Prometeo - the reviews

Mixed responses to the UK première of Nono’s Prometeo, given twice at the Festival Hall over the weekend.

Press

Geoffrey Norris, Telegraph:

While some words are distinct, the greater part of Massimo Cacciari’s text is separated out into its component vowels and consonants.

They become just another source of sound, mixed in with the instrumentals and electronics in a score that can range from quiet miasmas and gurglings to full brass blasts, from vocal purity redolent of the Renaissance to a tangled web of augmented fourths and major sevenths, from aggressive discord to the sort of soft ambient music commercially available on CDs fostering relaxation.

Andrew Clements, Guardian:

Just occasionally, the teetering, trembling sounds break out into massive climaxes, a reminder that Nono, for all his uncompromising modernism, was a Venetian, an heir to the spatial experiments of Monteverdi and the Gabrielis.

I disagree with much of the sentiment of Norris’s review - “innocuous aural massage” my arse! - but Clements’s really perplexes me. His reference to “a slow unvaried unfolding” doesn’t tally with my experience at all. Sure, there are points of continuity, even reuse of the same materials, but the variety between each of the 11 sections is very distinct and, I would suggest, gives the piece a much greater linear shape than it is otherwise credited with. His line above also surprises me, as it seems to suggest that the Venetian connection (found in a certain spatial aspect) is something of an afterthought, rather than the poetic core of the entire piece!

Hilary Finch - Times:

The Festival Hall, of all Prometeo’s venues, must be the most abstract, providing no evocative atmosphere except, perhaps, that of a recording studio. So Prometeo had to stand alone; and at times it seemed more like a work of modernist reference than an overwhelming emotional experience. But, on coming out into a London Saturday night, it was palpably clear that any work that can resensitise and refocus the human spirit, presenting listening as understanding rather than as distraction, can’t be all bad.

Andrew Clark - Financial Times:

[T]he Southbank Centre was right to stage this overdue UK premiere, if only to show how unrealistic modernism had become by the time Nono completed his “theatre of sounds” in 1984-85. He was an idealist. Even if Prometeo is musically too thin to sustain the weight of theory and ideas motivating it, you have to admire the purity of Nono’s artistic/aesthetic quest, something today’s composers, dogged by the demands of consumer accessibility, are not allowed even to contemplate.

Blogs and online

Boulezian:

The combination of such instrumental composition, voices, and the all-important spatial dimension - not just the placing of instrumentalists and voices, but also that of the twenty-seven speakers, to be understood not as agents of amplification but as points at which music could take place - inevitably brought to mind the great Venetian polychoral works of the past. St Mark’s, in a sense, was brought to the South Bank and transformed. But equally so was Venice itself, or at least the Venice of Nono’s understanding … . The twists and turns, the lapping of the waves, the transfer between East and West were voiced; indeed, the interchanges, and landscapes of Venetian, European, and world history were present throughout this retelling of the Prometheus myth. Moreover, the words, a fascinating assemblage from Massimo Cacciari, are far more readily audible than many commentators - have they actually been listening? - would have one believe.

Intermezzo:

Deprived of the option to look at the performers or to understand how the sound was being produced, obliged to sit still for over 2 hours and hemmed in on all sides by sound, I found it hard also to understand how the work exemplified democracy or freedom. Perhaps it’s simply a case of unreasonably raised expectations, but it all seemed like just another pleasant Friday night out.

Simon Thomas, MusicOMH:

We are told that hearing Prometeo is a deeply personal experience. Describing it can therefore only be subjective and any one response is as valid as another. Those transported to another plane are just experiencing it in a different way from the people, and there were a number, who found they had to leave the auditorium before the performance was over. Nono certainly pushes the observer to the limit. Two hours and 20 minutes, without interval, is a long time when the promised plateau of serenity doesn’t appear.

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New Noise - Cross Talk reviewed

My first review for the website Musical Pointers has just been published. MP has been running since 2002 and is one of the richest and most diverse British music review sites on the web. My first contribution is a review of Joby Burgess and Janey Miller’s duo New Noise, and its expanded line-up as Cross Talk, heard at the Purcell Room last week. Programme:

Iannis Xenakis Ohko
Pedro Gomez-Egana Clark nova
Steve Reich Four Organs
Karlheinz Stockhausen Kreuzspiel
Martin Parker Grab WP
Donnacha Dennehy Fold WP

(My review of Nono’s Prometeo is being written now and should be online in a couple of days.)

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A view from the tar pit

Mammoth in tar pit

Wow, this is a dumb-headed apologia for the music industry. It’s a weird article anyway, since it spends its first three quarters on prologue and only one quarter an anything like an argument. But still. That prologue sets out a hypothetical meeting between a record exec and his techies in 1996 in which they review the possibility of music downloads becoming an important revenue stream thanks to this new-fangled internet that everyone’s getting so excited about. No, say the techies, CDs are huge chunks of data, and even by the most optimistic measure download speeds and harddrive space aren’t going to come close to dealing with music that weighs 1.4MB a second.

Shortly afterwards, MP3 compression appears, becomes wildly popular and throws all those projections out the window.

Charles Arthur’s article wants to defend charges against the record companies that they acted too slowly to online distribution of music: “the fact is that that overwhelming change happened years before it [was] expected”, and he’s right that the change was sudden. He even manages to compress his 700-word prologue into a pithy analogy: “If you want the same sensation, try imagining how you’d cope if the price of petrol rose by a factor of 10 tomorrow.” Fine - but to follow up, imagine how much we’d be laughing at the car manufacturer who took more than a decade to reconsider their line of 6-litre SUVs.

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IMSLP to return 1st July

Thanks to Scott MP for the word: IMSLP to return on 1st July.

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Rzewski on demand

From the intray:

Terrance McKnight, new Evening Music host on WNYC, has uploaded two recent live performances of two iconic Frederic Rzewski pieces, “Coming Together” and “The Price of Oil,” both performed this past Friday by Newspeak at the Brooklyn Lyceum.

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Submission

I’ve had an email from Paul Bailey to check - quite reasonably - that after all that I did actually get my thesis handed in. So in case you’ve been wondering, the answer is - yes I did, a day early in fact (thanks to wonderful binders who turned a three-day job into a 24-hour one).

Submitting, I had been forewarned, is an extremely underwhelming experience, but even so my mental preparations had depended on me handing in to an office somewhere in the generally impressive Senate House building not, as transpired, in a prefab round the back of Senate House. So it was even less whelming than I was prepared for (they didn’t even measure my margins!). Seeing your two copies simply get added to the shelves of dozens of others received that week and in process is also pretty deflating.

Psychologically, the aftermath of submission is a peculiar thing. Again, I’d been warned this would be a difficult phase, although to be honest I’ve not found hard as such. Just disorienting, and continually off-balancing. It’s a little bit like severe jetlag - you think you’ll be basically OK after a night’s sleep, and you can function fine most of the time, but every now and then something catches you out. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me a week to put a post like this on the blog.

I found several typos within hours of handing in (including one really embarrassing omission), and I’ve decided not even to open my copy now for about a month, just to get some distance. After that, I’m going to take a couple of days and read it for myself, fresh, just to step back and (hopefully) take some pleasure in what I’ve done - at the moment it’s still too close for that. In the meantime, I’m rehearsing like crazy to sing the B Minor Mass at the end of this month. Not the easiest piece when I’ve not sung to an audience for about 10 years, but at least in those evenings when I feel I ought to be doing something other than watching TV, I do have something other to do…

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Musician Deathwatch

del.icio.us/skills/obituary | About this list

This week we bid farewell to the following members of the musical community:

:: Peter Howard Broadway arranger
:: Joe Feeney Crooner
:: Tristram Cary Electronic and TV composer
:: Jimmy Giuffre Jazz clarinettist and composer
:: Humphrey Lyttelton Jazz trumpeter and broadcaster
:: Henry Brant Experimental composer
:: Bebe Barron Electronic and film composer
:: Walter Schenkman Pianist and musicologist
:: Brian Davison Drummer with The Nice
:: Robert Reed Go-go keyboardist
:: Ozzie Cadena Jazz and gospel producer
:: Lili Boniche Algerian singer and composer
:: George Butler Jazz record executive
:: Thomas Humphrey Luthier
:: Danny Federici Keyboardist for Bruce Springsteen
:: Judy Frankel Classical and folk singer
:: Al Wilson R&B singer
:: DJ Froggy Club DJ
:: Cedella Booker Bob Marley’s mother
:: Carole Lynne Actress and singer
:: Marios Tokas Composer
:: Tommy McQuater Jazz trumpeter
:: Wayne Frost Breakdancer
:: Klaus Dinger Neu! drummer
:: Gene Puerling Leader of vocal quartet the Hi-Lo’s
:: Allan Ganley Jazz drummer
:: Jerry Kravat Nightclub owner and bandleader
:: Sam Weiss Record label owner
:: Sergei Larin Opera singer
:: Sean Levert R & B Singer
:: Bill Bolick Hillbilly singer
:: Shusha Guppy Singer of ballads and chansons, and writer
:: Neil Aspinall Head of Apple records
:: Cachao López Mambo’s inventor
:: Alan Dargin Inventor of rock’n'roll didgeridoo

Rest in Peace.

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Clearance sale

I’ve just spent my Bank holiday Monday reviewing, re-organising and recycling the mass of paperwork that accumulated while writing my thesis. To follow that up, I’m doing the same thing to my NetNewsWire clippings folder:

This Soho post on orchestral finances seems to have slipped below the radar, but is well worth your time.

Object Collection has posted a couple of videos of Jennifer Walshe’s music.

Brian Sacawa and ABAblog present performer’s eye views of new music publishers.

I’m really excited about this Stockhausen event planned for later in the year - a chance to properly assess some of those late pieces?

And I know it makes me a geek, but I’m almost as excited about Gramophone’s review backlist going online. Just in time for my viva too!

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Memetime

Rebecca has tagged me with the latest incarnation of the “find the nearest book” meme. I’m pretty sure I’ve done this once before, but here goes again.

Erm, the nearest book is actually a London A-Z. Page 123 covers Streatham Vale and Mitcham Common. Hey, there’s a place called Lonesome. Well, that’s South London for you. The second nearest book is a vocal score for the B Minor Mass (Bärenreiter edition). Page 123 of that is from the second movement of the Credo.

The nearest book with any actual sentences in it is Ligeti in Conversation:

S. [Claude Samuel] In any case, as far as Le Grand Macabre is concerned, the verdict has already been pronounced. Does it make you want to carry on?

L. [Ligeti] Yes.

(From an interview given in 1981.)

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Thesis update: it’s with the binders

5 am - wake up in a cold sweat, dreaming of corrections I need to do right now. Think about it. Turns out my dreams are right, so haul myself out of bed and put the kettle on.

9.10 am - queueing in the rain with about 150 other people waiting for the British Library to open.

9.30 am - get into the library, collect Ruch Muzyczny vol.5 (1961), look up those last damn page numbers I need.

9.45 am - heading back home

10.30 am - home, start printing

c12.00 pm - realise that in the recent shuffling around a subheading in Chapter 4 has migrated from the top of one page to the bottom of the previous page. Also, the chapter is a whole page shorter than it was two days ago, requiring renumbering of subsequent chapters and of the contents page and list of illustrations.

1.00 pm - put three copies of the thesis into three box files (c1,000 pages total), step outside into a hailstorm to head off to the binders.

1.02 pm - boxes are already getting pretty wet, step back inside to grab some plastic bags to wrap everything in.

2.00 pm - arrive at the binders. They are absolute stars and their website is hugely reassuring for those of us who get stressed about all the details. Seriously: London postgrads, these are the people to go to. They’ve done my blood pressure the world of good today.

2.15 pm - meet my girl for a late lunch - or, rather, some overdue carb and sugar loading.

4.00 pm - back home.

Here’s the stack-of-papers money shot you’ve all been waiting for:

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