Boring Like A Drill.

(Continued from Part 2, here.)

It’s the last day of the year. On my desk is a small ammonite fossil; it is 140 million years old. It was handed to me as I entered the premiere of Jennifer Walshe’s new piece TIME TIME TIME, an ambitious commission by LCMF and the Serpentine Gallery. It’s a collaborative work, with contributions by Áine O’Dwyer, Lee Patterson and M.C. Schmidt, with a quartet of musicians distributed around the audience. The text, by Walshe and Timothy Morton, deals with the title subject in a similarly emphatic yet inarticulate way. Any honest subjective approach to the concept of time and its consequences must be one of incomprehension, of struggling to understand how time truly relates to subjective experience. Each audience member was holding a fossil of an age we can barely even conceive of in the abstract.

I’ve previously discussed Walshe’s recent work ALL THE MANY PEOPLS and the way it observes the new conditions of subjectivity in the present age. TIME TIME TIME shows how people must invent their own understandings of the passage of time, from the deep geological time of the earth’s development, of the dinosaurs, how it is measured and apportioned, to how it passes.

Compared to other performances by the same composer, it unfolds at a less frenetic pace, including a song from O’Dwyer, dance from Walshe, resplendent in a green sequined dress on a catwalk in the middle of the room, and theatre as performers crawled through the space imitating extinct species. In between all this was antiphonal patter from Walshe and Schmidt, accompanied by videos depicting fictional dinosaurs, geothermal simulations of the earth’s interior, smartphones, atomic clocks and observations of insitutions at nearby Greenwich on the Prime Meridian. Amidst the urgency, the frustrations, the urgency, through it all came a mood of reverie, yearning to grasp something that can never be possessed, as one might long for the past.

It all sounded as good as it looked, with humour and pathos balanced nicely throughout in a way that carried the capacity audience along. Most memorable still is the period where vocalists, musicians and electronic artists combined to surround audiences with sounds resembling primeval swampland, with the innocence and charm of an aural Rousseau painting. Throughout the evening, motionless above the stage, a lone figure sat cross-legged in meditation.

The final night was combined poetry by CA Conrad with short films, including Marianna Simnett’s new film The Bird Game which combined the very British traditions of nursery rhymes and public information films. The two new musical commissions presented were for orchestra, again conducted by Jack Sheen. Burrows & Fargion’s Let us stop this mad rush towards the end was beautifully executed but suffered from a fatally close resemblance to Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet in conception and method. Angharad Davies’ I ble’r aeth y gwrachod i gyd…? on the other hand was a powerful experience. Compositions by musicians with a greater reputation for improvisation can often come across as flawed or lacking (whether fairly or not) but this was thrillingly stark and complex in equal measures. Davies’ presence as a soloist was shadowy, confimed to recordings of her playing violin inside a church: isolated slashes of sound, amplified and left to resonate. The orchstra echoed and augmented the violin with dark harmonies and dense coloration. The initial impression of call and response broadened out into an orchestration of and counterpart to the tape, in a way that remained clear and controlled without ever becoming simplistic. It would be good to hear this again.

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Tags: Angharad Davies, Jennifer Walshe
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(Continued from Part 1, here.)

I’ve already said eclectic, haven’t I? The thrid night began with a Bulgarian folk ritual, performed by the Mogila Kukeri Group: enactments of peasant life encircled by animal-headed creatures swathed in dozens of cowbells. The look and sound of these costumes was overpowering, the bells loud enough to drown out even the bagpipes. There was an emphasis in their movements in establishing boundaries, defining a space and direct representation of common activities. It was the closest the festival came to the heart of its theme of witchcraft. With the departing Bulgarians still fading away into the distance, the space was given over to Fluxus, with the combined forces of Musarc and An Assembly performing Alison Knowles’ Work for Wounded Furniture, segueing into La Monte Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. Again, common objects and simple actions were presented plain, with Knowles giving us inadvertent theatre and music through establishing a new frame of reference for observing the partial destruction and ineffectual repair of household objects, while Young gives a new focus to unintentional sound, and to the inherent theatricality of making music. The musicians regrouped in the wings for Heleen van Haegenborgh’s new piece Material Affordance, which awkwardly tried to make sense out of its mix of antiphonal singing and half-blowing over recorders before suddenly setting off on a march to nowhere across the space and out again.

More striking was another LCMF commission, Alwynne Pritchard’s piece for pianist Zubin Kanga, Heart of Glass. Kanga fearlessly carried out this piece on, in and around the piano while confined to tuxedo and stilettos, deftly performing complex musical gestures in an apparent fugue state. Pritchard’s audio score dictates the the pianist, attempting to approximate a state of hypnosis. There were accompanying videos as well, which I could never get a good look at. The premise of the piece required a certain suspension of disbelief but I suspect would still be an effective piece of music without the theatrical element, due to the obscutiry of the sounds and the amorphous, dream logic behind them. The following night, Kanga premeried Michael Finnissy’s Hammerklavier, another LCMF commission. Again combining piano with video, Finnissy’s typically brilliant and incisive discourse on Sviatoslav Richter and Beethoven was paired with Adam de la Cour’s film collage of Richter in concert and vintage gay erotica. The alchemical connections between these elements were stronger for being palpable even as they resist (or are forbidden from) being addressed in words, even as the cultural references are as opaque to me as Bulgarian folk rituals.

There is a common problem to so much “magical” or transformative art, in that it makes grand claims for itself beyond art that are hard to sustain. I’m not sure what Bhanu and Rohini Kapil’s One or the other is not enough was supposed to be about; all I got was a muddled lecture about metaphysics and theosophists over a small pile of stuff. Almost inevitably, more audience participation was requested. Shamans are a pushy lot, it seems. There were films, too, which I can’t comment on much other than this bemused Anglophone observer was reminded of the existence of that curious sub-genre of postwar European artists who were still bravely socking it to the same 1905-Bolshevik pasteboard gallery of priests and generals as late as the turn of this century.

The theme of “eavesdropping” on Thursday night incorporated Rowland Hill’s performance of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (“a recreation of”, according to the programme). The change in gender wasn’t so much the confounding element as the change in form: a performance for an audience, heard but not seen. The interpersonal dynamic here was the same as a particularly uncomfortable standup comedy gig. Louis D’Heudieres’ Laughter Studies 6 provided actual comedy with its noble but doomed attempts to alternately describe and/or imitate a stop-start series of unheard sounds played to members of An Assembly through headphones; art is mediated experience, and all mediation is distortion.

I’ll give Cerith Wyn Evans’ …. )( the benefit of the doubt as it was described as a “precum teaser” for a much larger commission for the 2020 LCMF. The hieratic, slow-paced performance on piano and gongs was betrayed by a perfunctory and non-committal ending, so let’s hope it’s a fragment of a work in progress. The set by duo O YAMA O (Rie Nakajima and Keiko Yamamoto) was a disappointment, considering Nakajima’s captivating and inventive interpretation of Alvin Lucier’s Chambers this summer. Maybe it was the vast space of Ambika P3, or one of us was having an off night, but the duo’s small sounds came across as inert and trivial.

Finally, there was the chance to hear Cassandra Miller’s incredible Duet for Cello and Orchestra played live. For this performance the soloist was Anton Lukoszevieze, with an orchestra conducted by Jack Sheen. I’ve raved about this music before, so I’ll just compare this interpretation to the Tectonics recording: here was more grit and grain in the cello’s stasis, with a more rough-hewn phrasing in the orchestra’s tangled melodies. This brought out more of the folk-inspired aspect of Miller’s music, as heard in other of her pieces. The piece remarkably maintains an inner calm, even as the interweaving of the orchestral parts pushes the piece to the brink of chaos (think Cage’s unbridled simultaneity instead of Ligeti’s intricacy). The poignancy of the closing cadenza was felt all the more in the faint, exhausted rasp of the cello’s harmonic soliloquy.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alison Knowles, Alwynne Pritchard, Cassandra Miller, La Monte Young, Louis D’Heudieres, Michael Finnissy
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Flubbed last year but saw all of the latest London Contemporary Music Festival. Curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen put together the most ambitious programme yet – six gigs over nine days, with bold, eclectic programming and newly-commissioned large-scale works. The theme of “Witchy Methodologies” implied that it might demand the punter to buy into a ragbag of mismatched and demotic metaphysical woo. This was thankfully avoided, although each of the first two nights did feature performers who expected the audience to join in. The blurb that promised “rituals and reenchantment, doubling and transformation, gossip and eavesdropping, hauntologies and orreries, mysticism and technomancy” etc. was interpreted broadmindedly enough to make a varied, compelling programme, setting very different works into a new context. Questions over the nature of transformation and meaning ran through each evening in music that ranged from musical table-rapping to Fluxus.

It all began this year with a performance of Ligeti’s Poème symphonique, repurposed here as a kind of initiation rite. As a bold but seemingly empty gesture, it served as a threshold to the unknown. Its soundworld was echoed later in the evening by Fritz Hauser’s Schraffur, which began with Hauser alone in the middle of the vast space of Ambika P3 scraping a notched drumstick and then multiplied throughout the audience, with performers using different resonant surfaces at hand to create an enveloping cicada-like din.

The rest of the gig was all voices, with the group Musarc giving beautifully realised performances, unexpectedly matching Poulenc’s Un soir de Neige against new commissions by Joseph Kohlmaier and Lina Lapelytė. The two premieres made simple use out of call-and-responde and convergence in a way that felt tentative and underdeveloped, making both somewhat disappointing in their lack of adventurousness. By contrast, Jennifer Walshe’s The White Noisery was a powerfully sustained celebration cum laceration of pop culture, tradition and social movements. A slightly older work (2013), it received its first UK performance here and gave a rare occasion to hear Walshe’s music without the commanding presence of the composer herself. Musarc was fully up meeting the same level of manic intensity and sudden mood swings, in a piece where the usual ironic postmodern collage of cultural references is turned in upon itself, depicting a world where all experience is mediated. It was a sign of things to come, later in the festival.

The first Sunday was a quieter night: “On Hauntology” was appropriately given over to the past. Susan Hiller’s video Belshazzar’s Feast feels quaint now, while Rosemary Brown’s little piano pieces have taken on a new currency. Brown gained notoriety in the Sixties for her musical medium schtick, channelling the spirits of Chopin and Liszt to transcribe new compositions they dictated to her. As observed by Nicolas Slonimsky, the old masters’ talents had been “fatally affected by their protracted states of death”, but he also saw that she was a musically gifted woman who had been denied the opportunities to develop her talent. Strangely, her use of stable tonality, gentle arpeggiation and modest scale means that her music fits right in with what would now be classified as “modern composition”. The Brown was interleaved with short improvisations by veteran vocalist Maggie Nicols, who continued the theme of confused groping for the past.

High point of the evening was a new commission by Eva-Maria Houben. A peaceful, silent place is a lengthy work for positive organ and piano. Houben played organ, sat across the hall from pianist Siwan Rhys, who had previously played Rosemary Brown. Houben’s organ pieces can range from subdued to almost imperceptible, and here she blended this restrained gamut of dynamics into a subtle, ever-changing palette of tones and textures. The tone of the organ became particularly mysterious, sounding muted, half-stopped and breathless. The cavernous space became part of the instrument, as Houben’s playing sought out different resonances and overtones, creating new harmonics out of the air. At times it was hard to tell if she was just very soft or completely silent, letting the ambience reverberate. Rhys played piano with infinite patience, an occasional high chord in close harmony that rippled through the sustained organ tones, stirring up new emergent sounds, gently pushing the air a little more.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Jennifer Walshe
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Frank Denyer’s hour-long work for chorus and large ensemble The Fish that became the Sun received its premiere at a sold-out performance in Huddersfield last week, some twenty-three years after the work was completed. The work was recorded for Another Timbre last year and has just been released to coincide with the concert. I’ve written about Denyer’s music before, but these were all briefer compositions for much smaller forces. The predominant tone in those pieces was of a very close, personal intimacy. What happens when he composes on a broader scale?

Subtitled ‘Songs of the Dispossessed’, The Fish that became the Sun matches voices with diverse groups of musicians; between them, forty musicians play a total of eighty-seven instruments. The family of sounds drawn together is highly eclectic and restricted to small groups and combinations heard at any one time. The most immediately striking thing about the piece is Denyer’s extensive use of found objects and specially-constructed instruments made of broken and discarded items – junk. This alien orchestra is joined by instruments including sitar, crumhorns, dulcimers and modern Western instruments. Different tunings abound. The use of space for the music is an essential component, enhancing the theatrical dimension of the work. Despite the obvious parallels that can be drawn, the theatre is less like that of Harry Partch and more like the music of George Crumb: a set of tableaux that shift from one scene to the next in highly discrete emotional states, each one a contrast – sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring – yet steadily building up a single, complex image. The strangeness comes from less from the surface and more from the substance, and its significance.

The panoply of unusual sounds (I doubt that many of them have been heard by listeners before) are so unfamiliar as to resemble sounds from nature, less refined and thus less knowable. The chorus sings wordlessly; the musicians dispersed through the space also sing and hum. Moments of simple unison playing clash with microtones and non-uniform timbres. The raw, unpolished order of nature culminates when a pair of children sing the only words heard in the piece. Their song has the gnomic simplicity of a nursery rhyme, along with the fraught ambiguity and underlying cruelty.

The word ‘ritual’ seems to get used too freely when describing pieces by modern composers. The Fish that became the Sun is packed with too much music to be considered, at least in recording, a document of a performance: it succeeds as an extended, purely musical statement, immediately rewarding at each moment. It does, however, operate on the level of a myth. From the title to the rhymes and distant fanfare at the end, we are placed in ther realm of transformative myth, the type of transformation that drives an origin story, to explain where we are now and how we got there. Denyer wrote the piece through the early 90s; Michael Turnbull’s sleeve notes describe the work as a response to the times. History supposedly having ended, we entered uncharted territory. The signs are ominous, and seem even more so now, but Denyer’s transformations are equally hopeful, as with the orchestra made from detritus. How much of culture is a constructed paradise and how much of it is a defence against the darkness? The Fish that became the Sun may signal a path to redemption or a fate to which we are condemned, but we don’t know which.

The recording features many of the musicians at the Huddersfield premiere, the Octandre Ensemble conducted by Jon Hargreaves, the New London Chamber Choir and Consortium5, with Benjamin Marquise Gilmore as the solo violinist. The performance and recording is satisfying to the extent that I can’t imagine the work being carried off with greater clarity or force. In conception, execution and presentation, The Fish that became the Sun is an immense achievement.

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Tags: Frank Denyer
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