Secret Music: June

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

Busy one this month as the summer festival season swings into action. Sorry it’s all a bit London-centric.

Saturday 1 June: Schott, 48 Great Marlborough Street, London: Jonathan Powell, 7pm | Price unknown, but usually just a few quid

Solo piano recital, including Aperghis – A tombeau ouvert, Radulescu – 2nd Sonata, Barrett – Lost and Sorabji – Le Jardin parfume.

Saturday 8 June: Bishopsgate Institute, Scanner: The Haxan Cloak, 8pm | £16

Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Bobby Krlic aka The Haxan Cloak and the Computer Junk Orchestra reimagine John Dowland’s renaissance piece Lachrimae alongside new music and visuals. Part of the Spitalfields Summer Festival.

Monday 10 June: Hoxton Hall: Rarescale, 8.30pm | £15

Carla Rees leads a digital acoustic ensemble combining flute with live electronics and guitar.  Includes the world premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s A Phoenix for Carla composed in response to Carla’s experience in the London riots. Part of the Spitalfields Summer Festival.

Tuesday 11 June: Rich Mix: REPLICA, 7pm & 8.30pm | £15

Edward Jessen’s visually sumptuous experimental music-theatre work for recorder quintet Consortium5 and vocalists John Potter and Peyee Chen. REPLICA unfurls theatrically-rich layers of cinematic successes in a stunning aural and visual realisation. Part of the Spitalfields Summer Festival.

Wednesday 12 June: The Forge: Mivos Quartet, 7.30pm | £11/£9 online, £12/£10 on the door

Britten’s 100th birthday marked by a performance of his Third Quartet, alongside contemporary works by

Felipe Lara,

Mario Diaz de Leon and Philip Glass

Saturday 15 June: Bishopsgate Institute: Powerplant, 8pm | £16

Joby Burgess presents Powerplant, a partnership with sound designer Matthew Fairclough and filmmaker Kathy Hinde, culminating in a collaboration with Gabriel Prokofiev. Part of the Spitalfields Summer Festival.

Wednesday 19 June: Village Underground: At The World’s Edge, 6.30pm & 8.30pm | £15

Combining puppetry, electronic soundscapes and live music, At The World’s Edge recasts the Greek myth of Persephone’s descent into the underworld. I saw an early incarnation of this as a London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper project, and it was shaping up well. Part of the Spitalfields Summer Festival.

Monday 24 June: Performance Space, City University: Mark Knoop and Séverine Ballon, 7pm | Free, but prebooking necessary.

The twice excellent Mark Knoop and Séverine Ballon play Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field for piano and cello, alongside a new work by Georgia Rodgers for cello and electronics.

Late addition: Wednesday 26 June: Royal Northern College of Music, Carole Nash Hall: ACM Ensemble, 8.30pm | £5 on the door

The Manchester-based ACM Ensemble brings a focus on Swiss new music to this concert, which includes works by Holliger, Furrer, Michael Cutting, Tom Rose and a UK premiere from Oscar Bianchi.

Beat Furrer - Presto
Heinz Holliger - Studie über Mehrklänge
Michael Cutting - Artificial White (ACM Commission)
Tom Rose - Schadenfreude (ACM Commission)
Beat Furrer - Lotofagas I (UK Premiere)
Oscar Bianchi - Crepuscolo (UK Premiere)

Friday 28 June: St Giles Cripplegate, Richard Uttley, 1.05pm | Free

Ending the month with another solo piano recital, this time by Richard Uttley, who will play works by Lindberg, Adès and Berio, alongside the UK premiere of Marvin Wolfthal’s 2008 Lulu Fantasy, a paraphrase on Berg’s opera. Part of the City of London Festival.

I’m curating a show (and shaking a tin)

Exciting times here at Rambler Towers. As well as putting together plans for my first full book, I’m also curating a show at Kings Place in September as part of their autumn OutHear series. I’m thrilled that the amazing Apartment House will be playing.

The concert will be on Sunday 22nd September, starting at 4pm – a very civilised late afternoon sort of time. More details, ticket information and all that jazz to come, but in the mean time please check out the Facebook page.

I’ve called the show ‘Some Recent Silences’, a title borrowed from the Cage tribute article I wrote for NewMusicBox last year. The article itself was an inspiration, but the concert follows some angles of its own:

G. Douglas Barrett – A Few Silence
Gregory Emfietzis – DIY 1
Mathias Spahlinger – 128 erfüllte augenblicke

INTERVAL

Ben Isaacs – allone
György Kurtág – Dumb Show
Charlie Sdraulig – Close
Michael Pisaro – Fade

There are some nods to the post-Cage/conceptual work discussed in the NMBx article, particularly in Barrett’s A Few Silence, which begins the concert with five minutes of silence, followed by a five-minute transcription of that silence played by the four musicians. Pisaro’s Fade for solo piano takes us slowly back to silence through a series of long, slow decays.

In between, however, I’ve shifted the emphasis slightly towards more music-theatrical uses of silence. The Isaacs and Sdraulig pieces thematise, in quite different ways, the production of sound at the edge of silence. In Sdraulig’s Close this often leads to ‘sonically redundant’ gestures that are composed, and have a musical content of a sort, but that don’t result in the production of an audible sound (bowing slightly above the string, for example). Isaacs’ allone is more effortful and activity-filled, but drawing on a similar repertoire of performer/instrument interactions. Kurtág’s very short Dumb Show, from Book 1 of his Játékok series, takes this a step further into the absurd, notating a complete piano miniature, including dynamics and articulation markings, but with the instruction to touch the keys only very gently, without depressing any of them. In another piece for piano (or pianist?), Greg Emfietzis uses an on-stage lamp as a silent partner in the music, contributing to and interfering with its development.

And at the heart of the concert is Spahlinger’s 128 erfüllte augenblicke, among other things a study in the relationship between silence and sound at the extremes of musical fragmentation. With the wonderful Lore Lixenberg singing, this will surely acquire a certain dramatic aspect too.

Over the coming months I will be posting quite a lot of material related to this concert; there will be some 10 for ’10-style composer profiles of the four younger composers in the concert, as well as some new entries to the Contemporary Notation Project. Probably one or two other surprises along the way.

Of course, putting something like this together costs money, and in the UK at least funding for one-off concert projects – particularly ones that are devised around an idea, rather than to showcase brand new commissions – is hard to come by. After some consideration, I am taking the step of asking you, my readers, for your help. I’ve always resisted on principle the idea of monetising the Rambler: I write here for the love, I get a lot out of doing it, and I don’t feel obliged to any standard of professionalism, which frees me up to write stuff that would be difficult to place elsewhere.

That principle hasn’t changed, and isn’t going to. However, if you do enjoy what you read here, and particularly if you come to enjoy the various posts I’ve got lined up in relation to the Some Recent Silences concert, then it would be a massive help if you would consider a small donation towards the costs of putting this show on.

Any money raised will be exclusively reserved for the players; none of it will end up as profit for me. In the event that I actually raise more money than the players are asking for (you never know …), it will still go to the players; they’ll just get a bonus. In the interests of transparency, I will of course make the accounts available to anyone who asks to see them.

If you would like to make a donation, of whatever size, please send it to the dedicated PayPal account at:

ramblerconcertfund@gmail.com

If you would like or are happy to have your name included on a list of donors, please make a note of this with your payment.

Thank you.

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:

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.

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 …

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

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

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:

• Prom 1, First Night. Julian Anderson: Harmony (new piece); Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Proms Chamber 1. Lutosławski: Partita bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 5. Lachenmann: Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 6. David Matthews: A Vision of the Sea (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 8. Lutosławski: Cello Concerto, Adès: Totentanz (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 11. Stockhausen: Gesang der Jünglinge, Welt-Parlament bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 17. John McCabe: Joybox (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 21. Colin Matthews: Turning Point bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 25. Zappa: The Adventures of Greggery Peccary, Nancarrow: Player Piano Study no.7, Glass: Symphony no.10 bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 26. Henze: Barcarola bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 27. Naresh Sohal: The Cosmic Dance (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 28. James MacMillan: Vn Conc. bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Proms Chamber 4. Diana Burrell: Blaze (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 30. Edward Cowie: Earth Music I – The Great Barrier Reef  (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 32. Lutosławski: Sym. Variations, Pf Conc. bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 37. Urban Classic Prom. Including Henze bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 38. Mark-Anthony Turnage: Frieze (new piece) bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Proms Chamber Music 5. Birtwistle: The Moth Requiem bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 39. Nishat Khan: Sitar Conc. no.1 bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 40. 6Music Prom. Including Berio, Adams, Anna Meredith bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 41. Gubaidulina: The Rider on the White Horse bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 44. Penderecki: Concert Grosso bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 48. Matthias Pintscher: Chute d’etoiles bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 50. John White: Chord-Breaking Machine, Gerald Barry: No other people, Rzewski: Piano Concerto, Feldman: Coptic Light bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 52. Param Vir: Cave of Luminous Mind bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 55. Lutosławski: Concerto for Orchestra bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Saturday Matinee 4: Lutosławski: Paroles tissées bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 63. Peter Eötvös: DoReMi bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 67. Arvo Pärt: Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 70: George Lloyd: Requiem bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 71. Górecki: Symphony no.3 bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…
• Prom 75. Last Night. Anna Clyne: Masquerade bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on…

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.

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

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.

• Hermann Keller – 29 Stücke: No.1 (Jazzwerkstatt)
• Luciano Berio – Sequenza XI (Deutsche Grammophon)
• Hermann Keller – 29 Stücke: No.5 (Jazzwerkstatt)
• Mark André – … in (Kairos)
• Michael Finnissy – Two Motets: I. Videtis enim interiorem (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
• Salvatore Sciarrino – 6 Capricci (Coviello)
• Walter Zimmermann – 15 Zweifache (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
• Lee Myung-Sun – Olleh (Celestial Harmonies)
• Hermann Keller – 29 Stücke: No.17 (Jazzwerkstatt)
• Henry Flynt – Guitar Rebop (Recorded)
• Nicolaus Huber – Lazarus (Aeon)
• Hermann Keller – 29 Stücke: No.20 (Jazzwerkstatt)
• Stephen Montague – After Ives … (NMC)
• Hermann Keller – 29 Stücke: No.24 (Jazzwerkstatt)
• Michael Finnissy – Two Motets: II. Deus ti salve (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
• Stefan Prins – Etude interieur (sub rosa)
• Richard Barrett – DARK MATTER (NMC)
• Hermann Keller – 29 Stücke: No.29 (Jazzwerkstatt)

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.