There’s a CD rip of Samuel Beckett’s play Words and Music in my MP3 player, with the music composed by Morton Feldman. I’ve tagged it as an opera. Earlier this week I replied to a tweet asking what composers think of Philip Pullman’s comment that “Structure is a superficial feature of narrative”. My hot take was that narrative is really a subset of structure. Thinking about it now, Beckett’s dramatic works exemplify this concept beautifully. Beckett wrote several radio plays that juxtapose words and music and, even when there is no specific musical content much of his later writing eschews development of plot or character in favour of structural procedures such as repetition with variation, elaboration, transposition and recapitulation.
Last Thursday the new music ensemble An assembly, directed by composer/conductor Jack Sheen, presented a double bill of words and music that may or may not be opera at the Round Chapel in Hackney. Beckett’s Words and Music, conceived as a radio work, was given a live, stage performance with Feldman’s accompanying music. Beckett wrote the play in 1961 but was never fully satisfied with the music that others composed for it. Feldman’s music was composed in 1987, the last year of his life. Some ten years earlier, the two had consciously collaborated on an opera, Neither. Both men shared an expressed dislike of opera. The opera had one singer, no characters, no plot, no specified staging and almost no libretto.
The staging of Words and Music in Hackney was a fitting counterpart to Neither. The musicians, singer and dancer from the first half of the programme vacated the space and the audience in the balcony looked down onto the large empty room below as the drama between the music and two voices played out, unseen. If it is not opera then it is, at least, as Luigi Nono described his Prometeo, a “tragedy of listening”. In alternation and then, reluctantly, together, the voices of actors Alex Felton and Peter Clements and the musicians of An assembly search for a way of giving meaning to sentiment. Listening with an ear for music, one is struck by the musical aspects of the words; not just in vocabulary but more particularly in construction. The counterpoint between one voice and another, between voice and music, the introduction of themes, reoccurence of phrases, turns and changes of subject. The words are heard as part of a joint composition with the music. Feldman’s unusually brief musical interjections are surprising in the way that each presents such a distinct contrast in mood from the preceding one. Like his last work, it suggests ways in which his music may have developed had he lived longer. It also makes you think it’s a pity he got fired from his job as a soundtrack composer.
The first half of the evening was the premiere of Anton Lukoszevieze’s Opéret OPERA Operec. Better known as a cellist, Lukoszevieze’s piece is perhaps unsurprisingly composed for four cellist, supplemented by a keyboard player, percussionist, singer and dancer. It has ‘opera’ in the title so let’s say it is. With the dancer and coloured floor lighting, the staging recalled Lukoszevieze’s chamber arrangement of Henning Christiansen’s fluxorum organum, adding a layer of oblique theatre and ritual. With voice provided by Josephine Stephenson, the collage-like nature of the work also suggested a connection with the realisation of Tom Phillips’ opera Irma from last year.
Opéret OPERA Operec juxtaposes, through no objective necessity, the words of Georges Perec and Benjamin Péret. Perec is presented through dance, composed out of material from Perec’s Species of Spaces and performed here by Rachel Krische, ranging far and wide across the available space, at times part of the ensemble before striking off on her own again. Péret’s poetry was presented in music: the singing was fairly plain and simple throughout, while the musical accompaniment was, according to Lukoszevieze, generated through “phonetic patterns, voice pitch translation, braille and puns”. This may explain the strange sense of collage throughout the work, despite the absence of diversity in the material’s sources. The music was by turns arbitrary and incongruous, redolent of other genres yet never confirming to a recognisable model. It had the air of old-school dada, as an insolent travesty of a salon recital or cabaret show. Rather like Satie’s theatrical music, an array of familiar objects were subjected to some capricious outside force to create something more unnerving than amusing. Then the work unexpectedly ended with a long litany intoned over a harsh, juddering wall of sound as the percussionist displayed and discarded a series of posters containing progressively more complicated spurious equations. Make sense who may.
My only complaint is that at times the words could be hard to hear, but this is the consequence of playing in the boomy acoustics of a church, coupled with balcony seating and, thanks to the late onset of cold in February, a head full of gunk. Most punters kept their coats and scarves on, but it was worth the trouble to hear and see such and imaginative and thought-provoking programme.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anton Lukoszevieze, Morton Feldman, Samuel Beckett
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Principal Sound: Feldman and Nono in particular
Wednesday 21 February 2018
In the days when information was scarce, one of the few readily available recordings of Morton Feldman’s late work was the CD of Joan La Barbara singing Three Voices. It was an invaluable, but unusual, entry point. A rare example of Feldman working with tape – the only one outside of his experiments in the early 50s – and a long work for voice alone, with other small curiosities that set it apart from his other pieces of the time. Last weekend, the Principal Sound festival at St John’s Smith Square presented a chance to hear this strange music in a new way.
Having just written about the importance of seeing/hearing music performed live, Juliet Fraser’s performance of Three Voices was a perfect example of what can be gained from the concert experience. I haven’t heard Fraser’s recording of the piece from a couple of years ago, but her performance on Friday night showed this piece and Feldman’s musical qualities in general at their finest. Imperceptible shifts in shading to the voice(s) kept the music hovering in an ambiguous emotional space, between tender and cold, sensuous and forbidding. Fraser’s perceptive programme notes mentioned that she chose to disregard the score’s instruction against vibrato; this had the added effect of softening the edges of the notes, slightly blurring the distinction between the live voice and the ‘tombstoney’ loudspeakers at each side, inviting a connection to be made between them. Working, unusually, with such a ‘full’ sounding instrument as the human voice, Feldman’s constricted harmonies cause beatings and overtones to emerge between the voices – this was clarified somewhat by the spatial distinction across the stage, particularly when the three identical voices hocket back and forth on the same pitch.
It was a smartly-programmed concert. Feldman is the source of inspiration for the concert series, but the programme this year focused on Luigi Nono, particularly his late works, which share Feldman’s need for hushed expanses of time searching for a form. Each work contained an elegy or dedication of some sort, and the choice of Feldman’s work echoed Nono’s use of electronics and spatialisation of sound. The series began with Nono’s A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum: flute and clarinet hidden away in the upper reaches of the church, swathed in trailing streams of harmonic resonances and echoes that circled around the audience below.
Over the weekend I got to hear the Quatuor Bozzini play again, after hearing them play Jürg Frey so well in Huddersfield, years ago. Their rendering of Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima was a telling contrast to the interpretation I heard the Arditti Quartet give ten years ago. In his late works, Nono contructs fragile webs of sound out of the most meagre of materials. Stark, unpolished, often rudimentary instrumental gestures, broken off from any phrasing or context. With Arditti, Nono’s quartet became a transcendence of musical refuse into thwarted lyricism. With Bozzini, it became more coherent, like remnants of an ancient culture that has endured the ravages of time, faded but still refulgent. The following afternoon, the Bozzini’s two violinists played the duet “Hay que caminar” soñando. Nono’s last piece remains one of my favourite works, for its miraculous capturing of sonorities in the same realm as his electroacoustic works, produced entirely through acoustic means. Clemens Merkel and Alissa Cheung’s use of bow pressure, placement and angles brought out colouration of the violins’ sound that rivalled the electronics heard on the first night.
I don’t want to run down a checklist of everything that happened, so I’ll just mention a few more things that stick in my head now. Hearing Exaudi premiere a new work for unaccompanied chorus by Linda Catlin Smith, getting to experience Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop playing Bryn Harrison’s Receiving the Approaching Memory live and relishing that it’s as labyrinthine for them as it is for us, the Bozzini Quartet playing something by Claudia Molitor that has finally made me start to pay attention and, conversely, something by the wonderful Aldo Clementi that I found, to my surprise and shame, dull.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman
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Hearing it, seeing it.
Wednesday 14 February 2018
I’ve seen a few cases of really petty criticism lately about people talking of ‘seeing a concert’ instead of hearing it. It’s a stupid argument based on false pedantry. This doesn’t mean there are significant differences between hearing a recording of a piece of music and hearing it performed live. Apart from context, the visual aspect plays a large role.
I’ve written in the past about the advantages of being at a live concert over listening to a record, and of the problems in how to present live music with minimal visual content (i.e. laptops). Last week’s Kammer Klang gig at Cafe Oto highlighted some of these contrasts in a very stark way, juxtaposing a tape-only work by Hanna Hartman (who often plays live with an elaborate, visually-intriguing setup) with two chamber compositions performed by Distractfold that both used theatrics. (This was all followed by Jennifer Walshe so, yeah, Performance.)
Even in the most traditional music gig, visual cues to the music abound, drawing attention to structure and the interplay of elements that may not be immediately obvious to a casual listener. (Walshe’s piece, Is it cool to try hard now? included a section that referred to how these gestures can be faked to elecit an emotional response.) Distractfold played Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s piece The man who couldn’t stop laughing, a work I’d previously heard on the radio. In addition to electronic playback, the musicians dress up for the piece and are required to grimace or gesticulate at various points in the score. It adds another layer to the piece, one which I had been unaware of when hearing it the first time. I don’t know how much it helps to have the theatrical part. In a crowded space like Oto (Kammer Klang nights seem to be habitually rammed) it’s easy to miss a lot of what’s going on; plus I’m biased towards sound and less well disposed to the cabaret-like stylised subjectivity on which the theatre was based.
The first piece, Barblina Meierhans’ May I ask you something? also used theatre, but with a different approach, at once both more naturalistic and more deconstructive. Beginning with a kind of meta-narrative of the musicians discussing the piece and performance instead of playing, then sliding back and forth between music and theatre. The approach came across like the work of one of the composers associated with Bastard Assignments – with a focus on speech, performance gesture, memory and social context – only with more overt ‘music music’ content. Again, it could be hard to see, but it became activity that merged with the surrounding audience.
I want to finish with a counterexample. I first heard John Lely’s The Harmonics of Real Strings performed by Anton Lukoszevieze at a live concert and was a little underwhelmed. Even for my reductionist tastes it seemed a little too simple: a slow sweep up the length of a cello string, from low to high, pressing lightly to produce harmonics. Months later, I bought the CD recording and became intrigued. Harmonics don’t ascend in the same linear arrangement as fully-sounded pitch, but emerge and disappear, sounding lower or higher according to each harmonic node reached. As sound only, without watching that finger progressing up the fingerboard to each successive node, the music gained a depth and complexity that my eyes had denied me.
