Boring Like A Drill.

Fourteen years later, the Birmingham production of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht is still fresh in my mind. I was persuaded by a friend to go to Berlin to see this new production staged by Le Balcon, the French company which has been steadily working its way through the entire Licht cycle with insightful, imaginative productions based on relatively limited resources. The main motivation was to see how they interpreted the theme that underpins Mittwoch: a double image that both celebrates humanity’s ability for aspirational cooperation, while also judging it as inadequate without devotion to the divine forces of the universe, as personified in the opera cycle by Michael, Eva and Lucifer. As other critics had observed, the Birmingham version tended to focus on the optimistic side, with only faint insinuations of the more sinister undercurrents that appear throughout the opera. The performance was held at the Deutsche Oper, which already implied limitations in how the opera would be presented; confined to a proscenium arch with the audience looking on, the staging would not have the immersive qualities envisioned by Stockhausen in his conceived opera for the future. In a way, it appeared Le Balcon were going to press this to their advantage, emphasising that the activities we witnessed were compromised and incomplete.

I’ll start with the helicopters, since that’s what everyone always wants to talk about. They were, of course, not presented live on-site as they were in Birmingham – we were deprived of that spectacle. We were given a replay of the event, staged earlier in the month by four pilots with camera crew and the slightly apprehensive-looking string quartet of the Deutsche Oper taking to the skies in the fields outside Berlin. By way of introduction, we heard Stockhausen speaking before the world premiere some thirty years ago. The sound mix was loud, hot, the strings straining to be heard over the chatter of rotor blades and the roar of the engines; it buffeted the audience with a constant barrage of noise for half an hour. When the score called the musicians to recite numbers, they instinctively bellowed them out above the din, without consideration of aesthetic refinement. The quartet appeared as beaten down as the audience felt, each looking very cramped and claustrophobic in their small cabin; their brows with unrelieved expressions of concentration on the task at hand. It was an atmosphere of highly controlled desperation. Helicopter-String Quartet is often described as an analogy for space travel; at the Deutsche Oper we were reminded that the act itself is a difficult, rigidly disciplined and exhausting chore. Perversely, these reasons made it the best performance of the work I’ve ever experienced.

That feeling of generalised anxiety pervaded the entire opera. What exactly were we witnessing? Birmingham Opera gave the work a carnivalesque staging, complete with additional dance and theatre during the initial Greeting and the concluding Farewell. More detached in Berlin, we observed. Deutsche Oper’s chorus gave a superb rendition of the choral Welt-Parlament, backed by a rather unpleasant video animation of rippling and cascading sand, partly blocked by a large piece of modernist public sculpture. The sculpture and video projections remained throughout, the animations all sharing the same quality of either very out-of-date computer graphics or almost up-to-date artificial intelligence rendering. The unstable, hallucinatory images started to grow on me during the night as their slippery, insubstantial attempts at appearing real became a thematic element with growing importance. Le Balcon’s ensemble performed Orchester-Finalisten under dim lighting, the soloists scattered listlessly about the stage, stirring into action when needed, gaining enthusiasm only when it was their turn to lead. The accompanying collage of sounds that plays through the scene was again mixed very high, blurring the difference between what was played live and what instrumental sounds came from the soundtrack. Human figure and video image became harder to distinguish, the real became illusory. Over each successive solo, a trend towards diminishment and entropy became noticeable. The Helicopter String Quartet followed immediately, without a break.

Le Balcon provided the singers and the musicians for Michaelion, the long, strange scene that concludes the action. The mystery play aspect to Stockhausen’s operas was most obvious here, just as the exact argument he is presenting remained obscure. Heroically committed performances by the soloists and some bizarre pageantry held the audience’s attention while the scene progressed in the unhurried manner of later Stockhausen, but you kept wondering where it was all leading. A low state of anxiety had steadily built up during the night, so that the ambiguously-framed conclusion of the opera became more stinging in its lack of neat resolution. It ends with hopes; hopes that people can follow the principles of Michael and Eva and that Lucifer may work with them, which are high hopes indeed. Cynicism has no place in Stockhausen’s reality but in this production it’s hard to look at the scene’s ending in any other way: whereas hope is typically a positive note on which to end a drama, in this case it arrives as a settlement, unsatisfactory but the only workable alternative. Was it all too negative? Perhaps, acting as a counterpoint, yin to Birmingham’s yang. I doubt if it’s possible for an ideal interpretation of Mittwoch to be imagined, let alone performed. Both stagings I’ve seen had their own, opposing ways of warping your perception.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
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Jules Reidy: Clerestory [Thrill Jockey]. Reidy continues to develop a subtle but sophisticated form of tonality in the two pieces paired on this album, all originating from the unprepossessing source of playing acoustic guitar. Clerestory follows on from Instants & Their Echoes, further expanding the palette of sounds while keeping a coherent but pronounced concept of tuning. The first piece is Shadow Symmetric, commissioned and performed by the JACK Quartet as a result of their recent round of workshopping sessions. A straight-up, unadorned acoustic quartet, in which Reidy builds upon a simple, harmonious texture by alternating between two sets of just intonation scales, each fairly normal in themselves but with enough divergences between them to create a perceptible tension between consonance and dissonance as the Quartet moves from one chord to the next. The steady pace, evenness of dynamics and lack of vibrato suggest a concert of viols, and the slightly grainy, rusticated harmonies add to the impression of music arriving from somewhere outside of time. The JACK musicians know their just intonation and don’t need to make heavy work of hitting the unusual pitches specified by Reidy. You could crank it up to get the full effect of the strange harmonics but it works better as a quiet piece, seemingly still on the surface but faintly bustling in its depths.

Clerestory Windows is the counterpart, where material from the quartet is repurposed into a fixed media work for various electronics, complemented by Reidy’s guitar. The inspiration comes from a sound installation for transducers attached to suspended panes of glass, and so the piece is a set of shadowy, translucent echoes of the original. MIDI instruments produce the pitch-perfect harmonies in thin, glossy tones, slightly off-putting in their falsified timbres – it’s a nice homage to a previous generation of musicians working with microtonality. Later, some early digital synths recover some of the material, adding to the nostalgic futurism. This suite of inventions on the quartet’s material are given substance by the intervention of Reidy’s signature steel-stringed acoustic guitar, with playing that is simple and direct but dazzles with the glittering timbre of the strings. The lightness and brightness come as part of the mediation between real and virtual sounds, creating a double image where the electronics are both a representation of the harmonic sonorities and its embodiment.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jules (Julia) Reidy
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Gentle Fire: Further Explorations [Paradigm Discs]. I called Explorations, the first Paradigm issue of Gentle Fire recordings, an example of all that is best in archival box sets, combining historical interest and importance with a compelling and exciting listening experience. Further Explorations extends the previous collection with a single disc of performances recorded by German radio in 1973 and 1974. The group, musician/composers Richard Bernas, Hugh Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones and Michael Robinson, play a combination of conventional instruments, electronics and home-made instruments. Yeah, they’re British but they also worked closely with Stockhausen (Sternklang) and so their ways of making music are an intriguing hybrid of the empiricist, do-it-yourself methods espoused by the Scratch Orchestra and the abstract or mystical idealism that directed improvisations under the European avant-garde. This permits them more than a single dimension to their playing, allowing for interpretations of these very open scores that question and play with the assumptions upon which these compositions operate, whether expecting rigour or anarchy, high seriousness or sly irreverence: there’s a bit of everything in the way they tackle these pieces, without resorting to making the vehicles for their own ideas. The new face amongst the composers here is the late Erhard Grosskopf, whose Looping 1 begins the album. Composed for the ensemble, the piece is built out of playback of tape loops of filtered electronic tones and speech, which the musicians must match with suitable harmonic relationships. This gives it an unusual consistency, as though the piece is all straight-through playback, with a fixed, minimal texture. The voice fragments are electronically treated and distorted, gradually becoming clearer. The text is, almost inevitably, by Mao Zedong, as period-perfect as a Raleigh Chopper.

Graham Hearn’s Art Must Be Fed sets the musicians randomly-selected tasks to perform, either to play something “badly” or sing, hum or whistle some remembered music from elsewhere. The wonky, humorous nature of the piece is tempered and made more poignant by the gentle pacing of the work, guided by a slow, repeating piano phrase that resembles the beginning of a Satie piece that never gets going, enhancing the atmosphere of melancholy absurdist theatre. Their rendition of Christian Wolff’s perennial Edges is a different performance from the London EMI recording from a few years earlier and shows the group’s interpretative chops in a more conventional light. While very different, both pieces require their performers to make decisions on the fly, where the given instructions are unstable, flexing back and forth between acting as a waypoint and a limit. The two group compositions are striking in the way they take a monolithic premise and then build variations out of it. Group Composition III is made by the ensemble as it goes along, each musician working on a gong tree built by Michael Robinson, using methods roughly similar to those in Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I. The surfaces are worked over with various mallets and microphones to create an extended abstraction of resonant metallic sounds shaded by reverberation and filtered noise. It’s with this piece that you realise how much modern free composition and improv is still modelled on these performances from over half a century ago. In Music Project V-II, the numbers refer to intervals in the traditional diatonic scale; in short, it’s a pop vamp stretched and stripped to its barest essentials of hovering between dissonance and resolution. Like an early, unexplored path of minimal composition, it takes a simple idea and transforms it by taking it in an unexpected direction, finding strange sounds in a confined harmonic space. The conception of the piece, as something so open and irreducible as to defy authorship, produces something that sounds like something quite different from any other possibly related works from this time.

The sound quality is as good as you would expect from 1970s West German radio production, perhaps a little dry in places, which was the style at the time for presenting new music. None of these recordings have had a legitimate commercial release before now, so this will sound better than that untagged MP3 you downloaded from some blog years ago. The accompanying notes and booklet are again excellent and informative, including the original programme notes from the concerts and a radio talk given at the time by Michael Robinson, in whose memory this album is dedicated. It’s another step towards recovering a past which is still felt today but is not yet fully recognised.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christian Wolff, Erhard Grosskopf, Gentle Fire, Graham Hearn
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Vilhelm Bromander: aurora [Warm Winters Ltd.]. Well this is all quite lovely. I think I found its charm truly ineffable and so refrained from trying to write anything intelligent about it. A suite of short pieces for a septet of winds, brass, low strings and pump organ. The modesty of its expression comes from the quiet formality of its presentation and the slightly scuffed ensemble playing in its execution. Subversive in its self-effacement, rather like those new British composers from the 1970s. In fact, the musicians here are mostly playing instruments unfamiliar to them: Bromander for example usually plays double bass, as heard on the equally surprising .​.​.​for some reason that escapes us. Here, he’s on soprano sax and organ duties. They’re not the Portsmouth Sinfonia, but as they ring the changes on these cascading chorale-like pieces, they do evoke the dignified amateurism and communal pride that the Scratch Orchestra aimed for.

Jackson Greenberg: Apartments from Sybarite5: Collective Wisdom [Bright Shiny Things]. Throwing out a pile of emails I found Greenberg’s The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes from 2023, a piece which started out as a string quartet recorded in 2012. Ten years later Greenberg fed the recording through effects pedals and other processes, playing through the piece live to tape. The sleeve notes say it was therapeutic, and the spontaneity of the treatments can diminish the uncanny quality that sometimes emerges in favour of raw texture, leaning into authenticity over more profound communication with the listener. More effective is Apartments, a 2023 composition for string quintet with tape loops and live AM radio, played with poignant wistfulness by the ensemble Sybarite5. The radio inevitably creates a melancholy mood, something familiar yet distant and unattainable. The simple part for strings supports the elegiac and reflective atmosphere, while delicate flourishes of electronics act both as alienation and enhancement of the feeling of emotional displacement. Made to be played while looking out the window on a rainy day.

Christopher Whitley: almost as soft as silence [self-released]. Critics (me) could get in a cheap shot about Whitley thinking too hard when commissioning violin pieces, going by his adventurous if flawed Describe Yourself from a few years back. I should point out that he followed it up with an album going the opposite direction, by simply playing with as little thought as possible. The fifteen tracks on the sub-thirty minute almost as soft as silence are the merest slips in the wind, blowing past the ear with felicitous facility. Title track excepted, nothing feels fragmentary or self-aware about form (no deconstruction here) as each piece is absorbed by technique while seeming to be effortless. Pleasant to an almost baffling degree, and it’s only in the last track you feel you’ve heard something substantial. It all sounds lovely, what with Whitley being darn good and the instrument a loaned Stradivarius, which I suppose obliges him to play nice.

Jeff Kimmel & Jack Langdon: The other side of the air [Dinzu Artefacts]. I’ve just been listening to a few releases by Low Impact, including Jeff Kimmel’s In Plain Sight and Exhausted Mechanisms by Kelley Sheehan and Jack Langdon. Both were a little fiddly for my tastes, but I remembered those names: early last year Kimmel and Langdon released The other side of the air, a set of duets for clarinet and organ. It’s one of those cute little miniature pipe organs, matched by Kimmel playing clarinet with as little affect as possible. The whole thing was recorded in one session. In the first piece, Langdon plays chords without quite enough air, adding microtonal shifts as the intonation falters, rubbing up against the slow, careful clarinet melody. For the second piece they shift to suspended unisons, where the beating frequencies and halos of overtones become foreground material. From here and for the rest of the set the two spread out to explore the same phenomena in wider pitch ranges and discovering new timbres along the way. Between the two of them they may sound like a recorder ensemble, a chorus of ocarinas or a blown set of bottles, building up these pallid but unstable colours to create fascinating variety from increasingly immobile playing.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christopher Whitley, Jack Langdon, Jackson Greenberg, Jeff Kimmel, Vilhelm Bromander
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Eldritch Priest: Too, So Like Nothing [Halocline Trance]. Three piano pieces by Eldritch Priest, played by someone else. …soot?aporia from 2005 begins with a stutter and seems to be breaking down before it’s even begun, and the fleeting, fragmentary nature of the piece carries on from there, finding the most unlikely continuity out of the abrupt positioning of stumbling chord sequences, delicate arpeggios and unequal phrases of unexpected tenderness. The someone else playing is Roger Admiral, who interprets EP’s jostling, angular movements with supreme felicity and tact. All three pieces share a louche, hazy nocturnality under Admiral’s hands as he finds the undercurrent of cool late-night jazz beneath the surface agitation. In …soot?aporia he sounds like Milton Babbitt playing a cocktail lounge: the textures are more relaxed but shares the phrasing that seems erratic disguises a canny understanding of the flow of time against rhythm. nape…wrinkle…linger is a shorter work from 2002, more open in its texture and so more tractable for the listener’s sense of direction. Admiral plays it all with a loving touch and delicious sensuality; he insinuates jazz impressions out of supple technique, even more than the compunded harmonies do. The title piece is a later work from 2020: the same tricksy energy is less obvious, but still present in a more refined form. On the album, it seems to find a balance between the two preceding tracks, and Admiral still manages to rhapsodise at fascinating length upon recondite musical language.

Linda Catlin Smith: The Complete Piano Solos (1989-2023), Volume 2: The Underfolding and Early Works [Redshift]. After Volume 1, dedicated to the recent, hour-long The Plains, Cheryl Duvall turns her attention to Smith’s earlier pieces: The Underfolding is from 2001 and the remaining eight pieces are short works from the last century. These are generally less well-represented on record than her later stuff, so to hear a collection of them gathered together affords a glimpse into a world of inspirations and influences which have shaped her present work. Some time ago, it took me a while to get a bead on where Smith was coming from; as heard in this collection, she spent the Nineties trying to find a clarity of language, which I had first assumed was a pose of folksy simplicity. That clarity is produced in different ways: Poire is deconstructed Satie, Iceberg isolates rising arpeggios from one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The earliest work here is Zart, a homage to Feldman by way of Schoenberg, making use of touch, attack and decay to dwell upon clotted harmonies; the surprising variety of dynamics and cut-off of resonances also appear in 1990’s Music For John Cage, clarified both in technique and harmonic language. Duvall plays these pieces with a directness, even bluntness, the stark dynamics and clean attacks giving it an unvarnished sound – that may seem like I’m gearing up to use ‘folksy’ again but that doesn’t apply here. Duvall’s directness takes on the appearance of attempting to explicate Smith’s various methods, but in fact conceals questions of compositional technique behind the need to show the unity of a common goal which unites these works. 1999’s For Udo Kasemets is another tribute piece, where Smith honours the dedicatee by adopting a system of permutations and yet she and Duvall produce a piece which sounds warm and intuitive; the earlier Bloom is also dedicated to Kasemets and shares qualities with Smith’s pieces for Feldman and Cage. In all of this experimentation, it’s really only The Surroundings from 1995 which left me cold, sounding a little too stark and formulaic in this company. The key work to understanding Smith’s later music is The View From Here, a 1992 composition that eschews direct references, systems and intellectual querying to instead rely on personal experience, not as a means of self-expression but as a means of contemplation. The assimilation of all these tendencies can be heard in The Underfolding, which slowly roils and churns through successions of dense chords for 22 minutes, maintaining an internal calm even as it never reaches a point of balance or stability. At times the pace slows or pauses, lingering on a particular sonority before continuing as before. The tension and relaxation in the piece feels like an organic process, yet still leaves the listener with the memory that the piece was more difficult and disturbing than it seemed at the time. Duvall’s head-on approach comes through here, neither overstating nor soft-pedalling the confrontations contained within the piece.

Emilie Cecilia LeBel: Landscapes of Memory [Redshift]. I described LeBel’s earlier field studies as admirably spare in places but susceptible to moments of fussiness. The two halfhourish pieces on Landscapes of Memory are both composed for piano with e-bow drone. Ghost geography, played by Wesley Shen, focuses on a figure which articulates a repeated chord, followed by a high single note. This gets elaborated upon, but gently. The bowed piano string acts as pedal point and sounding board for the decaying chords and pitches, giving additional colour to each iteration of the chords. Later, there is a dramatic flourish, characteristic of LeBel, with loud arpeggiated chords and then some hushed inversions of the opening motif. The dramatic effects sought after by the composer are based in sonority more than any direct theatrical reference and so appear more focused and coherent than in the previous collection I’ve heard. Pale forms in uncommon light was composed a year later (2023) and is played by Luciane Cardassi. It’s equally slow and deliberate, as you would expect in making the overtones heard against the drone. The bowed string is a higher pitch and the figures played by Cardassi are a bit less reticent, allowing a hint of chord progressions, cadences or melodic fragments to appear; as such, this piece is in five named sections which explore each of the immplicit facets a little further. They’re not the easiest pair of compositions to get along with, each being very sombre throughout, but they are two serious attempts to make expressive music out of psychoacoustic phenomena, without resorting to cheap drama.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eldritch Priest, Emilie Cecilia LeBel, Linda Catlin Smith
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