Right after Die Hard, A Christmas Story and Lethal Weapon, It’s A Wonderful Life is my fourth-favourite christmas movie. Last year I linked to Gilbert Sorrentino’s remarkable interpretation of Capra’s movie as an essay in digust with modern American life. This year’s heartwarming message of cheer comes from Soho the Dog: Strauss and Mahler re-enact It’s A Wonderful Life.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Film, Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Busy, Busy World
Monday 15 December 2008
“Later that year Zuckermann abandoned his harpsichord business and America in disgust at the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.”
It’s a good story about how a search to find Olivier Messiaen’s birthplace in Avignon leads to a conversation with the man who used to provide harpsichords for John Cage, but that sentence belongs in an old Woody Allen story.
II. She Sees Red:
Once upon a time, Banksy visited Melbourne and left a piece of street art. Culture-conscious locals preserved the ephemera with a sheet of perspex. Unknown vandal/artist restores the natural order of things by tipping paint down the back of the perspex. The obliterated artwork is tagged “Banksy Woz Ere”.
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
1 Comment »
Boulez plays Boulez
Sunday 14 December 2008
Two centenaries on successive days: Olivier Messiaen (d. 1992) on Wednesday, Elliott Carter (still alive and composing) on Thursday. On each night, Pierre Boulez conducted the Ensemble Intercontemporain in a commemorative concert in London.
I went to only the first gig. There have been Messiaen concerts going on in London all year, and I’ve missed all of them up until now. My main motivation for going was that Boulez is one of the few remaining survivors of the 1920s generation, so I thought I’d better take this chance to see him in action, particularly as he was conducting his former teacher, and his own music as well. I’d been to some concerts of Carter’s music before, and had heard most of the pieces on the Thursday programme before, so I gave that a miss.
The two Messiaen works were from the early 1960s, both premiered by Boulez: Couleurs de la cité céleste and Sept haïkaï. Both works put Messiaen’s taste for the hieratic and the ritualised to the forefront. The former is a static processional for winds, brass, piano and percussion, creating sounds suitably imposing, rather than seductive. The latter’s short movements show the influence of Messiaen’s visit to Japan; less, thankfully, in musical exoticism and more in an affinity with the sense of eternal time expressed in traditional gagaku court music. It’s a suprising piece for Messiaen, particularly in the dense passaages of unusually thorny textures.
After the interval (where we witnessed at the bar a distinguished lady of advanced years scull a large rioja, either to recuperate from the first half or to fortify herself for the second) Boulez conducted his own work from the late 90s, Sur incises. The piece is an expansion of his piano piece Incises into a work for a hyper-instrument consisting of three identical groups of piano, harp, and percussion. It’s all very nice, but it’s a little too typical of much of Boulez’s later music, and its obsession with the doubling (or tripling) and shadowing of instruments, from Répons onwards. Long, agile phrases of melody contrast with sustained moments of stillness, impeccably put together but always feeling a little to mellow. The intellectual and emotional punches of his earlier music are all being pulled here.
On stage Boulez, combover intact, was a model of self-effacement, even taking a detour round the back of the piano each time he walked to his podium. My lovely companion F, who has suffered under conductors of varying degrees of waywardness, admired the undemonstrative directness and lucidity of his conducting.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Hentai-Oto-Ma
Thursday 11 December 2008
(This post is dedicated to the Slavic readers who can’t get enough of the two censored anime pictures on this page.)
Months ago I posted a spectrogram of a passage from my composition Hentai-Oto-Ma, and completely forgot to upload the sound file of the same section for comparison. So here it is.
Hentai-Oto-Ma was made using Coagula Light, a shareware “colour-organ” that interprets digital images as sound spectra (height=frequency, width=time). The image source for this piece was a pornographic Japanese manga comic: each digitally scanned frame of the comic was interpreted with five different, variable time-frames and pitch ranges. The five sequences of frames are played simultaneously, each subjected to different filtering and panning processes. In effect, the piece is a type of timbral canon, with the same series of tone structures transposed into different frequencies and durations – this can be heard most clearly at the end of the piece.
The left half of the picture above shows selected frames from the original comic. On the right is a spectrographic analysis of right channel of Hentai-Oto-Ma (0’28” to 0’39”) showing the images transformed across time and frequency.
Click here to hear an mp3 of the above excerpt; or listen to the whole thing (11 minutes, 17 MB mp3.) If that’s not enough, you can read more about this and related pieces for cheapo digital synthesis (and get another mp3).
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
George Brecht Event
Tuesday 9 December 2008
The Most Useful Piece of Advice You’ll Get All Year
Monday 8 December 2008
Got a tune stuck in your head and you just have to get rid of it? The Girl From Ipanema. It wipes the music part of your brain and then fades away. Works every time.
I recommend track 21 on that linked page.
(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)
Filed under: Journalism, Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Exercise in Timing (after William Carlos Williams)
Thursday 4 December 2008
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
A brief reflection on crossing the threshhold
Wednesday 3 December 2008
I haven’t been getting out as much as I’d like to lately, but I did make it to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s (free!) performance of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil on Sunday evening. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling that we didn’t have to pay to hear something as extraordinary as this music.
The cycle of songs was Grisey’s last completed work, before his sudden death in 1998. Over ten years after the completion of his remarkable Les espaces acoustiques, his abilities in creating and balancing new sounds had deepened in skill and sensitivity. My reservations about his reliance on dramatic gestures in his earlier work did not apply: this meditation on death hovered like a final breath, both frail and terrible, suspending time and revealing the profound emotional depths of which music is capable.
Nothing felt forced, everything felt natural yet utterly strange; every development in the music was unexpected yet inevitable.
By a fortunate coincidence, Inconstant Sol has recently posted a recording of the complete work, taken from a performance in Paris earlier this year – having earlier given us a complete Les espaces acoustiques. The Quatre chants are well worth a punt on your bandwidth.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Dick Without A Hole
Wednesday 26 November 2008
Dick Without A Hole (Red Detachment Of Women Mix) (2’11”, 2.85 MB, mp3).
It is recommended that this track is played on a continuous loop.
It is recommended that this track is played on a continuous loop.
Bob the late-night talkback radio host is taking your calls on the open line about the issues of the day that matter to you, and our next caller is Gene. Gene wants to ask Bob a riddle. Bob doesn’t get it. Moving right along: Peter is next on the line. Peter also wants to ask Bob a riddle. Bob doesn’t know the answer, but Peter won’t tell him! Perplexed, Bob takes Phyllis’ call and asks her Peter’s riddle, but Phyllis just wants to hear Gene’s riddle again…
Dick Without A Hole was inspired by my love for the genteel stupidity of talk radio in Adelaide in the 1980s. The hosts craved the urgency and confrontation of shock jocks in other parts of the world but everyone in Adelaide, announcers and callers alike, were just too nice to carry it off. I still have a few cassettes of some of the better sessions, particularly the 9pm to midnight shift when the demographic got drunk and doddery.
This playful little dance of fumbled verbal exchanges and missed punchlines comes from one of those surviving tapes. Set to a cheerful, semi-funky shuffle, our four protagonists juggle the two dud gags back and forth, never grasping them yet never quite letting them drop. I find that their shared confusion in joke-telling gives a satisfying sense of mystery to this simple yet intractable form of social interaction. Their ritual is consecrated by the hallowed incantation of Messrs Kennedy and Gray, the two Magi of mid-seventies Australian comedy.
Dick Without A Hole made its public debut at John Beagles’ and Graham Ramsay’s Museum Magogo in Glasgow, 1999. After that it toured to PB Gallery in Melbourne, and was revived in 2002 for the Piped Music series at The Physics Room in Christchurch – more specifically, in the toilets of The Physics Room.
Now with the mp3 player of your choice, you too can enjoy Dick Without A Hole in the comfort of your own toilet. For best results, leave it playing on a continuous loop.
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
1 Comment »
Cheap Gigs: Ricordi and Spectralism
Thursday 20 November 2008
The shiny new King’s Place in King’s Cross has been hosting a series of new music gigs of widely varied stripes every Tuesday evening. On the 25th the Elision (sorry, ELISION) Ensemble is playing works by Liza Lim, Salvatore Sciarrino, Franco Donatoni, and others. I’m pretty stoked about this because I saw Elision, oh, lots of times in Australia and it’ll be nice to hear what they’re up to now. It’s part of music publisher Ricordi‘s 200th anniversary.More info and tickets here (warning: that “dynamic price” thing means that 9.50 ticket price keeps going up it’s about 12 quid on the door.)
Also in London, there’s some Romanian (and British) spectralism happening at Conway Hall this weekend: Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram, Tim Hodgkinson, and more! After my encounter with Gérard Grisey’s music last month I should really check this out too. No ticket price mentioned; the friend who gave me the heads-up thinks this means it’s free. He may well be right.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
From Light to Sound
Friday 14 November 2008
Southbank’s Klang festival was a convincing refutation – with many more to come, I expect – of the lazy canard that in the last thirty years Karlheinz Stockhausen descended from his once-lofty heights to write music that was invariably banal, inane, and absurd. (Similar erroneous assessments were made of Cage in the after his death.)
After completing his monumental seven-opera cycle Licht (Light), Stockhausen began a new cycle of twenty-four pieces called Klang (Sound) – one for each hour of the day. Sadly, he died with only twenty-one of them written, thus thwarting his next proposed project: a cycle of sixty pieces, one for each minute of the hour.
The second hour of Klang, Freude (Joy), is a 45-minute work for two female harpists, who must sing a fragmented setting of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus while they play. The material and form of the piece, as with other parts of Klang, are distillations from works made earlier in Stockhausen’s life, transformed into something completely new. The material is a 24-note row derived from his mid-50s masterpiece Gruppen; the form is a return to moment form which Stockhausen used in the 1960s.
The frenetic activity and complexity of Stockhausen’s earlier music has yielded to clarity and serenity. Later Stockhausen shows greater attention to the innate quality of sounds, and less on constructing relationships between them. Far from inane, the best of the late works show an equal sophistication to the earlier ones, but in a sensual rather than an self-consciously intellectual way. The episodic form and sustained atmosphere of Freude recall his 1968 piece Stimmung, and created a poignant, suspended state of timelessness that recalled the late works of Morton Feldman.
The singing harpists Esther Kooi and Marianne Smit played damn near flawlessly. As is frequently the case with Stockhausen, they were required to play from memory. Such was the level of dedication he demanded from his interpreters. Earlier in the week we had seen a virtuosic display by percussionist Stuart Gerber performing the fourth hour of Klang, Himmels-Tür (Heaven’s Door). For the best part of half an hour he executed an intricately choreographed sequence of attacks on an immense door, specially constructed from panels of differing woods to create a subtle palette of sounds. (Movie excerpt here.) Again, the piece was an impressive melding of music and theatre.
The final concert performance of the festival was Luzifers Tanz, a scene from the opera Samstag aus Licht. Unfortunately we didn’t get the opera staging, with the eighty-odd winds, brass, and percussion suspended in air in the shape of a face(! – nor did we get the musicians’ strike); but the performance by the Royal Northern College of Music was exemplary. It’s a remarkable piece, at once highly diverse and elaborate in its details and defiantly monolithic in its overall presence, following Stockhausen’s bizarre but internally consistent logic as the various sections of the gigantic big-band submit to the will of a cocksure, dinner-jacketed Lucifer. It’s also quite likely the only piece of concert-hall repertoire where the bass singer gets to make devil-horns gesture at the audience.
Oliver Knussen (“I… came to the conclusion that, far from being a hodge-podge of separately-commissioned bits stuck together with mystical glue, as some would have us believe, within [Licht‘s] massive architecture can be found some of the most impressive and compelling hours of music Stockhausen ever composed” – from his programme introduction) conducted the London Sinfonietta for Stockhausen’s last work, completed the night before he died: an orchestral setting of the charming set of tunes he wrote in the seventies, collectively called Tierkreis (Zodiac). True to the end to his principle of questioning convention, the chamber orchestra is arse-about: winds and brass in the front, percussion to the side, strings at the back with the cellos on the left.
Despite being a relatively normal piece by his standards, Stockhausen still managed to fill it with surprising twists and moments of invention (some of which felt a little rough and may well have been revised during rehearsals had he lived). In the penultimate piece, Taurus, a tuba player strolls onto the stage and plays an insolent solo for the orchestra to follow (“quite humorous technician with strong lungs” Stockhausen wrote in an email to Knussen) before standing beside the conductor. He finishes his solo with a flourish and a bow, earning a round of applause from the audience as he strides off-stage while the orchestra plays on.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Three observations about the Karlheinz Stockhausen festival
Wednesday 12 November 2008
- This was the most polyglot audience I’d seen at a concert series. A number of people had clearly gone out of their way to be there.
- These gigs had the highest proportion I’ve seen of punters bringing scores with them. Not necessarily the scores for the pieces being played that night.
- Queen Elizabeth Hall evidently has wi-fi. I hope the guy with the laptop in row K won whatever he was bidding for on eBay.
(The highlights post will appear tomorrow.)
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Trans Repetition (Part Two)
Monday 10 November 2008
(Continued from Part One)
Stockhausen himself apparently decided that Trans should be played twice in an evening: a recurring dream, the red light giving it a hellish look. One of Samuel Beckett’s hells, a confined space in which the actors are condemned to repeat their futile actions. A misprint in the programme claimed the second performance would be ten minutes shorter than the first. I wondered if the repeat would suddenly black out in mid-phrase, like the ending of Beckett’s Play.
I previously suggested – in another parallel with John Cage, as it happens – that Stockhausen’s ideas had been given attention, for his good or ill, ahead of his music. The second performance, despite the addition of dramatic baggage to its theatrical presentation, allowed for closer attention to be paid to the writing for the unseen brass and winds, roiling ominously in the darkness, and for appreciation of the work more as music than as just a coup de théâtre.
So why did F announce she hated it as soon as the second performance concluded? She thinks it pushed itself too far, it revealed too much of its workings, and its strangeness quickly became overly familiar. It went from being a singular musical experience to a dramatic narrative, making itself more of an idea than a piece of music. I’m inclined to agree with her, and think it’s more true to its nature to be experienced as one experiences a dream: an illusion that passes before the senses and is gone, its lingering presence felt more than recalled in detail.
As it turned out, F also disliked Cosmic Pulses on its second hearing, in contrast to when we first heard it at the Proms. In the Queen Elizabeth Hall the sound felt too close, and came across as harsh, flat and dull as it hurtled around the relatively more confined space. (The eight-speaker audio system had a few glitches at the beginning, too.) The premiere of Urantia had similar problems, as it consisted of three of the twenty-four layers of electronic sounds that make up Cosmic Pulses, with the addition of a recorded soprano. “Oh my god,” whispered someone in the seats behind us when it was over, but the tone suggested more exasperation than revelation. A kinder environment would probably create the effect of otherworldly awe, but in this hall it became grating.
The larger space of the Royal Festival Hall would have been a much more sympathetic space for these electronic works, as the Sunday night performance of Stockhausen’s early Gesang der Jünglinge proved. All three works had the same method of visual presentation: a small, white spotlight projected onto the back wall of the stage. F didn’t care much for this either, thinking it lacked imagination.
This has all sounded rather negative, but the next post will dwell on the highlights of last week’s Stockhausen’s concerts. The popular assertion that “the rule of thumb must be: the earlier the piece, the better” is as nonsensical as the waning myth that all of Cage’s “chance” music sounds the same.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Trans Repetition (Part One)
Sunday 9 November 2008
So why did my lovely companion F love Trans after the first performance on Saturday night, and hate it after the second performance? Saturday’s concert, the first in the Southbank Centre’s series of gigs dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, was a study of repetitions: two performances each of Harmonien and Trans, with an interval between.
The two versions of Harmonien, part of Stockhausen’s last, incomplete Klang cycle, were for bass clarinet and flute respectively, performed by their dedicatees and Stockhausen companions Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer. With their perculiar costumes and occasional twirling movements back and forth across the stage, they affirmed that for the last forty years of his life, theatre was an essential element of Stockhausen’s music. This has been a recurring theme throughout the series of concerts for the past week.
Another, less known theme that has become apparent over the week has been Stockhausen’s talent for melodic invention and development of his material – the actual ‘music’ part of the music. The transparent beauty and lyricism of many of Stockhausen’s later works have been overshadowed by his reputation for eccentricity and conceptual excesses. However, his earlier, more highly regarded works are no less hostage to reputation for their conceptual boldness – whether they be Gruppen, Gesang der Jünglinge, Mantra, or Trans.
(Is it my ignorance or is the discussion of the recent performances of Trans as ‘Classic Stockhausen’ a recent development? Is the dividing line between old, good Stockhausen and bad, new Stockhausen slowly creeping forward?)
F, herself a musician, was impressed with the performances of Harmonien. “You can’t write that down,” she observed, “you have to know the notes.” She also loved the Royal College of Music Orchestra’s performance of Trans. The performance and staging were excellent, with a strong sense of foreboding in the eerie red-violet lighting, the unseen winds and brass erupting from the darkness behind the string section which acted like automata, held in some sort of trance.
(Concluded in Part Two)
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Stockhausen and Career Moves
Thursday 6 November 2008
There are a few simple parallels in the deaths of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Both died unexpectedly soon before their 80th birthdays, each leaving a legacy of posthumous premieres for a series of readymade memorials. Both also left behind a substantial number of critics who doubted that neither their reputations nor much of their music would survive for long without the personalities of their creators to sustain interest.
The proliferation of recordings and performances of Cage’s music since his death seems to have put his myth to rest. It remains to be seen whether Stockhausen can also elude the same, undeserved fate. The celebrations-cum-commemorations may or may not have helped to preserve and regenerate Cage’s reputation, but they will surely play a role in reviving Stockhausen’s.
Stockhausen is still usually regarded as The Leader Of The European Avant-Garde Who Lost It Some Time In The Seventies. As one preview of the Klang series of concerts at Southbank puts it: “The point of these festivals is to see what can be rescued from the absurdity in his later work.” Only two sections of his monumental Licht cycle of operas are being performed, but most of the music in the series comes from the last years of Stockhausen’s life.
