I don’t know about you, but I love ‘score reading’ videos on YouTube. You know, the ones where you not only get the music, but you also get scans of the score synched up alongside.
So I’m thrilled to have discovered ch252525′s channel. Over 250 music-plus-score videos, all of them 20th-century/contemporary. There are too many gems in there to list them all. You will surely find your own. But here are a few things I was particularly happy to find:
Richard Barrett – EARTH, for trombone and percussion.
Helmut Lachenmann – Serynade, for piano
John Cage – Aria, for voice
Luigi Nono – Ommagio a György Kurtág, for contralto, flute, clarinet and tuba
Finally, most eye-opening of all: Brian Ferneyhough’s (now withdrawn) Sonatina for 3 clarinets and bassoon, of 1963:
Having just written about one contemporary epic, it seems like a good time to draw full attention to someone else’s writing on another, given its premiere almost exactly a year ago.
At the end of last month, Simon Cummings of 5 against 4 embarked on a nine-part series of posts on James Dillon’s Nine Rivers cycle. It’s a giant undertaking for a blog, and a fitting tribute to Dillon’s masterwork. As readers have come to expect with 5 against 4, not only is each post a lucid and forceful critique of the music, but each is lavishly supplemented with original programme notes, audio recordings and, in many cases, the scores themselves (courtesy of Peters Edition). Here’s a run-down of them all.
East 11th St‘s rigorous grid-based foundation perhaps brings the calculated structures of the Constructions in Metal to mind, & the interrelationship of indeterminate & pitched instruments isn’t dissimilar to that of Ionisation, but … the compositional aspect that’s projected with greatest force is timbre
At 10 minutes’ duration, it’s the shortest piece in the cycle, but there’s absolutely nothing slight about it; on the contrary, L’ECRAN Parfum is a searing demonstration of Dillon the dramaturgist, cramming into its brief span a bewildering & almost infeasibly intense dramatic outpouring
Having moved seamlessly between its first two components, Nine Rivers enters an entirely new area with its third piece, Viriditas … Timbrally disjunct from its predecessors, Viriditas also stands apart from them in the complexity of its material
La femme invisible is a decidedly difficult work to get a grip on; despite the clarity of its structure, & indeed its familiarity (the CD has been available for almost 20 years), the work still seems as impenetrable as ever—fascinating but enigmatic, allusive yet elusive
Despite being heard in the wake of almost two hours of incredibly intense & intricate music, L’œuvre au noir comes as a genuine shock; Dillon’s piercing gaze into the abyss, & the sheer scale of its blackness is breathtaking
The electronics … are negligible, so the piece is simply heard as one for brass septet & percussion • Despite éileadh sguaibe‘s brief duration … Dillon establishes a fascinating relationship between these two groups, which in many ways feels like a continuation from L’œuvre au noir (& almost sounds like a larger incarnation of Richard Barrett’s superb piece for trombone & percussion, EARTH)
The overall interaction between the instrumental & synthetic aspects of Introitus is strikingly effective • But most impressive is Dillon’s string writing, the sheer inventive range of which is exhaustive, & the interrelationship of the three groupings, particularly the long episode where the quartet is in the foreground, is thrilling despite the quietening taking place
Having explored eight different kinds of ensemble, Dillon finally unites them; it’s not explicitly described as such, but with nine woodwind, seven brass, six percussion, piano, harp & 11 strings, plus live electronics & a choir of 16 voices, Oceanos is undeniably a work for choir & orchestra—not a large one, to be sure, but an orchestra nonetheless • As such, captured in that evocative title, it has a breadth of scope far beyond that of its predecessors, a broadness that also results in some of the slowest, most weighty material in the entire cycle
I wasn’t there last Saturday, in Huddersfield Town Hall at the dead of night. So I can only write a compromised response to a partial experience. Richard Barrett’s music is so inherently physical in the way it is conceived and arranged – disposed and composed – that anything not in the flesh is almost not there at all.
Well, I exaggerate, but listening to CONSTRUCTION via Radio 3′s online broadcast falls even shorter than usual of the complete picture. CONSTRUCTION is a work so detailed in its working-out, so expansive and spatial in its design, that a stereo stream (even in HD) will always be found wanting.
But here goes.
More than two hours in length, CONSTRUCTION has occupied Barrett for at least six years. Its programme note advertises it in 20 separate parts, but its shape is more complicated than a simple list. Wounds I–V, for example are as much the five movements of a miniature violin concerto as they are separate pieces (although most (?all) have already been performed as such). All of the 20 ‘movements’ of CONSTRUCTION belong to one of four such cycles running throughout the work. And CONSTRUCTION itself, of course, belongs to the much larger cycle of compositions Resistance and Vision.
Another of those CONSTRUCTION movements, heliocentric, is itself a tessellation of several smaller Barrett works to have emerged in recent years. These include the clarinet duo Hypnerotomachia, the flugelhorn and trombone duo Aurora, and the flute and recorder duo Città del sole (now renamed Adocentyn).
Any one of these duos is therefore a work within a work within a cycle within a work within a cycle. As CONSTRUCTION unfolds in real time, the upper and lower boundaries of that ecosystem – the little duo and the overall cycle – are invisible. We are somewhere in the middle, a chosen screenshot within an animated fractal dive. Extending the ecosystem metaphor, perhaps somewhere on the level of organisms or communities.
This sounds like an impossibly complicated design, its execution over nearly 150 minutes a utopian folly. And it’s probably meant to come across that way – utopias, and their relationship to the poorer reality in which we live, is the work’s underlying subject. However, because it is a work of art, it is able to put its own idealism into action, to send it out into the world and let it concretise into an existence of its own.
There’s more here than it is possible to write about. (Perhaps that’s why, as I write myself on Tuesday evening, I can find no other reviews from press or blogs.)
Some favourite things: the sudden emergence of familiar elements from Aurora or Wound II; the rotating solar system, ordered and chaotic, of heliocentric; the blend of electronics and acoustic instruments; the devastating control of one colossal span of time; the staggering instrumental colour.
Some things that either surprised me or still need processing: the children’s playground recording; the final ‘resolution’ of the work’s own utopian goals into improvisation.
Although there is a strong line up at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival there’s no doubt, I think, what the highlight will be: Saturday night’s world premiere of Richard Barrett’s CONSTRUCTION.
Years in the making, CONSTRUCTION was originally commissioned by Liverpool City Council, while the city was 2008 European Capital of Culture. Whether it will ever performed in the city that paid for it remains to be seen. But for now, Huddersfield is the lucky recipient.
CONSTRUCTION is a two-hour work for three voices, ensemble, electronics and ‘sound house’, composed as in twenty parts, arranged as four interlocking cycles. It includes duos, solos, pieces for electronics, a group improvisation, a song cycle and a miniature violin concerto. One is tempted to call it the most ambitious project by this composer of ambitious projects, except that CONSTRUCTION itself forms just one part of Resistance and Vision, a massive, utopian cycle of works that is a more a philosophical theme than a realizable event. (Other works in the R&V cycle include Mesopotamia for chamber orchestra and NO for orchestra.)
ELISION will be the performers on Saturday; you can read more about the piece on their site. Sound and Music have also produced a video trailer. I doubt tickets are available at this stage, but the whole thing is being broadcast on Radio 3 from 10:30 pm. Set your digital recorders.
CONSTRUCTION breaks down into lots of pieces that can stand on their own. Several have appeared previously on these pages: see RB’s comments on Aurorahere and my review of Hypnerotomachiahere. I also reviewed Wound IIhere.
Great news from Sound and Music and the University of Huddersfield:
Sound and Music and the University of Huddersfield are delighted to announce a new, permanent home for the 20th and 21st century scores and recordings of the former BMIC Collection.
Now called the British Music Collection, this unique resource with over 30,000 scores will from November 2011 be located at the Music Library of the University of Huddersfield, where it will shortly become publicly accessible, housed within a specially-designed unit.
The Collection (called the BMIC Collection before the creation of Sound and Music in 2009) is a remarkable resource consisting of scores, recordings and background material from the UK. Most of it relates to post-1960 and contemporary work, but it also encompasses materials stretching back to 1900.
It contains both published and unpublished works, including many pieces that are out of print or hard to obtain. High-profile composers, such as Britten, Tippett, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Cardew, Harvey, Weir, MacMillan, Turnage and Adès, are featured alongside currently-emerging composers and many less well-known or unjustly neglected creators whose work deserves rediscovery.
Sound and Music and the University of Huddersfield will work in partnership to develop the British Music Collection, both to develop the digital resource and to acquire new materials for both the physical and online archives.
To celebrate the British Music Collection’s new home, Sound and Music and the University of Huddersfield will be hosting a free discussion event, exploring some of its treasures, on Tuesday 22 November, 10am at Huddersfield Art Gallery as part of hcmf// 2011.
It’s been a while, and it’s closer to 2012 than 2010 now, but I thought it high time to revive last year’s ‘10 for ’10‘ series of composer interviews. In any case, we never got to 10, so there’s unfinished business to deal with at least.
I first encountered Daryl Jamieson‘s music in September this year, at the Pharos International Festival of Contemporary Music, in Cyprus. He was born in Nova Scotia in 1980, but in recent years has made his home in Tokyo. I have elsewhere described his piano trio, Snow Meditation, as containing hints of a 19th-century Romanticism, but “in a way that wasn’t kitsch, nostalgic, or even ironic”. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily the best way to approach Jamieson’s music as whole. Remembering back to that piece, more than a month later, I think my specific response was born of a more generalisable sense that here was music that was sensitive to certain formal habits or practices – and even contained occasional surface allusions in terms of certain gestures or sounds – but that was capable of re-presenting these things, or perhaps moving between them, in a way that seemed much more generous in spirit than much, more cynical, postmodernism.
That’s still not a precise encapsulation, and Snow Meditation (heard just once) is falling further into memory now. For this profile, Jamieson has provided an altogether different piece, a Fugue in b for piano solo (2010). According to its programme note, it is ‘the third in [a] long-term series of fugues I am hoping to write over my life’. The attachment to fugue suggests a continuing wish to connect with and consider the values and objects of tradition. But there is an almost mystical allusiveness to this piece that may be characteristic. A sense that life is being breathed into or through something that is hardly really there. Jamieson also writes: ‘Donʼt expect to hear the fugal subject: it is played only with the mind of the pianist, not with her hands…’
TR-J: Composing is an anachronistic career choice for the 21st century, isn’t it? Why do you do it?
Daryl Jamieson: I’m not sure that composing has ever been a sensible career choice. I seem to recall a great many composers throughout history becoming so against the wishes of their families, whether that be for reasons of finance or class or gender. But music is part of the human experience and always will be; likewise, people are naturally curious and like to experience things they have not yet experienced. There will always be new music, in some form or another, and so composers will always exist, regardless of financial reward.
Personally, I compose for a very basic reason: I want to express something about the world and my emotional reaction to it, and the tools at hand that are most comfortable, most familiar to me are musical. It’s not really a career choice, it’s just something I do. In high school and university I had many diverse interests that I could have pursued as a career, I suppose: I studied math and drama and poetry as an undergraduate, and my science marks in high school were higher than my music ones. But composing allows me to indulge and explore all these fields – drama with opera and music theatre, poetry with songs, science and math with the serial matrices I create to govern the harmonic fields in many of my pieces – and so I can develop all of those interests along with my musical technique.
TR-J: How do you think composing, being a composer, now is different from 20–30 years ago?
DJ: Composing, for me at least, still involves sitting at a desk with a sheet of blank manuscript paper and a pencil. Part of my practice involves matrices and series with moderately complex maths worked out on a computer, but nothing I couldn’t do by hand if forced. In the pure moment of creation, I don’t think anything has changed for centuries, not in the way that I compose.
However, there has been a growing crisis with the role of the composer in society, which has been steadily decreasing over the past century even as visual artists have recently become ever more prominent. In Japan, for instance, if you ask the average person about contemporary composers, most people can name only Takemitsu – who died more than a decade ago – if they can name any at all. Composers have mostly excepted themselves from the general public debate, despite the efforts of those few composers who write political music, such as Richard Barrett, or who are politically active, such as Pascal Dusapin. I went through a period of writing political music, mostly in my undergraduate years, but since then have largely avoided specifically political themes. I do think about how my musical organisation and structure can reflect their political and societal equivalents, though music is abstract enough that people who want to ignore that type of political message can and do. Political engagement, even by major composers, seems to be ignored by even the quality papers, let alone the general public, and so I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is.
That said, direct political or social action is something I personally would like to be more involved with in the future. Recently the mmm… ensemble (which I co-founded) embarked on a year-long charity project called the ‘hibari project’*, which will raise money for those who were orphaned or disabled by the Great East Japan Earthquake. We have given a hundred composers from around the world a platform to reflect publicly on a matter of international significance, while also helping the victims financially. I hope that this will play a small part in remaking the connection between composers and the general public.
The other big change in the past thirty years, a more positive one, is in communications technology. mmm…’s main concert series, the ‘Circle of Friends’, features young composers from around the world. [Coincidentally, they have performed pieces by three composers in ’10 for 10’ series – Evan Johnson, Timothy McCormack and James Weeks – as well as one other hopefully to come in the near future - Ed.] We’ve only met eight of the twenty-five featured composers in person, and all of our interactions, including rehearsals, have taken place on the internet. This is undeniably new, and even ten years ago, in an age before Skype made long-distance phone calls irrelevant, our ensemble could not have existed in its current form. The opportunities to meet composers from abroad and have pieces performed in countries where you’ve never set foot seem to be greater now than ever before, and that must be a good thing for world culture.
TR-J: How important for you is it to work with performers on a new piece? And what happens when that piece is taken up by another player/group?
DJ: I like collaborating with performers, and I like workshopping pieces, and I’m quite jealous of the method choreographers use to create new pieces (teaching the piece to the dancers in small bits, moulding those bits into a whole over weeks or months, with the dancers learning everything by rote as you create). But in practice, I usually work briefly with the musicians before I write, hearing them play and learning their limits, and then present them, a few weeks or months later, with a nearly-finished piece. That’s as much a limitation of performers’ schedules and/or distance as a choice of mine.
In rehearsal, I’m content to not be in total control of things; I like to let the performers bring their own artistic sensibility to the music, and not be overly concerned with what I think is the ‘correct’ way to play it. After a piece is first performed, I’m creatively finished with it. I don’t do revisions, neither am I protective of my initial intentions. I sometimes don’t even recall my original intentions, as I’m already writing the next piece. So if a new performer takes up one of my pieces, I encourage them to trust their own judgements about the music, and not rely on my critiques. The composer is only one-third of the necessary minimum number of intelligent beings needed to create musical meaning. Both the performer(s) and the listener(s) bring their own experiences and interpretations to the music, and their’s are not less important than the composer’s.
TR-J: A lot of composition is about ways of proceeding, extending an idea in time. What sort of decisions are you dealing with as you compose?
DJ: I have two different methods of approaching composition. One is serial (neo-serial?) with regard to pitch, one is comparatively free (structured improvising on the page). The series and matrices I use in the first method tend to be derived from natural phenomena – such as mountain heights – or arcane numerological analyses of poetry. The soundworlds created by the two methods are not so dissimilar, but the neo-serial pieces tend to have more notes. In both cases, I first plot a structure – indicating textures and durations of sections – and as I compose the details of the pieces, I’m principally concerned with rhythm and colour. That is not to say I don’t care about pitch or harmony, just that I separate my harmonic thought from my rhythmic and timbral thought.
Since the overall structure (and sometimes pitch) has been predetermined, while I compose I can focus on the individual moment, the individual note, its colour and duration, the balancing of irregular rhythms with regular ones to avoid the tyranny of pulse and barline. I try to infuse each moment with what I consider beauty. This emphasis on colour, beauty, and ‘the moment’ is something I have in common with Japanese aesthetics, though this has been a dominant strain in my music ever since I discovered Feldman in the early 2000s, long before I moved to Japan. Certainly whilst in Japan I’ve been consciously developing this aspect of my music, and have been greatly influenced in this by Japanese art, especially Noh theatre, and by learning to play the koto.
TR-J: What projects are on your desk at the moment?
DJ: I’ve got a series of piano miniatures to write that I’ve been putting off for the best part of a year, as well as a piece for the next mmm… concert on 27 March (this will be an alto flute and violin duo), and a piece for koto (with voice) and viola for the third concert in an on-going series called Music Without Borders, which is a collective of five composers who write for Frankfurt-based koto player Naoko Kikuchi along with various other instruments, both Western and Japanese. All of my upcoming projects are influenced by, or are settings of, Japanese poetry, which has been an abiding interest since the mid 2000s.
TR-J: Here’s a middle C. What do you do now?
DJ: There is no dusk here. There is a moment when it is day, then there is a moment when it is night. The day is over. There is a sound that was a middle C, but its middle C-ness has gone. When did it go? you ask. I didn’t notice either. It was here a second ago, you say. Never mind, it’s gone now. The moon is bright tonight, you say. There is the illusion of rain. The middle C, stripped of its middle C-ness, lingers.
—
*The Hibari charity project launched on 25th October. It will be updated every Tuesday for the next year with two new pieces of contemporary music. The pieces are available to stream through the site; to download, all that’s required is a charitable donation. All proceeds go to the Asahi Shinbun newspaper’s Social Welfare Organization, helping children who were orphaned by the Japanese earthquake, as well as elderly and disabled people who were affected.
New compositions for solo amplified clavichord and ensemble with Olie Brice on Contrabass, Leon Michener on Clavichord and electronics, and ‘mystery guest’ vocalist. Projections from the visual music box by Pianoscope.
The clavichord is one of the most early and expressive of keyboard instruments, and one that the young Handel was very attached to, often stealing away at night to practice in secret. In this recital his instrument is taken out of it’s normal acoustic setting and subjected to various means of sound generation and styles of playing, forming the basis for a suite of compositions that move through free Jazz, Hendrixian riffs, Baroque partimenti, Classical composition, and folk music.
Michener will be playing a restrung clavichord, using custom pick-ups to allow amplification, sound processing etc. There’s also some microtonal stuff going on, and a harpsichord tuned in Pythagorean tuning.
Autumn’s here, although you wouldn’t know it by the weather in London at the moment. Time for a new Radio Rambler playlist … here are some notes on some of the pieces to help you along the way.
Francis Dhomont – Chambre des enfants
Dhomont is a pioneer and massively overlooked – you won’t find his name in Baker’s, Griffiths, Kennedy, Morton or Vinton. (Although you have my word that he will be in the forthcoming new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music.) Anyway, his music is far too good for neglect, and is generously documented by empreintes DIGITALES. This track, which totally owns the disturbing/cute interface from which Richard James has built a career, comes from the all-excellent Forêt profonde cycle of 1996. Why Dhomont isn’t the name to drop, I don’t know. Perhaps he shouldn’t have moved to Canada in 1979.
Franco Donatoni – Duo pour Bruno
Timo Korhonen – Tutte le corde
I don’t often get on with new music for guitar – is there any other instrument that struggles so much to shake off its folk origins? – but this piece for guitar and tape by Finnish composer Olli Koskelin does pretty well I think by embracing that background rather than pretending it’s not there at all. You can find it on this recital disc by Timo Korhonen.
Stefano Scodanibbio – Ritorno a cartagena
Philippe Manoury – Jupiter
Two pieces for flute (plus …)
Misato Mochizuki – Intermezzi I
I wasn’t much taken with Mochizuki’s music when I first heard it, and filed it under generic post-Lachenmann, post-spectral mainstream modernism. On closer listening that wasn’t really fair, and her best pieces are rather more than that. The solo flute part in Intermezzi I contains enough cues from shakuhachi music to make me believe that its clichéd gestures of Western modernism are equally borrowed – the dialogue between the two is delicately, but not too comfortably, poised. This track comes from an intriguing Ensemble Intégrales CD that I found while putting together the playlist for International Women’s Day; I can also recommend Klangforum Wien’s disc on Kairos.
Luca Francesconi – Terre del rimorso
Peter Eötvös – Two Poems to Polly
Eötvös is frustrating, isn’t he? At his best he is capable of some very striking music (Windsequenzen, Psychokosmos, Atlantis). At other times, meh. Two Poems to Polly isn’t a major work, but it is an example of the spare that serves him better than the sumptious.
This is a great album of historical new music recordings made by Ensemble Neue Horizone. Unfortunately, it’s let down by poor ID3 tags. See the album’s page on allmusic if you need full info.
Evan Johnson – L’art de toucher le Clavecin, 2
John Croft – … ne l’aura che trema
Two more pieces for flute plus, this time from the Richard Craig CD I raved about earlier this year. Here’s what I said then:
The two best new works, however, are those by Johnson and Croft. Coming after the Sciarrino, which ends with a flat, focussed stream of tongue slaps and breath noises, Croft’s fantasia for alto flute and electronics is like stepping onto another world. The title alludes to ‘the air that trembles’ that Dante encounters in the first circle of hell, inhabited the ancient poets and philosophers, before crossing into the second circle, the realm of the excessively passionate and, rather like the Barrett, there is a sense of both withdrawing and projecting, an almost erotic play with a threshold. In its own way, Johnson’s L’art de toucher le clavecin for piccolo and violin similarly toys with boundaries. But here the path is more tentatively trodden; at times even the border itself seems to evaporate. The dialogue – hence the reference to Couperin’s instructional pamphlet – is between ground and ornament, but everything is ultra-cautiously proposed, bundled under fantastic layers of contingencies and securities. It sounds like the recipe for a health and safety nightmare, but Johnson’s skill is for extracting something rare and precious from out of such pressure.
Erdem Helvacıoğlu and Per Boysen – Metal Sky
I’ve reviewed Helvacıoğlu’s music a couple of times before. Here’s a track from an album I’ve not written about, to give you a flavour.
Mauricio Kagel – Divertimento
Finally, a ‘farce for orchestra’ from Kagel. This comes from the documentation CDs from the 2006 Donaueschinger Musiktage, on Neos. Thankfully a lot of the Neos catalogue is now making it onto Spotify (at least it is in the UK). It’s worth searching by label for this one, and Neos will likely feature in many future playlists.
I’m in Cyprus at the moment, on flaky hotel wi-fi, so not able to post much today. But I do want to draw attention to the Help Carla Gala, which will take place this Thursday at St Marylebone Parish Church.
Carla Rees is a renowned new music flautist and founder of Rarescale. A resident of Croydon, Carla was hit devastatingly by the recent riots in London. Her flat was burnt down, along with 10 flutes and a private library of more than 600 scores. She also lost her two cats.
She and her boyfriend had just come back from a weekend coaching the National Youth Wind Orchestra, when they encountered gangs of youths and smashed cars in the street. Fearful of the atmosphere, they grabbed clean clothes, fed the cats and booked into a hotel. An hour later, her home was in ruins.
The driving force behind helping Carla with this benefit concert has been Tim Benjamin, and a poster for the event can be downloaded from his website. Here are some more details:
7.30pm, Thursday 15th September 2011
St. Marylebone Parish Church
Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LT
The concert features a huge array of performers, plus music by composers from Telemann to Knussen, plus nine miniature world premieres. Please go if you can.
Tickets are £10 on the door.
The Help Carla Gala is one of several benefits for Carla being organised by the new music community: one just past was on Sunday 11th September at St Paul’s Church, Chiswick featuring Flutophonic. Another will take place on Sunday October 9th 7pm at the same venue, St Paul’s Church, Grove Park, Chiswick W4 3SB featuring Flutophonic, Claire and Pasha and pianist Anthony Hewitt. Free admission, with a retiring collection.
