Category Archives: Music

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.

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.

Image

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

London-Ear

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.

Secret Music: April

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

Thursday 11 April: Cafe OTO: Synthesized Voices of the Revolutionary Utopia, 8pm | £4

Not a concert as such. Instead, an illustrated talk by Andrey Smirnov, Director of the Theremin Centre at the Moscow State Conservatory, on early Soviet experiments with audio synthesis and graphical sound. Presented as part of The Wire‘s Salon series of events. Looks fascinating.

Monday 15 April: St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield: Carl Rosman, 7.30pm | £7.50/£5/free for students

Solo recital from the clarinet monster that is Carl Rosman. Programme includes pieces by Aperghis, Barrett, Cassidy, Grisey, Evan Johnson and Rebecca Saunders, plus new works by Huddersfield postgrads. Ridiculous.

Saturday 20 April: The Great Hall, University of Leeds: Standing Waves: Performing the Music of Alvin Lucier, 12–6pm | Free

Mixed installation/concert event of works by Alvin Lucier. The focus is on pieces involving resonance, and the works lined up so far make for an awesome programme: Music on a Long Thin Wire, I am sitting a room, Chambers, Music for Cello With One or More Amplified Vases, Charles Curtis, Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums, and Bird and Person Dyning.

Part of University of Leeds’ Contemporary Music Weekend. As is …

Saturday 20 April: Clothworkers Centenary Hall, University of Leeds: Ensemble Brumaires (Ian Pace, Mark Knoop and guests), 7.30pm | £10/£5 students

Music for piano(s) and/or percussion by James Dillon, Matthew Shlomowitz, Alistair Zaldua, Brian Ferneyhough and Béla Bartók.

Monday 22 April: Cafe OTO: Kammer Klang, 8pm | £6

Swiss/Brit ensemble We Spoke play percussion works by Steve Reich (including Drumming) and Fritz Hauser. Plus a set from Martin Creed’s band.

Tuesday 23 – Thursday 25 April: BFI: Streetwise Opera, 6.15pm/8.15pm | £22.50/£15

Streetwise Opera bring their ninth major production, The Answer to Everything, to the BFI. The film mixes performances from homeless and ex-homeless performers with a handful of professionals; the soundtrack features new commissions by Emily Hall, Orlando Gough and Gavin Bryars, as well as music by Britten, Handel and Vivaldi. Will tour as both a film and live production later in the year.

Thursday 25 April: Austrian Cultural Forum: Ensemble Amorpha, Global Austria, 3, 7.00pm | Free

Ensemble Amorpha return to the ACF London to present Global Austria III, a concert of works by composers whose creative lives have been shaped by the musical energies of Austria. It features solo and duo works by Julia Purgia, Johannes Maria Staud, Olga Neuwirth and Schoenberg.

Thursday 25 April: The Forge, Camden: Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop, Songs about words, 8.00pm | £11/£9 online, £12/£10 on the door

A programme of experimental song including works by Mauricio Kagel, Charles Ives and Laurence Crane, and a newly-commissioned cycle by Matthew Shlomowitz.

Saturday 27 April: Great Hall, Goldsmiths College: Ian Pace, Mark Knoop and guests, 7.30pm

London date for the Saturday 20th programme.