Because no-one wants to be just adequate.
A couple of weeks ago I saw the JACK Quartet play at Wigmore Hall. The stand-out pieces began and ended the concert: I finally got to hear Ruth Crawford Seeger’s superb String Quartet played live. I’d never heard Horațiu Rădulescu’s music played live, either, and his 5th Quartet “before the universe was born” – consisting pretty much entirely of harmonics played on retuned strings – was also an exceptional experience.
You can read that review for more about the concert; but at half-time I pondered over my overpriced-but-actually-rather-drinkable shiraz about a discussion earlier that day, about “experimental” music, which I wrote about last week.
Then, I had another thought. Just before the break the quartet had played Julian Anderson’s Light Music, a piece he had written in his teens. Only recently performed for the first time, it’s the earliest work the composer keeps in his oeuvre. Strongly influenced by the spectralist composers (Rădulescu and French composers of the time), the piece is technically fine, sonically interesting, pleasant overall but a little shapeless, and it starts to drag. Each section seemed to carry on a little too long, exploring and assessing each new effect.
By contrast, Crawford’s quartet always feels as though it is over too soon. I always wish there was more of it, that each section could just keep going. In some ways it seems as though this feeling is part of the music’s subject: the final movement is structured so as to preclude the possibility of continuation right from the start.
Which is the more experimental work, in the conventionally understood sense of the word? Anderson’s piece embraces the newest musical thinking of its time; Crawford’s predicts future musical thought. But which piece presents us with more experimentation? The Anderson quartet is struggling to accommodate new material; Crawford’s material is held in absolute control.
Too much, too long: it seems to me that this is the true defining condition of experimental music. Each new discovery is presented with some degree of excessive emphasis, partly out a didactic need for exposition and partly out of uncertainty of its own success.
It’s a problem I’m aware of in my own music: the nagging sense that this thing is of less interest to the listener than it is to me, that they’ve picked up on it quicker than I thought. Remembering that thumbnail description of Cage’s music of always having either too much or not enough happening in it, I err the other way and present excess with a kind of Beckettian obstinacy (“I’m doing it on purpose.“)
I would not be displeased with a concert that programmed two performances of Crawford’s quartet.
