There’s an alien character common to all quarter-tone piano music: the claustrophobially close intervals spelled out in clear tones once so familiar to the ear can’t help but call up the air of other planets. The big personal discovery on this night was Mildred Couper, whose ballet music Xanadu was composed in 1930 for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. It’s a thrilling piece of flashing exotica and wide-eyed wonder, appropriate to the setting and the times (the piece was composed for the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s satire Marco Millions and apparently not used again). It has a bright, burlesque beauty to it, with any traces of tongue-in-cheek Chinoiserie validated by contemporary American modernism, effectively deploying steady pulses and stacked intervals that rose and fell giddily. It was the first of many microtonal pieces Couper composed and it made me feel sorry that I hadn’t known of her before this night.
The night was part of the year’s second series of Music We’d Like To Hear concerts at St Mary-at-Hill. Still working its way back from Covid, seating was reduced for these events and I’d stupidly left it too late to book for the July concerts. Friday was dedicated to piano music in quarter-tones, ably performed by Mark Knoop and Siwan Rhys on electronic sampler keyboards tuned a quarter-step apart. Thankfully, samplers these days are mostly adequate so as not to be a distraction, despite some harshness and incongruous sound location from the PA. As the concert series title reminds us, the important was that we can hear Couper and other composers played live and played well, despite current circumstances. The concert began with the obligatory Three Quarter-Tone Pieces by Ives, which on this hearing starting to make an impression on me for its compositional qualities over the pure sonic novelty which usually dominates. The free-associating patchwork of allusions to different musical styles came over well here, enough to make me wonder how securely each piece is held together.
Where Ives, like Hába, used quarter-tones as an extension of harmonic language, Couper’s Xanadu treats the microtonal scale as something new. Georg Friedrich Haas’s early set of three Hommages for quarter-tone pianos treat the base material of the scale as the subject. In each, a sole pianist is required to play both instruments at once, one hand each. The second piece was played here: in Hommage à Josef Matthias Hauer Knoop produced a continuum of arpeggiated clusters, ascending rapidly in constant repeated motion while rising in pitch only incrementally, producing a slowly varied cloud of overtones. Start and end points appeared to be arbitrary, the whole reminiscent of Ligeti’s then-uncomposed Coloana fără sfârșit, Ligeti having been the dedicatee of the previous Haas Hommage.
In the second half the lights were extinguished, but not for Haas, as Knoop and Rhys tackled Clarence Barlow’s daunting Çoğluotobüsişletmesi. This half-hour piece from the later 1970s used computer programming to calculate and distribute its arrayed masses of points, lines, layerings and trajectories across the piano keyboard. Barlow has postulated it as a work for solo pianist but performance typically employs four pianos to share out the layers. Two parts were pre-recorded here and played back, with Knoop on real piano and Rhys on sampler keyboard: four of the pitches in the scale are lowered by a quarter-tone. Even in this more practical form, each pianist was required to perform extreme leaps of register back and forth while reeling off unwieldy strings of single notes or involuted rotations around a clustered gamut of pitches. The voices enter one by one, at first sounding angular and ungainly but steadily acquiring a monumental presence. One or more striking details leap out for the ear at any given moment, suggesting other fleeting movements simultaneously passing beyond one’s attention. The retuned notes alert one to changes in material and pitch organisation, even within that welter of pianos. It’s ultimately overwhelming in its impersonal generosity, never exactly bludgeoning the listener because it is always clear that there are explicable principles of organisation at work for every moment, even as those principles remain opaque for the time being. I doubt we shall ever hear it as perfectly as we might imagine it, regardless of the forces involved, but this will do very nicely.
Saturday was given over to a single work, the premiere of Matteo Fargion’s String Quartet No. 5 ‘the nobby saddy quartet’. Written last year in lockdown and commissioned for the concert series, it’s an hour of affectionate indulgence of gentle melancholy. The slow, single movement, episodic structure, restrained timbre and extended sequence of cadences near the end all recall late Feldman, who indeed gets namechecked by the composer. The difference comes in the treatment of material, directed towards a self-aware caution of taking authenticity of musical expression for granted. All pizzicato at first, a repeated line descends chromatically over a fifth. It’s an inauspicious opening that stays around for long enough to start to feel comfortable. Like the best kinds of melancholy, it finds pleasure in its sadness and in doing so starts to forget itself; it deviates, lingering over one thought before flicking to another, then back again. As you would hope and expect, it cannot treat itself entirely seriously, even as it holds the idea of melancholy in reverence. This premiere was by Apartment House, in the same quartet manifestation last heard at Cafe Oto in May. They played it like Schubert, cold and tender. Punters claimed it felt like less than an hour; they always do, when it’s good. What struck me most about Apartment House’s playing was how slow each they could make each moment pass, without seeming too long or to be broadening out.
Summer has been cruelly disrupted, but not before I got to take in all of this year’s Music We’d Like To Hear season. I got to write about the 2018 season in more detail for last January’s issue of Tempo, but I still need to get a few things down about the concerts just passed.
It was the programme’s fifteenth anniversary and ended with their fiftieth concert. The 2019 series began with a recital for violin and piano by Mira Benjamin and Philip Thomas. The term ‘recital’ here perhaps ought to be used advisedly, but this gig was the most conventionally-formed ‘evening concert in a church’ out of the three – at least on the surface. MWLTH gigs, curated by composers John Lely and Tim Parkinson, always bring a combination of the brand new, the unfamiliar and the unjustly overlooked, often reviving works previously thought lost to live performance. Benjamin and Thomas ended their gig with a collaborative work, Marc Sabat and Matteo Fargion’s duet YOU MAY NOT WANT TO BE HERE (after Bruce Nauman). The words from the title phrase (taken from Nauman’s Poem Piece) were spoken in various permutations, or substituted with pitches on violin or piano. As twilight slowly faded through the church windows, slow exchanges between voice and instrument, instrument and instrument, untreated and prepared piano sounds inculcated a state of mesmerisation in the audience, subdued but held in suspense. I had to remind myself that Naumann was not directly involved in the composition of this piece – that impression may have been helped along by Parkinson worrying aloud in his introduction that the piece may rub some people the wrong way.
The concert began with Thomas Stiegler’s Inferner Park, a set of thirty-one slender pieces and fragments that skirted the boundaries between charming, obstinate and foreboding. The work is named after Paul Klee’s set of drawings. Works by Nomi Epstein, Tim Parkinson and Georgia Denham seemed to work together to form a sort of deconstructed violin sonata, each providing a distinct, isolated aspect of the players’ roles in the form. Epstein focused on gesture, attack and colouration, Parkinson on material with minimal interpretation, Denham on sonority and sentiment.