Christopher Fox: Unmeasured
[Huddersfield Contemporary Records]. Stupid here missed the Christopher Fox recital at City University this week, so I’ve been compensating by listening to his Unmeasured, a set of three recent piano pieces expertly played by Kate Ledger. There’s an intellectual playfulness lurking behind Fox’s music, to a greater or lesser degree, and it’s a little more conspicuous here, exposing a constructivist game that underpins each work which tilts the conventionally expressive into the realms of the uncanny. The album title points to the compositional theme in these three works, that of rhythm, or perhaps timing. Opening with the most recent piece, Figures of Light takes ambiguous, chromatic chords and staggers them into slow arpeggiations that are left to resonate; the result strikes the ear as a single melodic line that erratically loops and folds upon itself, stopping and starting at unpredictable moments, freezing time to reveal the particular harmonic content in each segment. Tension builds through the steady pulse of notes, broken by irregular phrasing and pauses. As mentioned above, it’s more about timing than rhythm, and Ledger’s playing adroitly tests and teases how far the disruptions to continuity can be stretched. This aspect of playing has an increasingly important role in the next two pieces. Es war einmal requires Ledger to silently read excerpts from Grimms’ fairy tales as an internal guide to the phrasing and expression of the music on the page. It takes on the surface musical appearances of animated narrative speech, yet without any conscious attempt to mimic the human voice or illustrate semantic meaning; the rhythmic cadences paired with Fox’s colourful musical material function as a story on a deeper, subverbal level, as one told to you while falling asleep. The longest and oldest work here, senza misura, gives Ledger licence to determine both the ordering of the twenty-odd sections that make up the piece and the durations given to each event. It’s mostly chordal, with Ledger choosing how the relative density and dissonance of each successive sound may be reconciled through judicious timing, treating notes on the page as a plastic material to be stretched and shaped into a complex but balanced musical sculpture. Ledger’s performance acts as a superb vindication of Fox, whether intentionally or not, composing a virtuosic rejoinder to Ezra Pound’s Great Bass theory.
Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 [Another Timbre]. Antti Tolvi has a background of playing various instruments in experimental jazz and free improvisation, so he has a flexible sense of timing too. He takes this to an extreme in his realisation of Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6, a piece composed in 1953 for either one or two pianos. It’s one of Feldman’s most open works, despite specifying pitches: just fifteen single events notated onto fragments of staves, haphazardly scattered across a single page. The brief instructions begin “Composition begins with any sound and proceeds to any other.” This opens up all sorts of questions which cannot be easily answered, as James Pritchett has noted when he played the piece. “Can you repeat any of the sounds? and how long the piece should go on?” The suggestion of a second piano permits further speculation on how freely the piece may be interpreted. It’s a thought that has occurred to me, too, but I lack a keyboard and the ability to test it for myself. Fortunately, Tolvi has given us one answer, in the form of a solo performance that lasts a little over seventy minutes. His phrasing and articulation are unconventional, with Feldman’s usual performance note of “as soft as possible” given some leeway, allowing for a piano with recalcitrant dynamics. I’m relieved to say it’s not one of those recently-fashionable slow interpretations that treats Feldman as a pioneer of ambient music; Tolvi uses silence and near-silence as a motivating force, creating a torqued stasis that keeps the listener alert. (To answer your anticipated questions: (a) Yes it’s Feldman, but not as we know it, and (b) Great work! Don’t do it again.) The material is relatively simple even by Feldman’s standards, which does provide a lot of the strangeness; that transparency also suggests extended repetition is permissible, and Tolvi demonstrates that you can sustain this music with almost nothing.
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