Boring Like A Drill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(The highlights post will appear tomorrow.)

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.

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.

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.

I’ve spent the past week dealing with flu, apathy, and the Karlheinz Stockhausen festival at Southbank. Normal service should resume tomorrow, with a violent disagreement between my girlfriend and most of the audience at the weekend performances of Trans.

It’s nice to know a piece of music nearly 40 years old can stir up as much debate now as it did at its premiere. We both went to the performance last year by a student orchestra (Trinity College?), which was a fine example of the low-road approach to presenting Stockhausen’s music. The weekend’s high-road approach brought up some interesting contrasts in how we react to ostensibly the same music.

Conceived as an 80th birthday celebration, now an unexpected memorial, the festival focuses on his last, unfinished cycle of works, Klang. Having witnessed a few more pieces from the cycle now (after hearing two at the Proms in August), what I wrote last year seems more appropriate than ever, to Stockhausen’s later work as a whole.

Audience and orchestra, equally lost in the purple fog, partook of the event in a state not unlike the suspension of disbelief required to embrace the enactment of a myth. Its alien weirdness and denial of rational meaning suspended judgement, the music and its theatre an unquestionable, unalterable fact to be experienced. We all deferred to the indomitable arrogance of Stockhausen, an arrogance that was necessary to trust that he could put across a work he could not understand, without a safety net of explanation or justification.

I’ve got the pictures back from the Hobart incarnation of the Redrawing show, and uploaded a new mp3.

In addition to the main elements of String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) installed in Melbourne, the Hobart version included an extra video, showing my live performance of the piece at the Melbourne exhibition.

I’ve also uploaded a spiffy new recording of the String Quartet, a 23-minute mp3 which gives a good idea of how the thing sounds in its present state.

The main projection and automated version of the audio still played live in the gallery, while punters could also listen to the recorded, human performance over headphones. Two similar but different performances of the music could be heard at once, thus adding a further layer of duplication and imitation to the work.

First, a special thankyou to Blogger for breaking everybody’s browser icons.

Second, an extra special thankyou to Jodru at ANABlog. Remember a few weeks ago when I linked to a recording of this year’s Stockhausen Proms concerts? ANABlog now has the whole thing conveniently broken up into individual tracks, in smaller, more user-friendly mp3 form.

I haven’t plugged Kyle Gann’s internet radio station, PostClassic Radio, yet. I really should because it’s an excellent stream of new music with a newly expanded playlist, which just happens to include *ahem* a couple of my own pieces.

Funnily enough, the bots that run the internet radio service can’t quite cope with the type of music being played on this particular station, and offer links to buy CDs by the likes of myself and “Uncle Morty” – the latter a necessary evil to skirt the bots’ inability to tell individual pop songs from subsections of a 3-hour work.

(Don’t bother clicking the “Buy” link for my stuff: it’ll just say “Title Not Found” and try to make you buy an Il Divo album instead.)

Are you crazy about pianos? If you aren’t crazy about pianos, are you crazy about classic cars? You should meet raymanboy: he sells pianos and the occasional car on eBay, and he certainly seems pretty crazy.

Firstly, his listed prices for items change at random intervals, either up or down, by as much as £10,000. Then there’s his notoriety amongst piano and car afficionados. The listings themselves are typically illustrated with multiple photographs of what is presumably the object for sale rotated at various angles, inexplicably collaged in with pictures of airplanes, drawings of Mata Hari, and blurry photographs taken of a TV showing wedding videos and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The real giveaway, however, are his product descriptions. If you hurry, you can still make an offer for his VIDO. RED ROSENDORFER WHITE BARON RICHTOFEN GRAND PIANO. If you’re not a musician, don’t worry: that description doesn’t make sense to anyone, except maybe raymanboy himself.

Perhaps the detailed description will clarify things:

And it goes on, for another 8,000 words of quotations, word association football and meandering streams of semi-consciousness, all in a variety of fonts that arbitrarily change colour, size, and style. He obviously puts a lot of effort into these things; this particular item has been revised 13 times in six days. Towards the end he sounds like the love-child of Gertrude Stein and Christopher Knowles:

Otherwise strutted like the wings of an aeroplane that all rhymes curiosly previous reaons fly out and away and sound and symphony be one together. Hers or his more is more the confusion. This may grow like the piano into a form of anything born of a love and any construction. The greatest of these I find hard to contain; that which on pne hand you at the time deny or hide and detain by “etiquette” for those around. That it may be by this piano you may have experience. A future I only dream but do not have. The premise as heavenly I knew from just one meeting. And in another place than this piano that was the same to those sounds and attitudes which she displayed upon that. Attitude as it changed in one meeting is like a Flying Circus by force of surprise. That to have been at that greater stage of life wherefore I would wish to be again – as one viewer stated to experience beneath the mountain to stand with her alone. It is now as if I I have recoil I was as if I am still there. And there you to find I know to look upon this piano his and hers be there and their kingdon shine. Most time for the buyers of commodity there are two accounts for one crash. His account the real angel of whom we speak you are told is “The Red Baron” was not but he was bar-ren.

Et cetera. They seem to always end up being about the Red Baron. It’s a mystery that he manages to sell anything, let alone have a high customer rating.

Last week (yep, up-to-date as ever) I went to the UK premiere by the London Sinfonietta of the late Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques, a landmark work of late 20th Century music. The cycle of six compositions was begun in 1974 and completed in 1985.

What is it with the British coming so late, so often, to presenting major works by prominent composers across the Channel? Perhaps, in Grisey’s case, his reputation as the founder of the “spectralist” school of music did him more harm than good in British concert halls. The British are innately leery of the French habit of dressing up their creative inspirations as universal theories.

Perhaps that reluctance isn’t such a bad thing, much of the time. I’d heard a couple of Grisey’s pieces before but until now I’d never “got” him, having been distracted on previous occasions by trying (and failing) to hear his vaunted theoretical ideas at the expense of his music. Or else I was showing my British roots.

I became a believer after hearing Les espaces acoustiques, a rich, sensual, gorgeous work, superbly played by the London Sinfonietta, aided by orchestral ring-ins for the last sections, which require an orchestra of over 80 musicians. As well as working purely as music at face value, Grisey’s conception of music as a synthesis of harmonies and instrumental timbres was made very clear in Les espaces‘ explorations of sound. Conductor George Benjamin (a composer in his own right) allowed the sonic richness to saturate the performance without ever letting the music wallow in a shapeless, plodding indulgence.

Grisey’s music can be alternately subtle and dramatic, sometimes almost excessively so. He is praised for inventing a new language of sound, free from the stultifying elements of musical modernism, but in his limitations he is equally beholden to them. It is telling that the violist and composer Julian Anderson, who played the opening section of the cycle, says “It really was quite significant” that Grisey included a distinctive, hummable melody in a composition written in 1976. Outside the institutions of the European avant-garde and romantic traditions, discoveries (and rediscoveries) similar to Grisey’s had been going on for years, and pursued more radically and thoroughly than in Grisey’s music.

In America, composers as diverse as La Monte Young and James Tenney had spent the 1960s exploring tonality, the harmonic spectrum, new sounds, forms and structures. Europeans largely thought of them as amateurs, pranksters. Grisey, on the other hand, was the professional: he knew that a composer needed a computer laboratory, a symphony orchestra, and a tendency to disrupt his new sound world with conventional dramatic gestures to be taken seriously.

The Stockhausen Proms I enthused over in August can now be yours – both concerts in their entirety (from the BBC radio broadcast) are online thanks to inconstant sol (via The Rambler).