I’m writing a book

OK, it’s time to come clean. I’m writing a book.

Quite an ambitious one: a history of composition since 1989. New music in the long 21st century. Modern Music After Modern Music And After. The Rest of The Rest is Noise.*

I’ve been thinking about this thing for a few years now, and nurturing the ambition for a few more than that. Yet it’s still in the very early stages. I’ve not spoken to any publishers yet, and I don’t have a huge amount of writing to show. Just a lot of plans, spider diagrams, lists, notecards and a slowly cohering concept. Here’s a representative photo of one wall of my study:

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But although I’m still in the very early planning stages, I thought it about time to plant my flag in the sand.  If I don’t, it will never happen. This is the book I’m writing: TROTRIN, or MMAMMAA.

There are two reasons for starting in 1989. There is the obvious one: the end of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of globalization and a neo-liberal political consensus across Europe, North America and beyond have affected social and cultural activity across the globe. Music is no exception to this.

The second is related, and no less pressing. In spite of a steady stream of books on 20th-century music history in recent years, from Whittall to Griffiths to Ross, and the steady passing of years, a coherent approach to the recent history of composition has not yet emerged. In their histories of the later 20th century, these books all rely on a narrative that begins in 1945 and the implications of the postwar landscape: the rebuilding of Europe, the ascent of America and the tensions of the Cold War. If this framework holds true for the historiography of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and even 80s, it follows that it cannot function for the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, the decades of the EU, challenges to American hegemony and the end of the Cold War. This is reflected in the relative success of these books to address the music of the last two and a half decades versus that of the preceding three or four. Reading these authors, one gets a sense of the ground falling away and the search for new foundations: postmodern fragmentation (Griffiths), or silence (Ross, who includes only a handful of pages on music since 1989).

So the primary aim of my book is to establish that foundation. By focusing, uniquely, on writing a history of modern composition that begins in 1989 I hope to effect a break from the post-1945 narrative. In doing so, I also hope to find a way to write about contemporary music that reasserts its position in relation to contemporary life, and reclaims its expressive language from accusations of irrelevance and elitism.

And drawing this line hurts, because there’s a ton of outstanding music from the 1970s and 80s that hasn’t yet made it into the history books, and that I’m going to have to force myself not write about. I’d love to include L’Itinéraire, the German Feedback Group, pre-LICHT Stockhausen, the best work of Lachenmann, Ferneyhough and Lucier, and much more, but that will have to wait.

However, I will be able to write about Peter Ablinger, Bang on a Can, Richard Barrett, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Empreintes Digitales, Michael Finnissy, Christopher Fox, Alexandr Knaifel, Liza Lim, Annea Lockwood, Nico Muhly, R. Murray Schafer, Mathias Spahlinger, the Wandelweiser group, Hildegard Westerkamp … it’s not all bad. Hopefully the prospect of that book excites you as much as it does me.

*Thanks to Tom for that one.

Reviews resurrected: EXAUDI at the Warehouse, October 2009

Resurrected because it features my first encounter with a couple of pieces on EXAUDI’s forthcoming disc for HCR – Stephen Chase’s Jandl Songs, and Claudia Molitor’s lorem ipsum. Not sure why I didn’t mention the pieces by either Gwyn Pritchard or Linda Catlin Smith at the time, and now of course I can’t remember anything about them.

Originally published on Musical Pointers.

Don’t forget the launch concert and party for EXAUDI’s CD, this Saturday, 4th May, at the Only Connect Theatre, Kings Cross.

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EXAUDI, dir. James Weeks

Chung Shih Hoh: mantra:imagine
Stephen Chase: from Jandl Songs
Gwyn Pritchard: Luchnos
Ignacio Agrimbau: The Humanist
Amber Priestley: Unloose to the Murmer
James Weeks: from Mala Punica
Linda Catlin Smith: Her Harbour
Claudia Molitor: lorem ipsum

The Warehouse, London, 29 October 2009

Several of the pieces in this miscellany of special commissions and ‘must do’ rarities came across as surprisingly honest to certain choral traditions. No doubt that perception is a product of my upbringing, but that tradition and the resulting pieces sound interestingly and pleasingly English to me, right down to the strings of finger pops in Molitor’s lorem ipsum, which recalled peals of change-ringing bells. But then EXAUDI and most of the composers they performed are products of similar upbringings to mine, so perhaps it’s silly to fret over context vs content and acknowledge things for how they appeared.

The obvious exception was Agrimbau, and it’s not entirely unrelated that I found his the least satisfying piece of the evening. Instead of establishing for itself a position in critical relation to tradition it preferred to dwell overlong on a series of new music tricks and treats. The dense accompanying notes didn’t help much – the music itself didn’t seem correspondingly dense. On the contrary. Perhaps the philosophical underpinnings would reveal themselves on subsequent hearings. Another puzzle was the relationship between score (described as highly graphic, and featuring emoticons) and the sounding result (which was precisely ordered and didn’t betray any aleatoric origins). Maybe EXAUDI had undertaken a substantial act of David Tudorism in translating the graphics to conventional notation, but then, one has to ask, why the graphics in the first place? All in all, a baffling piece.

The rest were much lighter in tone. The middle movement of Hoh’s mantra:imagine was a Zen-like setting of ‘Pepsi Cola’, but it was the first movement that especially struck me, a series of dense harmonic textures, interrupted by chunks of silence, rather like Ligeti cut into large panels and pegged out on a line.

Ligeti was also recalled inthe group’s director James Weeks’s three pieces from his Mala punica. Each was constructed around canonic procedures that derived great complexity from simple materials. The result was simultaneously airier than Ligeti, but more robust and unsettling. There was a sort of dark madrigalian quality to the individual part writing too, which suggested a greater interest in the Latin texts than Ligeti ever showed in his Requiem or Lux aeterna.

The two stand-out pieces for me were those by Chase and Priestley. Chase’s six Jandl Songs belong to an in-progress series of settings of the avant-garde Austrian poet. The texts themselves are curious, experimental verses, the flavour of which Chase captured perfectly in his clean, but deceptively clever settings. It was impossible to pin down why they worked so well – an explanation sat just out of view – but work they did, extremely well.

Priestley’s Unloose to the Murmer, a sort of deconstruction of Monteverdi’s Orfeo by way of Cageian Musicircus ritual, may have had loftier ambitions – and it didn’t quite reach them as satisfyingly as Chase’s songs – but it was nevertheless a successful and revealing piece. The Orfeo extracts were chopped and tossed together to form a series of choral refrains, which each degraded in turn into aleatoric passages governed by giant sheets of manuscript covered with transparencies, on which were graphic notations for more indeterminate interpretation. The performers were distributed about the space, with a sheet each. After each refrain they removed a transparency each and the cycle began again until all the transparencies were gone, leaving a slow, underlying cantus firmus. The graphic transparencies seemed to suggest movement as well as sound, so the indeterminate sections became miniature theatre pieces. It is more complicated to describe than it was to experience: the effect was actually quite direct, yet with an element of mystery, exactly like Cage. I thought Monteverdi was a good choice for such a treatment: his sectional constructions, melodic simplicity and harmonic and rhythmic robustness mean that he can be bashed around quite a lot without losing his fundamental identity. These are qualities shared, incidentally, by many British composers you might hear at the Warehouse, for whom questions of material and its malleability are central to their aesthetic – Molitor and Weeks, in different ways, might be two more. Priestley, on this evidence, sounds like she shares this interest, and I suspect she will go far with it.

Secret Music: May

(Click for the background to the Secret Music listings.)

Friday 3 May: Roca London Gallery: Distractfold Ensemble, 7.15 | Free

In the Zaha Hadid-designed Roca Gallery in, London Manchester’s Distractfold Ensemble, with guest harpist Martino Panizza, present an exciting new programme:

Iannis Xenakis – Mikka S

John Croft – mit schwarzem Glanz

Martin Iddon – Danaë

Charles-Antoine Fréchette – Toposition(s)#2

Concert starts at 7.15, but I’m told there is a pre-concert talk featuring Allard van Hoorn, Mauricio Pauly and others.

Saturday 4 May: Only Connect Theatre: EXAUDI, 7pm | £12/£10

See previous postings. More details here.

Friday 10 May: St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden: Herakles!, 7:30pm | £10

A new piece of surreal and absurdist music-theatre, written and directed by Neil Luck, Herakles! mixes contemporary classical music with concrete poetry, slapstick comedy, free improvisation, Kabuki theatre and Broadway showstoppers. All filtered through the highly idiosyncratic and avant-garde texts of Richard Foreman.

Performed by ARCO (Neil Luck, Adam de la Cour, Chihiro Ono, Benedict Taylor, Sam Rice and others).

Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 May: Tectonics Festival, Glasgow, times and prices vary

First incarnation of this two-day festival of experimental music, curated by Ilan Volkov. The mouth-watering line-up of composers includes Chiyoko Szlavnics, Frank Denyer, Alvin Lucier and Iancu Dumitrescu. Performers include Anton Lukoszevieze, Ilan Volkov, the BBC Scottish SO and Oren Ambarchi.

What with this and their Rzewski/Barry/Feldman/White Prom in August, the BBCSSO under Volkov are in danger of becoming the UK’s leading new music orchestra.

Tuesday 21 May: The Forge, Camden: Sound of the New, 7.30pm | £9/7 online, £10/8 on the door

Second New Dots concert showcasing emerging composers and musicians – five premieres by Michael Cutting, Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Yuko Ohara, Emma-Ruth Richards and Piers Tattersall, played by the Atea Wind Quintet and Richard Uttley (piano).

Tuesday 21 May: Performance Space, City University, London: Plus-Minus, 6pm | Free, but booking necessary

Music for piano, voice, percussion and electronics by Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, Simon Steen-Andersen and Georgia Rodgers. Come on, you know want to hear that!

Tuesday 21 May: Café Oto: Kämmer Klang, 8.30pm | £6 on the door

Kämmer Klang marks its 3nd night in the 4th series with a programme of new music composed and performed by Jennifer Walshe (All the Peoples) and Sebastien Roux (Sol le Witt transcriptions) and a selection from John Cage’s 44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 performed by Lucy Railton and Leo Chadburn.

[a late addition]: Sunday 26 May: Schott, 48 Great Marlborough Street, London, 6.30pm | Price unknown, but usually a few quid

Florian Steininger plays piano works by Ives, Radulescu, Rihm, Hauer, Clarke and Sorabji.

Choose your own …

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I’ve said this a couple of times now, to people who haven’t heard Peter Ablinger’s music before, but who are interested: He’s sort of (sort of) like our John Cage. Which is one of those handy shortcuts you sometimes have to take in conversation.

And yeah, it’s a little hyperbolic, but it gets the idea across.

But it’s not just the ideas and sounds and themes of Ablinger’s music that suggest Cage; there’s a certain unavoidability about him too. Not that I think that every composer after, say, Voices and Piano or IEAOV is going to have to come to some sort of accommodation with Ablinger as they did with Cage after Music of Changes or 4’33″. The music world isn’t structured in that way any more. But there is a sense that every path you follow, if you follow it far enough, leads you to Ablinger.

Connected with this, and something else Ablinger shares with Cage, is a sense of completeness about his compositional project. That,  like unfolding a box, every side to each new work has been laid out in turn and followed through. His deceptively excellent website is a perfect illustration and realisation of this. Pick a link from his list of works, get an idea of the themes and materials of the piece (transcription, representation, listening, subjectivity, community, space, technology, the environment, etc.), pick one and follow the thread to the next piece. It’s like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books we used to read in the 80s before the Internet existed. Choose Your Own Realised Sound Concept.

Today, while writing up next month’s Secret Music listings (soon come), I discovered his piece Piano and Record for the first time: a faithful transcription of the microvariations of a blank vinyl record for solo piano. Isn’t that just the perfect early 21st-century artefact?

I bloody love Peter Ablinger.

P.S. Can a hyperbole ever be a shortcut, geometrically speaking?

With EXAUDI, exposed

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I’m chuffed to be hosting a couple of composer conversations at EXAUDI‘s next concert, on 4 May at the Only Connect Theatre, Cubitt Street, King’s Cross. Before the music starts I’ll be on stage talking with Matthew Shlomowitz and EXAUDI’s director James Weeks, and about midway through I’ll be hosting a roundtable discussion with Shlomowitz, Weeks, Aaron Cassidy, Stephen Chase and Claudia Molitor. A shedload of talent, moderated by a fool.

I’m not the reason you should go. You actually want to see EXAUDI themselves, who will be singing pieces by Shlomowitz, Weeks, Cassidy, Chase and Evan Johnson. They’ll also be launching their new CD, Exposure – the sixth release from Huddersfield Contemporary Recordings. I’ve been listening to it lots over the weekend, and it’s pretty special. It features pieces by Cassidy, Weeks, Chase, Molitor, Bryn Harrison, Richard Glover and Joanna Bailie. A really diverse mix, but somehow, and thanks to EXAUDI’s alchemical powers, a coherent one. Really beautiful too.

The concert should be great as well; get down to King’s Cross if you can.

#promsnewmusic

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So the Proms 2013 programme came out yesterday. Here’s what I reckon.

The highlights are clearly Proms no.50 (Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC SSO in John White, Gerald Barry, Rzewski and Feldman), no.11 (Ex Cathedra reprise their triumphant Welt-Parlament from MITTWOCH last year) and no.5 (Lachenmann’s Proms debut – Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied programmed beside Mahler 5). But no.25 (Aurora Orchestra play Zappa, Nancarrow and Glass) also looks fun.

I’m intrigued to see how the 6Music Prom (no.40) pans out; the Urban Classic Prom (no.37) looks flimsier.

There’s lots for Lutosławski fans, in his centenary year – much more than there was for Cage in 2012. Still no Livre pour orchestre – which I know will disappoint Adrian Thomas, and others.

Special mentions to a couple of other inclusions: both Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (Prom 67) and Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Prom 71) should sound lush from up in the gods. Another big new Birtwistle is nice to see (Chamber Prom 5), and I’m interested to hear Pintscher’s double trumpet concerto (Prom 48) and Eötvös’s violin concerto for Midori (Prom 63). As Simon Cummings points out, it’s also interesting that several of the BBC commissions (Adès, Khan, Sohal) are for pieces of substantial length. Thumbs up too that a lot of the new music events have been moved back into the main evening programmes, and not shunted out into the matinees and chamber proms, as they have been in the past.

The biggest disappointments are the notable absences: four major composers passed away last year – Carter, Harvey, Henze and Nunes. Only Henze (nos.26 and 37) is represented in the programme. I would have been surprised if any Nunes had been included, but Carter’s absence seems like a major oversight; Harvey’s even more so, given that this is a British festival. I realise there wouldn’t have been time to devise a substantial memorial to either composer given that they died only late last year. But since the programmes aren’t finalised until February or even March, there should have been time to squeeze one or two small works in. A pity no one thought to do so. Harvey’s music in particular seems made for the RAH’s acoustic.

Here’s a quick guide to the whole lot for new music fans. No stylistic filters, just a list of all Proms featuring a living composer, or one predominantly active since the 1960s or so:

One day the classical music industry will wake up to ID3 tags and its mind will blow

I just tried looking for Haydn’s Symphony no.73, ‘La chasse’ on Spotify.

Being a contrary type, and knowing that searches for symphony + no. very rarely narrow the field, even for a number as high as 73, I thought I’d just pull up Haydn and flick through a few album covers instead.

Oh look, here’s Antal Doráti and the Philharmonia Hungarica performing the complete symphonies on Decca. Perfect – just click and scroll until I hit no.73.

Oh.

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There are 425 lines of this. Around four times that number if you include all the ‘additional tracks’ that Spotify lists – similarly without any identifying features.

It’s word soup: an endless stream of tempo indications, with barely anything to attach them to one particular symphony. I’m listening to a minuet and trio at the moment – God knows which one. The information is completely meaningless, completely unusable. And, if I had searched for “Symphony no.73″, or even “La chasse”, unfindable too.

This a particularly shaming example, but this kind of metadata wastage happens all over digital classical music. Even in new music, where pieces tend to have unique titles, it can be almost impossible to find things that you know are there using first-time search terms. There’s one album I know where each track is simply identified by the surname of its composer. No titles at all. And there are too many others where the composer’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the tagging. Who browses anyway, right?

Please: we’ve had digital music for nearly two decades now. Can we start to get our act together on this?

(NB I have just found that “La chasse” – on disc 21 of 33 of the Decca set – is actually one of few that can be found by searching by its title. But I think my point still stands.)

Radio Rambler updated

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A few weeks ago I came across Hermann Keller’s 29 pieces for prepared piano. I fell in love with their disintegrating sound, the preparations used negatively – to dismantle the piano timbre, rather than surrogate a percussion ensemble – and decided to build a playlist around them. The following includes six of Keller’s pieces, distributed in sequence among a variety of other things that have caught my ear recently.

I also wanted to include Richard Barrett’s DARK MATTER, the latest of his major composite works to appear on CD (on NMC), and a piece I have been listening to a lot over the last couple of months. It’s an extraordinary work. Like so much of Richard’s music it takes me a few listens for the whole thing to snap into focus. But when it does …

Nearly everything on this playlist is either a solo or duo piece. Most of the pieces are ‘small’ in other ways too; whether in scale, or humility, or on their level of focus. The 80-minute DARK MATTER might appear something of an exception to this rule, yet it too addresses ideas of scale, from the sub-atomic to the cosmic, the human to the social. And at its heart is a solo instrument – the guitar – which contributes greatly to the timbre, structure and concept of the piece.

So guitars are another thread running through this playlist – aided greatly by Geoffrey Morris’s excellent recording of contemporary guitar music In flagranti. As is melody; almost inevitably, perhaps, for a set of mostly solo works. Stephen Montague’s After Ives …, for piano and string quartet, connect several of these threads, and serve to acknowledge his 70th birthday last month.

As always, you can listen to the whole lot here through Spotify. Previous tracks played on Radio Rambler may be found in the archive; previous playlists are all here.

Where possible, links to the label’s website have been given for each track.

If you like what you hear, and you you think others might too, please spread the word.

Photo by puukibeach on flickr.

Two new homes for adventurous writing on music

Two new online journals on new music (etc.) have appeared recently. Both look great, and have got off to flying starts with their first issues.

surround is somewhat enigmatic in its self-presentation – minimal contact details, minimal news, a poem on the ‘about’ page. There’s a little more info on the journal’s Facebook page, which tells you that it is run by Mark Flaum and Jon Abbey, and that issue 2 is scheduled for publication in June. But not much. Flaum’s editor’s note to the first issue gives the journal’s goal as to attempt to capture in text those things about music that are “ineffable, uncountable, things that don’t fit inside words or sentences”.

Among others, issue 1 contains essays by Yuko Zama on Beuger, Frey, Malfatti and Werder; Matthew Revert on Vanessa Rossetto; Flaum on Kevin Drumm and an interview with Ralf Wehowsky.

 

Divergence Press is a more formal affair: peer-reviewed and published by the University of Huddersfield through the ever-present Centre for Research in New Music. Edited by Richard Glover, its first issue is built around volume 3 of the postgraduate CeReNeM journal. Nevertheless, it contains several items of interest: Richard Beaudoin and Neil Heyde on Beaudoin’s Flutter echoes; Bryn Harrison on his recent music; R. Andrew Lee on Tom Johnson’s An Hour for Piano; Sarah C. Davachi on La Monte Young and Arvo Pärt; and Maarten Beirens on Andriessen’s De Tijd.

Submissions are currently sought for issue 2, to be published in November, on the theme of sound, music, image.

Both journals look like promising new venues for adventurous musical writing. I commend them both to your browsers.

Just what London needs

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Last week saw the first edition of the London Ear Festival of Contemporary Music, a new showcase for serious modern composition. It’s surprising that such a festival should be necessary in a city like London, which prides itself on its world-class musical offerings, and its wealth of venues and performing ensembles. But, sadly, it is.

The bigger venues – like the Southbank, Barbican Centre, and so on – have become adept at Total Immersions, birthday parties or fairground attractions. But works that are harder to programme in this way don’t often get a look in – works for smaller ensembles or soloists, or works that don’t have an easily packaged hook. Work that constitute the bulk of new musical activity, in fact. Since the demise of the BMIC’s Cutting Edge series a few years ago, it has become even harder to hear such works live in the UK’s capital.

Which is why LEF is so welcome. Yes, you could complain that these were small works played in small venues to relatively small audiences (although the numbers were good for the venues chosen). But the intimacy and quality of the musical experience for those who did go was greater, I would suggest, than that for some more obviously glitzy events elsewhere.

Prior commitments meant that I was only able to attend two concerts (out of an impressive 11), on Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening. On Saturday I saw the Norwegian ensembles Nordic Voices and Bit20 in a split programme of works for voices and/or percussion by mostly Norwegian or Norwegian-based composers – Arne Nordheim, Rolf Wallin, Cecilie Ore, Lasse Thoresen and Craig Farr – alongside pieces by Peter Ablinger and Giacinto Scelsi. I enjoyed in particular Nordheim’s Response IV for four percussion and tape, proggy, indebted to its time (1977) and no less joyous for that; and Wallin’s xylophone and marimba duo Twine, which wove atmospheric, minimalist-y textures with skittering runs and arpeggios in increasingly complex patterns.

The best work, by common consent it seemed, was Ablinger’s Studien nach der natur, 10 short pieces (of 40 seconds each) that each attempt to transcribe a natural or man-made sound for six a cappella voices. The scores (available via Ablinger’s website) have the sort of of detail you would expect from a composer so deeply engaged with the processes of transcription, and the resulting performance was extremely realistic.

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From Studien 2: Das Meer

But – like oh so much of Ablinger’s music – there was more at work here than mere gimmicry or mimicry. The redundancies that are built into the process of painstakingly notating the sound of the sea, or a motorway, or an electrical hum, and then painstakingly rehearsing and performing it, are obvious, but they bounce the listener’s attention on to alternative questions of efficacy, value, meaning and form. Our idea of place, for example, or of reproduction or capture, or the tiny – almost tragical – narratives that inevitably form: why the squeal of tyres as the car accelerates into the distance? Why did the fly stop buzzing? Why was the sea, suddenly, no longer heard?

The Sunday evening concert was given by the excellent Ensemble Phoenix Basel, and made a fitting climax to what, by all accounts that I heard, had been an extremely successful few days. Unlike Nordic Voices/Bit20, Phoenix brought just four pieces, of roughly 15 minutes each. This made for a more rounded programme. Switzerland was represented in the second half by Hanspeter Kyburz (Danse Aveugle) and Franz Furrer-Münch (Skizzenbuch), while the first half featured Wayang, by LEF co-director Gwyn Pritchard, and a new piece by Alexander Moosbrugger, Fonds, Schach, Basar. After Pritchard’s knotty, uncompromising, but carefully coloured Wayang – an investigation of shading and shadows, rather than anything specific in Balinese culture – the concert gradually grew in momentum. Moosbrugger’s new work introduced a turntable, playing a crackly recording of András Schiff, in between dark ensemble writing and passing (nostalgic?) hints of Baroque harmonies. It didn’t grab me on first hearing, I confess. Maybe its heterogeneity and transitions between live and recorded materials would cohere better on disc. Danse Aveugle was typical Kyburz, a vibrant, energetic, shape-shifting stream. Perhaps not his best work, but enjoyed here. Furrer-Münch, a composer I had talked up a little before the festival, and whose music I have really enjoyed discovering over the last few weeks, closed off proceedings.  Like many of his works seem to be, in unexpected ways, Skizzenbuch is a peculiar piece. Which is what has attracted me to his work. Its four short movements take the sketchbook idea seriously, being not only partly sketched themselves, but also relating to one another in only the very loosest ways, almost as though entirely separate leaves from that book.

The performances in both concerts I saw were very strong, and given the calibre of musicians performing on other dates I imagine they were throughout the festival. But on top of interesting, original music, seriously treated, the festival managed to pull off a special intimacy, among the audience, composers and performers. By being focused on two small venues just round the corner from each other, and by incorporating other perks such as extremely reasonably priced food and drink in the festival club, pre-concert events, late night shows, and so on, a London festival was able to achieve the warmth, openness and community vibe that you only usually get in smaller regional towns. Lauren Redhead (who has written her own appreciation of LEF) compared it to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, but I’d say it goes even further than that in its villagey atmosphere. This really is a unique asset, and one for which the festival’s organisers are to be greatly commended. There are rumours of a second festival in a couple of years. Fingers crossed that that happens, and that the London Ear is able to build on such a strong start.