Great stuff. More details here.
Archive for January, 2004
February new music
Quick run-down of highlights in the London new music scene for February
Tuesday 3rd Feb
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies turns 70 this year (not until the 8th September, though), and to celebrate there are two all-Max concerts at the Barbican:
6pm BBC Singers, cond. Nicholas Kok: Westerlings, Angelus (world première), Corpus Christi with Cat and Mouse
7.30pm BBC SO, cond. Rumon Gamba: St Thomas Wake, 8 Songs for a Mad King, Worldes Blis.
8 Songs is figurative and literal musical lunacy – well worth seeing if you can get there.
Thursday 12th Feb
Music of Today: French Spectral Music, 6pm, Royal Festival Hall, South Bank
Tristan Murail: C’est un jardin secret …
Hugues Dufourt: Hommage à Charles Nègre
Gérard Grisey: Talea
If The Wire’s primer a few months ago got you interested, then this is your chance to see music by three of the leading spectral composers, for free. Can’t say fairer than that. And the Dufourt is a UK première. You mght even catch me at this one. I love the spectralists – the whole ’school’ just seems to find the right balance for me between modernist ultra-theory, experimental just-because noise, and sheer joy in sound. Grisey especially takes that oh so French glittering post-serial modernist sound that Boulez patented, and welds it (sometimes incongruously) to a sense of theatre and obstinate Dadaist drama that Boulez never thought about. I think he’s wonderful, and this is music that has to be seen live: so much of Grisey’s music (that I’ve seen anyway, but I can’t include Talea among this number) incorporates theatre: the sequence of huge suspended sheets of paper, say, that the percussionist has to rustle, one after another (a sort of ‘damn you, I’m going to see this spectral thing through to its logical conclusion’ – bit like Macbeth, really); or the ‘keyboard’ of gongs stretching across the back of the stage in Quatre chants … . You almost have to be a ballet dancer to play what Grisey asks here, as the sheer number of gongs means some of them are about 15 feet apart, and he wants them played pianissimo.
Saturday 14th Feb
In what has to be a tongue-in-cheek gesture, the South Bank Centre, the Society for the Promotion of New Music and the London Sinfonietta have devoted the whole of St Valentine’s day to that most un-Romantic of composers, Brian Ferneyhough. Ferneyhough is another of my favourite end-of-the-road composers, one of those heroic modernists still scraping away at the coalface. And again, despite all the theory, and the famously complex notation (this is where the ‘new complexity’ label comes from), this is brittle, often attractive music.
There’s a lot going on all day, so probably best just to click here for more details.
Saturday 28th Feb
7.54pm, Purcell Room, South Bank
Final tip for this month is this appearance by the Mondriaan Quartet, playing quartets by John Zorn (Dead Man and Cat O Nine Tails), and new works by Toek Numan, John de Simone and Richard Ayres. Also on show is the UK’s first sight of Robert Pravda’s octachord, which, I gather, is a giant electronic harp with 8 resonating strings to create dense washes of sound. Intriguing.
Steve Reich interview
An archived interview with Steve Reich has just been put up at Disquiet. The interview dates from ‘99, and centres around the release of the Reich Remixed CD. Reich reiterates the now-famous anecdote about hearing ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ for the first time. The way the story’s told these days, you’re given the impression that although Reich didn’t realise his work was being sampled like this, he was more than happy to hear the results and pretty much rubber-stamped what people like the Orb were doing. But does anyone else detect a little resentment in his words here? He’s a decent man, and not naive enough to believe it was worth pursuing any kind of case, but I can hear the sound of gritted teeth here:
“Steve Reich: I must admit, before we go too much further, I basically knew very little about this [the Reich Remixed project]. I knew very little about remix[ing] in general. I had heard the word – I had heard a few things. What happened, I guess, five or six or seven years ago in London, somebody was interviewing me for a pop magazine, and said, “You know the Orb,” and I said, “No, what’s the Orb?” and he said, “You know ‘Fluffy Little Clouds,’” and I said, “No, I don’t know ‘Fluffy Clouds,’” and so he said he had to get me the CD. So he got me the CD and I thought, Oh, so this is what’s going on.
Weidenbaum: That was the song on which the Orb sampled your work.
Reich: That was the Orb track that put them on the map, and it had a 30-second chunk of [my composition] Electric Counterpoint in it.
Weidenbaum: Have you seen the commercials?
Reich: No.
Weidenbaum: Now it’s the background music for a Volkswagen Beetle commercial.
Reich: Well, I’ll inform Nonesuch of that …”
And here’s the original 1999 article that the interview was for.
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You thought the Guardian’s Grime article was bad? Try this. Not a fan.
Two nations …
… separated by a common language. Not the ‘old school hardcore’ I hoped it might be. Pity.
Last of the RSS naggery, promise!
Just done a quick sweep of the blogs I read: three cheers for Die Acid House Die, DJ Martian, Emerald Daze, Peking O, Worlds of Possibility, Michaelangelo Matos, Crumbling Loaf and DeMeDo, who all have new Blogger/Atom feeds (just drop /atom.xml onto the end of the URL to get to it), and are guaranteed a regular read from me, at least.
[Update: Just noticed that Blissblog has a feed too, just not an Atom one. It's here for those that want.]
