwining dances, before freezing, erasing almost all memory of the music with a succession of soft chords and dyads, played simultaneously. The piano sound decays, revealing the violin’s sustained tone underneath, a faint colouration of the silence suspended between one isolated chord and the next.
There’s a beautiful poignancy and melancholy in these pieces, found in the way that Arnold allows the matter of his music to be reduced to the most spare and etiolated state without ever suggesting that the music is withholding anything from the listener. For what could easily be considered as studies in decay, there is a welcome lack of postmodern didacticism. In fact, it reminded me more of modernist thinking. I’ve referred before to Guy Davenport’s quote that completing an image “involves a stupidity of perception“. Hugh Kenner observed that in the twentieth century, Westerners learned to interpret fragments outside of their original settings, gathering meaning from non-consecutive arrays. As Ezra Pound wrote, “Points define a periphery.” Perhaps in the respect these Canadians’ sensibility is like my own Australian one: as colonial cultures, we can accept ruins as what they are, not just what they once were.
This post is already too long and I want to write about Marc Sabat and Isaiah Ceccarelli after I’ve heard them live at Oto. Right now I need to mention Chiyoko Szlavnics’ remarkable During a Lifetime. Szlavnics pits live acoustic musicians against pure sine tones; a combination well-known for its use by Alvin Lucier, Warren Burt and others. While those latter composers typically exploit the small differences in intonation between acoustic pitches and pure tones, Szlavnics works with the same deceptively simple combinations to very different ends. During a Lifetime is for saxophone quartet and electronic tones, but for much of the piece sounds like neither. A large, complex multiphonic sound swells, pulses, grows rough and then smooth again as variances in tone between the instruments modulate each other as much as the sine waves do. The electronics merge and disappear, then emerge again as one of the voices in the ensemble. This played by the Konus Ensemble, who do an exceptional job of balancing clear tones against some subtle, raspier edges. I heard these guys’ superb performance of Jürg Frey’s Memoire, Horizon at Huddersfield a couple of years ago, and they’re playing both pieces at Oto on Thursday.
