The question is not whether or not what Cage is doing is art. I’m convinced that it will be art without even hearing the piece, only because he does it. The question is, and it is because of John we must ask this question: Is music an art form to begin with? Was it always show biz? And by show biz I mean Monteverdi…. What I mean by show biz is fantastic show biz. That a new piece of Boulez, perhaps, presented in a classy hall in Paris is like Sarah Bernhardt doing a monolog. Without the histrionics, of course. That’s what I mean. By holding the moment. By capturing the moment in every sense of the word.
— Morton Feldman, in conversation with Peter Gena.
I often say to people I’m not interested in music, I’m interested in art. And I still believe that; I can point to a composer and say, “That’s an artist,” and I can point to someone else and say, “Well, they’re just a composer.”
— Anton Lukoszevieze, in conversation with Robert Worby.
It’s probably this commitment to music as art that makes me go to Apartment House gigs whenever I can. I was going to say that it’s their commitment to playing unjustly-neglected composers, but sadly the state of the arty end of the music business often means the two are the same thing. I got to go to their 20th anniversary gig at Cafe Oto last month but never got around to writing about it. Luckily, the whole thing (almost*) is now on the BBC web site for the next month.
What struck me most at the time was how well the programme flowed, presenting diverse types of music with a strong defining character for the whole evening. The playing order is different on the radio but the strength of the music remains. Listening again, you can hear how each piece alternates between two extremes of musical language – the minimal and the seemingly anarchic. There’s a shared way of thinking behind each of these two extremes: the predominant compositional thought given to the organisation of material, the innovative use of structure and the careful handling of sonic materials to present them in a new light. As art, each piece touches the listener through its own intrinsic qualities without relying on a narrative, a mood, a subject, or other high-falutin’ appeals to sentimentality.
There’s a mix of new composers (Luiz Henrique Yudo, Jennifer Walshe), old stuff (John Cage) and revelations: a new chamber ensemble arrangement of Henning Christiansen’s fluxorum organum (different from the one I heard in Huddersfield in 2013) and George Maciunas played at least as well as Mozart. Maciunas, he’s supposed to be essential, right? Every textbook mentions him, but nobody plays him. He might as well be Josquin. (I’m reading that Feldman interview again. “This whole business of accessibility is a lot of baloney.”)
The radio show also plays a couple of pieces from that Apartment House CD of Maciunas’ music I wrote about early this year, so you get to hear that, too. You also get to hear composer Laurence Crane messing around with various found objects and Lore Lixenberg singing John Cage’s Aria together with his Concert for Piano and Orchestra – a particularly fine rendition of each.
* To recreate the full concert experience at home, break for a couple of intervals and play The Fall** while having a few drinks.
** First Brix era mostly, I think.
[…] Henrique Yudo’s 2007 piece A QUARTET FOR CLAUDE MOLLET. Like the Yudo piece I heard at the last Apartment House gig, it’s a grid of not-quite-exactly-repeating figures. This time, a string-quartet see-sawed […]