I left the house for once, then twice, then three times for the Music We’d Like To Hear concerts at St Mary at Hill. It was their twentieth anniversary, which is both wonderful as they’ve provided such a consistently wonderful and important service to exposing new music in London, and a little sad that it hasn’t launched a small horde of imitators that have been able to last anywhere near as long (despite several noble efforts). The scant institutional support in a city the size of London is telling. Enough whingeing cos this is a celebration of music. The series began with repeat performances of works from the very first concert in 2005: Angharad Davies adroitly tackled Thomas Stiegler’s violin solo sonata facile (1993), an audacious work that employs the guttural avant-garde language of multi-stopped strings and aggressive glissandi, executed by holding the instrument upside-down between the knees and wrapping a rosined string around its neck. Beside the thick sonics, the piece plays off a cognitive dissonance of the apparent simplicity of its technique and the complexity of its results, while also realising that Davies is making the topsy-turvy approach look a lot easier than it is. Curator (forgive me) Tim Parkinson showed off his piano chops with a strangely evocative rendition of Markus Trunk’s Riten der Böotier (2005), a calm and austere set of miniatures that recall ancient Greek music – an entirely speculative concept. It was nice to hear a performance of Chiyoko Szlavnics’ string trio (violin violin cello) Freehand Poitras (2008), with its pure harmonic intervals expanding into combinations that seem to both perturb and resolve a drifting equilibrium. The evening ended with a live performance of Laurence Crane’s Events (1997), originally conceived for radio. It’s the most overt expression of the deadpan quirkiness that lurks within Crane’s music: a singer intones a small set of select nondescript facts related to the date 7 February 1997 – people’s birthdays, foreign exchange rates, weather forecasts – accompanied by a trio of clarinets and some small sounds from the piano. Melanie Pappenheim was the singer, reprising her role from the 1997 original broadcast; the clarinets sounded lovely, even as you wrestled with the idea of the material used to make the piece being informationally valid in one sense yet entirely null in another.
That’s about as nostalgic as things get in these concerts. The first gig also included two new works, with singer-guitarist Maddie Ashman premiering her reflective, folkish song cycle Otherworld and a piano trio by Chris Newman titled Things of Slight Interest, which is also folkish in its own way with his typically gruff but passive phrases piling up upon each other with apparent casualness, a particularly British mode of individualistic expression. For the second concert, Parkinson returned to the piano for a crisp interpretation of Tom Johnson’s late work Pairs and Pairs (2020), a charming piece despite its apparent reductiveness, ringing changes on complimentary pairs of dyads to produce exhaustive combinations of pitches by a method that is rigorously serial without sounding anything of the sort. Juliet Fraser gave luminous presentations of two slightly older works composed for her, Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments for voice and electronics, and Cassandra Miller’s Tracery: Hardanger. I’ve discussed both of these before (see links) but Fraser and Miller’s collaboration on Tracery continues to evolve over the years; this performance began with Miller’s one-time spoken guidance to Fraser on how to interpret the piece being made audible to the audience.
How a composer can prepare an audience as much as they can a musician is a subject too little explored. The performance of Niels Rønsholdt’s Song II, Melancholia III (2017) applied Miller’s principle in reverse. The piece is an extract from a larger work titled Until Nothing Left, scored originally for accordionist with various objects and the involvement of the audience. It appears the punters were not necessarily expected to contribute to the sound as such, as to contemplate their role in music-making. As a concert piece arranged for small ensemble and voice, shorn of its context of expectations of audience reflection, it came across as a diffuse narrative with a conventionally contemporary subjectivity of mild grievance. Piano with faint synth tones were the medium for Leo Chadburn’s pretty early work A Secret (2000), which was even milder in expression than the Rønsholdt but carried by tersely controlled material contained in a form that is simple but oblique. It makes an interesting comparison as part of his recent collection The Primordial Pieces, which I’ll write about separately soon. The big shock of the second evening was hearing Lily Greenham’s tape piece Traffic (1975), its cascading blizzards of tiny vocal shards sounding vivid, cutting and entirely contemporary even today, potentially moreso today than it did half a century ago, the acidity in its societal observation becoming more obvious as its zeitgeist has faded away, unable to be dismissed as “a trip”.
For the third evening, Angharad Davies and Tim Parkinson performed duet versions of pieces from Laura Steenberge’s Seven Poems (2024), an unusual work in that it differs from other music I’ve heard by her. On a smaller scale, with the ritualistic actions reduced to tasks that seem self-contained to their own means of making music, stripped of gestures that allude to a wider, unknowable meaning, the pieces became studies in playful process. In one, Davies and Parkinson rang toy bells muted by magnets, gradually unmuting them by tossing the magnets one by one over their shoulders, where they may or may not have hit various pots and pans scattered on the floor. In the other, the magnets are collected and thrown on top of large cardboard boxes where they may either roll away or clump together. The playfulness and modest means made it seem rather British. Bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval performed Alvin Lucier’s Same and Different (2021), a late entry in the elemental pieces he composed for soloist with pure sine tones. Off to one side in the church she played a single high pitch, using different fingerings to produce the same note, only never quite the same due to small variations in tone and intonation, producing a series of liminal episodes in texture and activity as each note interfered with the pure tone in slightly different ways. This still, ringing centre of the concert was given its own segment, unpaired with other works. The two Steenberge pieces were each partnered with a work by John McGuire, a composer repeatedly championed by this concert series. Twelve Circles (2022-24) is a solo piano work reminiscent in style to his monumental 48 Variations for Two Pianos (1976-80). In single notes, cycling through perfect fifths in alternating octaves, the music seems open and transparent but never sounds simplistic. The interlocking of cycles and their dependence on shifts in tempo creates an elastic, elusive texture in which the presence of a method is obvious but its workings cannot be anticipated, a satisfying combination of intellectual integrity and imaginative whimsy. Pianist Mark Knoop expertly managed the deceptively difficult contrapunctal implications in the frequent tempo changes, much as he and Roderick Chadwick had done with 48 Variations back in – gosh – 2017. Ensemble Plus Minus played McGuire’s double string trio Playground (2016-20), a work which trades off greater harmonic and instrumental colour for the more immediate pleasure of remorseless precision. The meshing of distinct but related material suggests an efficient approach to musical complexity, at odds with the admonishments for simplicity that usually accompanies “minimal” music and hints at why he may be considered unique (and overlooked): seeming to belong on a clearly defined turf that is yet shared with everyone and no-one.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Cassandra Miller, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Chris Newman, John McGuire, Laura Steenberge, Laurence Crane, Leo Chadburn, Lily Greenham, Maddie Ashman, Markus Trunk, Newton Armstrong, Niels Rønsholdt, Thomas Stiegler, Tom Johnson
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The LCMF2024 review (part 2)
Saturday 21 December 2024
There was more to the London Contemporary Music Festival than I previously let on, such as Melinda Maxwell playing an improvisation on an aulos and Kurdish songs sung by Dengbêj Ali Tekbaş with accompaniment on duduk by Murat Savaş, which open up a different perspective on the events overall. As supposed totem for this year’s festival, the Trickster gradually emerged over the four nights as a figure offering more substance than simple misdirection. The third night featured the LCMF Orchestra, which couldn’t help but appear more substantial. They began the evening with Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony, a notorious work typically more contemplated than heard. In a reversal of much of the first two nights’s performances, something often mistakenly considered as a conceptual work was revealed as a piece that’s at least as impressive as a musical experience as it is as an idea. Inside Hackney Church, the orchestra made the air come alive with both the presence of sound and its absence, first playing a D Major chord for twenty minutes before resolving into a resonant silence of equal duration. The boldness of its structure creates a tension that plays upon our expectations and anticipations, while also signalling a number of musical attributes that would gain currency in the half-century or so following its composition: drones, diatonicism, steady dynamics, silence. It held the punters, partly thanks to conductor Jack Sheen’s valiant effort to stand still with his arms extended for forty minutes.
Not much later, Sheen was also required to throw shapes and then add spoken narration to the premiere of Maggie Nicols’ work for voices and orchestra Our Wits About Us, one of the cross-disciplinary events LCMF likes to try out. As on most other occasions, it was a fun and curious experience but ultimately ephemeral in a way that makes it better considered as a good old-fashioned Happening than as a composition. Looking back over the programmes for the last two nights I’m shocked to find that I’m struggling to remember a bunch of the pieces which I heard barely a week ago. This wasn’t a problem for the first two nights; possibly it’s true after all that it’s better for art to irritate than amuse.
That being the case, I’m going to jump ahead to the end of the Festival (not quite: there’s another event in January) when the Christmas lights went up on the balcony railings and Charlemagne Palestine was let loose on the Hackney Church organ to play SCHLINGENNN TRICKSTERRR BLÄNGENNN!!!!!!!! Palestine had played at the first LCMF and so ending this year’s festival seemed to close a circle; he addressed the crowd before playing, repeating a small ritual with two brandy glasses and saying he hoped to make our ears tingle. In a way, it was a fitting counterpart to the Klein symphony that opened the previous night: he filled the space with long chords that he would periodically adjust on the keys or the stops for varying harmonic density and brilliance, creating moments of contrast by throwing himself foward onto the manuals to produce dense clusters, then relaxing and letting harmony return. He might even be mellowing in old age, as towards the end he began working in some brief cadential motives in the bass, with some upper movement that could have been prodded into melody.
Besides James Clarke’s string quartet mentioned last time, the Sunday concert also featured Apartment House performing the premiere of Laura Steenberge’s I Only Have Eye For You. It’s a peculiar but mesmerising work, taking her signature blend of acoustic sound and dissasociated theatrical activity but on this occasion producing something that seemed to unfold as a single, integrated action, curiously purposeful even as it seemed to defy interpretation, in spite of the programme note alluding to Greek mythology. A string trio present but never quite complete, each member rotating between instruments while also attending to a funnel filled with sand cascading into a plastic pail, exchanging pails to ensure the funnel remained filled. The strings provided fragile continuity to the near-inaudible but constant backdrop; the percussion throughout the piece acted as both stabiliser and disruption at once, with knotted fabrics and a cymbal used in various ways to provide small, almost inadvertent sounds later on as the piece continued to evolve.
Focusing on the music-music, on Saturday night Lisa Streich’s KIND for prepared acoustic guitar, play by Jacob Kellermann, seemed to almost get lost in all the bustle: it makes itself seem smaller and thinner than it is. Streich requires metal strips and a small wire grill to be attached to the strings and soundboard, rendering much of the piece’s Spanish-influenced classical gestures to sound as tiny, high-pitched chimes, while other notes are filtered through to sound at normal register, but blurred and distant. The LCMF Orchestra’s premiere of Sofia Jernberg’s The murals in Quinta del Sordo was game in its evocation of rough textures in a disjointed series of tableaux, but the piece suffered from a recurring use of awkward stage business which added a comedic element that detracted from the music. Jernberg also suffered from her piece inadvertently following both Our Wits About Us and Laurence Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5, with which it happened to share several distinctive elements. It could come across better given different staging in another context.
Which brings us to Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5 ‘In Hackney’: the piece is a stunner. It begins in a strikingly uncharacteristic way, with the orchestra members all playing small, untuned, hand-held percussive objects. You think it’s a nice little opening gesture, but it keeps going. The gentle noise rises and falls in calm antiphony, amid repeated fake-outs that the real music is about to begin. It’s entirely unlike anything I’ve heard from Crane before, to the point you wonder if the piece and the title are some big Fluxus-inspired feint, in keeping with the Festival’s theme. Just as you’ve accepted the piece as a well-crafted essay in orchestrated white noise, a big Haydn-type cadence swells up. There’s no follow-through and the gentle noise continues. You’re now convinced the piece is a witty postmodern spoof; soon after you begin to realise you were wrong again. It’s just occurred to me that Crane’s method here resembles that of Lutosławski: you’re getting into the music when he suddenly reveals that he’s just been laying out his basic materials, and then he really goes to town. ‘In Hackney’ is utterly different yet entirely in keeping with Crane’s aesthetic, while pushing that line of clear musical thinking into new territory with more complex cognitive ramifications for the listener.
