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.
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 ofHoh’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.
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.
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.
First of an occasional series of posts resurrecting reviews of mine that were originally published in print, but have long been inaccessible.
This one appeared in the now-defunct New Notes, in November 2007.
Roland Dahinden: flying white
Klangforum Wien String Quartet mode 175
‘Monochromatic’ is the sort of word one might frequently encounter in relation to Dahinden’s music, but it might also mislead. Musically, colourlessness suggests a featureless music that is simple to apprehend and unrewarding to return to, superficial and dreary as a whitewashed wall. But this hardly describes the four quartets recorded here, which are monochromatic in the way that all the leaves in a forest are. To compare either to a flat colourless surface is to ignore any number of other possible and imaginary dimensions. It doesn’t take much listening to realise that there is almost too much to take in, not only in one go, but also in many hearings.
Visual comparisons are easy to make, and Dahinden himself is interested in music’s intersection with the visual arts. But it’s equally easy to overlook the real, musical qualities given to us in favour of compromised metaphors. Because the least interesting aspect of Dahinden’s music is how it might recall Rauschenberg’s White Paintings when, in fact, it explores dimensions – across time, into sound, up and down register – uniquely available to it.
All four quartets are even in dynamic (quiet) and tempo (slow), and unfold a series of short gestures, related to one another and separated by silences; one thinks of late Cage and Feldman, possibly Nono. The strict compression of certain musical parameters forces attention elsewhere – primarily pitch and timbre – but even here Dahinden has carefully limited his options (the most immediately apparent difference between the quartets is the different pitch gamuts they employ). Within this tight envelope remains a range of possibilities regarding the disposition of notes in time, register and across the harmonic spectrum. What emerges is a search for the most brittle sounds; a tiny, imaginary realm between pitch, harmony and noise that deserves the evocative titles Dahinden gives his pieces. Attaching programmes to such music may be a fool’s game, but with familiarity one hears the different moods of each piece – mond see as slow and luminous, poids de l’ombre as intense and nervous – and can create aural–textual–visual connections of one’s own. Sensibly, Dahinden leaves it at that and lets the sounds alone speak for themselves.
Highlights from reviews of Steve Reich’s new piece, given its premiere by the London Sinfonietta on 5 March, and toured to Birmingham, Brighton and Glasgow afterwards.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Arts Desk(classical review):
Radiohead aficionados would have been satisified. This wasn’t a hidden homage. The melodies and harmonies of Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw Falling were very audible, even when stretched and distorted. And they fused well with Reich’s convulsive syncopations – unsurprisingly in the case of Jigsaw Falling with its Reichian intro. What was interesting, however, was how the unfamiliar harmonies that Reich is forced to play with liberates him to explore a more dramatic palette. In the two slow movements, he revels in the dissonances thrown up by Everything in its Right Place, encouraging them to assume a Jewish cantor-like wail through woodwind colouring.
Like a piece of conceptual art, it may be the idea rather than the actual music that is the most significant thing about the world premiere last night of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. There will be a hundred times more people discussing the fact that Reich has taken on Radiohead than actually listening to it. …
The first, third and fifth parts were faster and more recognisably Reich, and were loosely based on “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” (from In Rainbows), while the slower, more sinuous and melodic second and fourth sections used the better-known “Everything in its Right Place”. The latter has flashes of real beauty, over enjoyably dissonant chords, but as a whole isn’t entirely satisfying. Reich is more a rhythm guy and the slow parts at times left a queasy impression – like someone painting a strange coloured rose on top of a Mondrian or a Bridget Riley.
Radio Rewrite is a rich and impressive ensemble piece for non-rock instruments … Those much-hyped allusions are fleeting (most noticeable are hints at the melodic loops of [Everything in its Right Place]) and although the piece begins with sets of minimalist patterns, the journey through the five interlocking movements is varied, with periods of shadowy ambience.
Is it too much to read a sense of wistfulness into the piece? Radio Rewrite adds to a growing body of work that concerns itself less with the ringing clarity that has characterised much of Reich’s output, and more with the building of atmosphere.
In the slow movements the obsessive “three-chord trick” of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place kept surfacing, but so cunningly woven into a purely Reich-like texture that it was gone almost before you’d registered it. In the fast ones it was the urgent melody of Jigsaw Falling into Place that caught one’s ear.
But again, what gave pleasure was seeing how thoroughly the borrowed material turned into Reich.
It was a fine display of compositional mastery, which had nothing to do with remix culture, and everything to do with old-fashioned virtues of harmony and counterpoint.
Radio Rewrite, given its world premiere last night, also takes material from another source but its reworking is different from what went on in his earliest pieces. Two Radiohead songs provide a harmonic and melodic backbone but Reich buries it deep inside his ensemble (11 players from London Sinfonietta, including amplified string quartet, two pianos and electric bass) so that the source intermittently bubbles to the surface.
There was the familiar feeling of being sucked into the rhythms as the pianos pounded or tinkled, the vibraphones shimmered and the strings keened wistfully. Yet gear changes were often clumsy and at times the results came close to mood music, as if the interlocking processes took precedence over the materiality of the sound they made.
Those Radiohead fans (and band members) present will not have missed the snippets from Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw, but the piece absorbs only a handful of gestures from the songs into an otherwise familiar compositional framework, with alternating fast and slow movements, and oppositions between paired vibraphones and pianos giving structure and drive to the melodic material. In its instrumentation and quasi-renaissance voice-leading, in which the slow-moving lines of the melodic instruments are scrunched together, the piece’s strongest resemblance was to 2008′s masterpiece Double Sextet, a superb performance of which followed (and slightly overpowered) the new work in the concert’s second half.
An abrasive, shofar-like clarinet line and the shuddering muddying of harmony from vibraphones provided interest in a rather bland sequence of five movements. Reich’s technique remains a marvel. Nonetheless, after nearly 50 years of favouring the Early French polyphonists, modal jazz and African music as his influences, unmoved alike by disco, punk, techno, krautrock or Motown, Radiohead seems an odd place for him to start a relationship with pop: too thin, too drab, too short on ecstasy and heat.
The songs are barely recognisable, having been subsumed into Reich’s familiar language, but something of Radiohead’s distinctive harmony has clearly rubbed off, particularly in the slower sections. [review of BBC broadcast]
The Radiohead tag, it would be fair to say, was the biggest draw for the tweed-heavy crowd, but anyone expecting a carbon copy from the pioneering composer would have been severely disappointed. In fact, if you had not known it was inspired by Radiohead, you probably would never have made the connection. This obviously was not the point. With the fear of sounding gravely uncultured, the main problem was the rather relentless and emotionless style of composition, which after a while grew tiring. [review of Brighton performance, 7 March]
Though ’Radio Rewrite’ was the night’s sell, I probably enjoyed it less than the other pieces. How close the piece is to the originals I wouldn’t be the one to tell you. If anything, from the jagged staccato the pianos sometimes employed, I’d have guessed it’s origins lay with Kurt Weill.
Just over a week ago in Huddersfield ELISION presented a concert of four works by postgraduate composers Alex Jang, Pedro Alvarez, Matthew Sergeant and Luke Paulding, followed by a realisation of Richard Barrett’s CODEX IV for four improvising musicians.
These being student works, there were naturally areas where more experience and development in the future will count. But more importantly, I heard four distinct voices, each attempting a tricky artistic problem, and each coming up with a musically intriguing result.
Jang’s Retracings, for trumpet and percussion, was instrumentally and formally the lightest of the pieces; it had a much lower density of activity, at times stripping down to just the sizzle of a cymbal or rumble of a bass drum. It was also, I think, less concerned with weight and presence, and more a sort of spectral afterglow.
At several points one felt a distinct sense of dissipation, but the music was so low-key that there was rarely a sense of where we might have dissipated from. It is a piece possessed of strange and unidentifiable energies. Yet it somehow made a shape for itself. Although fragmentary in style, Jang’s use of a controlled timbral palette (dominated by sizzling or brushing sounds) prevented it from becoming too discontinuous.
The balance of activity between the two players is interesting. The music is dominated by the percussion, with the trumpet playing a very aphoristic role, certainly not acting as a melodic voice in its own right. It’s less of a duo than a solo + 1. Alex told me afterwards that he intended the trumpet as an extension of the metallic percussion instruments – its music came from the timbre and gestural language of percussion, rather than brass. And again, the choice of a sonic palette is a dominant feature.
Alvarez’s Debris was the least ‘ELISION-y’ of the four pieces, in that it didn’t emphasise virtuosity, and set its formal argument on the macro- rather than micro-level. It is arranged in sharply defined panels, which are continually shuffled and varied as the piece progresses. The composer’s notes refer to ‘negat[ing] aesthetic ideals of fluency and continuity’, and the idea of gate-switching between different gestural states is important. In addition to a small set of restricted (and related) instrumental textures, two further elements were in play: an electronic patch that was a sort of mellowed aggregrate of the previous instrumental sound, and very short bursts of noisy, saturated improvisation.
In an unexpected way it owed a debt to minimalism, or post-minimalism, like a Michael Gordon without half an eye on its audience. Certainly Alvarez is tackling the themes of continuity, rupture, form, duration and so on familiar from minimalism, but doing so with less easily assimilated materials so as not to let the work slip into a new agey/Arcadian mode. I liked it more than I thought I would, if I’m honest. On stage its longeurs are forgotten, and its subtle shifts in rhythm and texture are well-judged to maintain a sense of inquisitive experiment. I wasn’t convinced by the improvised interjections/punctuations, but they require such a vertiginous change in playing that I appreciate they may be hard to bring off successfully.
There’s a very obvious temptation for a young composer invited to write for a group like ELISION to forget any considerations of technique or practicality, and just let your ideas run to their limit. Matthew Sergeant cannot be accused of not taking this opportunity.
yimrehanne krestos is a trio for flugelhorn, alto trombone and percussion. It’s about 11 minutes long but it is played at a ferocious speed and, for the two brass players, completely without a break. In truth, it stepped beyond the boundary of the possible. In one passage percussion notes are flying past at a rate of about 10 per second. With grace notes in between. The writing for flugelhorn and trombone (!) hits similar speeds at times.
That’s what the score says, anyway. In practice ELISION brought the tempo down a notch, although not that you could tell from the dementedly fast sticks that Peter Neville brought out on the night. Most astonishingly it wasn’t just a blur, but playing that retained its contours of rhythm and timbre. Similarly, how Tristram Williams and Ben Marks coped without so much as a quaver’s rest between them I will never know.
But this piece is more than a speed-fuelled thrash. Yimrehanne Krestos is the name of an Ethiopian negus, and a church supposedly constructed by him deep inside a volcanic cave. From what I know it sounds an extraordinary, uncanny and bizarre place. The church is constructed of wood, and behind it lie the mummified bodies of some 10,000 pilgrims and workmen. At the front of the cave is a spring that supposedly has healing properties.
You can get a sense of the place from this video:
Having all this in mind (although I was lucky to be pre-informed – there were no programme notes), I parsed the work as a brass/percussion duo, in which the two brass enacted or suggested a complex of ghostly presences, fear, precariousness, mortality, presence. There’s an obvious apocalypse/trumpets route through there, but aspects of the sinuous counterpoint, rhythm and over-abundance of material made it richer than that. The percussion meanwhile was arranged in three clear sections: scrubbing brushes on bongo skins; tom-toms, bongos and congas played with Thai sticks (the passage mentioned above); and vibraphone (motor off, very hard sticks). One could hear this as a journey – outside/inside? arid/liquid? towards clarity? revelation? That’s a thematically appropriate but very literal reading; actually the shifts in the brass/percussion balance that take place throughout the piece complicate this picture.
There was an interesting continuity between Sergeant’s piece and Paulding’s where dust is in their mouths and clay is their food, in which similar instrumentation is brought to bear on another perspective on the afterlife. Again the brass appeared as the conduit to another world, but with the Messianic clangour of yimrehanne krestos replaced by something more ungraspable, internal, fearful.
I’ve already introduced the piece, but on the night it wasn’t without its surprises. Most unexpected was the rice which, having been poured into a collection of shallow trays and bowls, is struck like conventional percussion, causing clouds of grain to fly into the air, a beautiful and intentional visual effect. The overall soundworld was also much more fragile than its score suggests, a realm of apparitions of sound from all three players.
The concert ended with Barrett’s CODEX IV, a guided improvisation in which the four players made maximal use of the sounds, mutes and percussion instruments already on stage to close the concert with a network of incidental sonic connections.
Arvo Pärt in Conversation (Dalkey Archive Press) began as a book by Enzo Restagno that was published in 2004. Its publication coincided with the Torino-Milano music festival Settembre musica, of which Restagno was artistic director, and which in 2004 had a special focus on Pärt. In 2010 much of this book was translated into German, some new material was added, and it was published by Universal Edition. The book under review is the English edition of this text (translated by Robert Crow), and it should be noted that the title is now misleading: the first half of the English edition indeed features a long interview between Pärt and Restagno, but this has been supplemented with three two scholarly essays. Also included are two short speeches by Pärt himself.
It has to be said that content for serious readers is patchy. In the second of the essays Saale Kareda discusses the spiritual aspects of Pärt’s work. Many spiritual and religious themes are invoked, in the service of too little penetrative insight.
Kaire Maimets-Volt takes a potentially more interesting line, analysing Pärt reception through filmmakers’ use of his music. Tackling Pärt’s music through film, rather than the more obviously sanctioned paths of religious text and the tintinnabulation style could be an interesting line of approach. As a reception history of Pärt’s music in film it is well researched, and the appendix of films in which the composer’s work has been used (including films from Georgia, France, Brazil, the USA and South Korea) will surely prove invaluable to future researchers. However, I again felt that the essay fell just short of presenting a genuinely new understanding of Pärt’s music.[edit: This review was based on an advance copy of the book; it appears that the essay by Maimets-Volt did not make the final publication.]
The essay by Leopold Brauneiss is the longest and most substantial. Essentially it is a study of the evolution of Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique over 30 years, from Für Alina (1976) to Adam’s Lament (2010). This is more valuable work, and the breadth of his analysis is impressive. By narrating the increasing complexity of Pärt’s music, from the single note to chords, polyphony and finally chromaticism, he provides considerable insight into the technical range of the tintinnabuli technique.
The two acceptance speeches delivered by Pärt, on receiving the International Brücke Prize of Görlitz (2007) and the Léonie-Sonning Music Prize (2008) are short, but may contain points of interest for scholars.
The book’s most valuable contribution is the publication of a long interview between Pärt, his wife Nora and Restagno, conducted in 2003. The interview takes a more or less chronological approach, beginning with Pärt’s childhood and progressing through to Kanon Pokajanen of 1997. Restagno is prone to digressions as an interviewer, but he elicits plenty of material from the composer and this section of the book (which makes up half its length) is the most interesting to generalist reader and specialist alike. The passages regarding Estonian musical life in the 1960s, Pärt’s relationship to colleagues such as Nono and Schnittke, and the reception of Credo in 1968 are fascinating. Nevertheless, the most revealing section is undoubtedly that dealing with Pärt’s “silent years,” the period in the 1970s, shortly after Credo, when he withdrew from public composition and developed the tinntinabuli style for which he would become internationally recognised. This period was essential to Pärt’s development as a composer, but is often glossed by biographers. Here Pärt reveals in some detail what he was doing during this time, the precise nature of his exercises in monody, and the studies he was undertaking into plainsong and medieval polyphony. A valuable emotional counterpoint is provided by Nora:
You can’t imagine how important this period was, with all its pages of exercises and psalms. He didn’t know if he had found anything at all, and if he had, what it was. … I was very worried about him, and saw how much he was suffering. I knew that he would not have been able to go on living without that music, which was the real content of his life. I saw that he was about to implode, and didn’t know if he would manage to bring these labour pains to a happy conclusion.
Like many books of its type, Arvo Pärt in Conversation suffers from being too close to its subject and too credulous of their own words on their music. This is particularly true of the analytical essays, which could have afforded a more critical perspective. Other composers – Gubaidulina and Stravinsky, as well as Schnittke and Nono – are discussed in the interview with Restagno. Our understanding of Pärt’s music would surely benefit from greater examination of its interconnectedness with other currents in Western music. With its inspiration in bell tones and the prolongation of scales and tonal triads, spectral music – broadly defined – would seem like one starting point. That possibility is occasionally hinted at in the book, although only via secondary sources that refer to Pythagorean harmony (in Kareda), or the harmonic properties of bells.
The triad does indeed form the starting point of each work, and its pervasive presence yields a distinctive mixture of overtone and undertones which is highly suggestive of the sound of bells. (Philip Borg-Wheeler, disc notes to Arvo Pärt: Beatus, Virgin Classics, 1997; cited by Maimets-Volt)
Readers looking for a generalist’s introduction to Pärt’s music will still want to turn first to Paul Hillier’s well-known introduction of 1997. And for a more in-depth and scholarly approach I expect (although I have not read it) the Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt, edited by Andrew Shenton will be preferred. Nevertheless, Arvo Pärt in Conversation contains enough supplementary detail, and some useful original research, to be of value to scholars not only of Pärt’s music, but also of music in the former USSR and in the later 20th century in general.
Tom Johnson: correct music | Andrew Nathaniel McIntosh, Douglas Wadle, Brian Walsh | populist records PR002
How on earth do you review Tom Johnson’s music? It is so purely procedural, so pre-compositionally precise it surely evades criticism altogether. You see it, or you don’t, and that’s it.
Except nothing created is really pure, an observation that enlivens all Johnson’s music just enough beyond the pedantic. His ironic, amused experimentalism is encapsulated in the narrator’s final words in Eggs and Baskets, an apparently straightforward exposition of a simple mathematical phenomenon: “And with six eggs? Well, let’s just let the musicians play … so that we can review all of this, and hopefully clarify everything.”
As well as Eggs and Baskets (1987), this disc contains another didactic piece – Squares (2008) for viola and narrator – as well as Tilework pieces for viola and violin (both 2003), and the 21 Rational Melodies of 1982. All are examples of what Samuel Vriezen in his sleevenote describes as Johnson’s ‘complete constructivism’, although the Rational Melodies are perhaps the most thorough melodic exploration of this method. Each follows a rigid logic. Sometimes this is easy to follow, sometimes not. Listening to the set as a whole one is aware of the constant rigidity of process, but at the same time its variable transparency. That flicker between the mundane and the mysterious lies, I think, at the heart of Johnson’s music.
I have another recording of the Rational Melodies, played on different flutes by Eberhard Blum. Perhaps because of the relatively heaviness of his instrument, and the need in this music above most others to get every note to sound cleanly and of itself, Blum takes almost all of the melodies slower than McIntosh. In some cases at half or even a third of the speed. Blum uses different sized flutes for each melody, and those played on alto and bass flute are slower than those played on piccolo. His set has a wider sonic and expressive range, but on balance I just prefer McIntosh’s version, if only because I’m a sucker for that hoe-down-y fiddle sound, which tethers Johnson’s mathematical abstractions, if only loosely, to a recognisable tradition.
—
Naming both Tom Johnson and Samuel Vriezen in this review makes it opportune to mention Vriezen’s project to record Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue for piano. A recording already exists (played by Johnson himself), but Vriezen has taught himself to play these pieces at something like double Johnson’s speed – in the process revealing all sorts of hidden melodies and rhythms. He is currently crowd-sourcing the project through indiegogo, and with just over 5 weeks left until his funding deadline, why not consider a small donation?
Loré Lixenberg, Gregory Rose, Robert Worby | John Cage: Song Books | Sub Rosa SR344
Cage’s centenary year has seen a number of ambitious recording projects. Ranked highly among them must be this first complete recording of the Song Books, released on Sub Rosa. Cage’s two books contain 90 “songs” for solo voice – a total of at least six and a half hours of music, or 317 pages of score. For this 2-CD release the decision has been taken, probably wisely, to accept Cage’s permission to superimpose songs, and a total of seven Song Books Mixes have been made. These are presented alongside 14 individual songs.
It is a gargantuan effort for the three performers involved, Loré Lixenberg and Gregory Rose (voice), and Robert Worby (electronics). Better still, all 90 individual solos are apparently available for download through the Sub Rosa website (although at the time of writing I could not find these).
Presentation-wise, this is an exemplary release. The 24-page booklet includes not one but four essays: two by Cage scholars James Pritchett and Rebecca Y. Kim; two by Rose and Worby providing performers’ perspectives. There are lots of extracts from the scores, in all their variety, and some nice photos of Cage that I hadn’t seen before. The packaging is lovely.
But, ah, Cage. What about the music?
First to say: this is a studio recording, prepared as such. So, for example, the electronic processing was carried out in post-production, not live. The recording acoustic (the Edward Boyle auditorium, St Hilda’s College, Oxford) is dry and silent. Facts like this give the set a polished feel that seems at first far removed from Cage’s chaotic carnival of the voice (“it’s like a brothel” was his own description). There are no glitches, no extraneous noises, and a frankly disconcerting sense of equilibrium, even when several songs are running at once. It sounds distinctly un-Cagelike; except that while listening I began to wonder where that notion originated anyway, and who’s to say they have ownership of it today. In his essay, in fact, Pritchett offers the advice (contrarian for a CD note) that “This is not music to sit down and listen to from start to finish … wandering and exploring is more in order.” Perhaps one needs to listen to the CD as though it is a live performance, so that life can still seep in.
The Song Books themselves are among Cage’s most remarkable achievements. Composed in 1970 in answer to a commission for two sets of songs from Cathy Berberian and Simone Rist, they began with an I ching consultation that stipulated that 56 and 34 songs for each book – 90 in total. Cage had just three months to meet his deadline. The measures he took to deal with the pressure of time lead to the songs’ diversity, and helped him unlock a range of new compositional methods. Pritchett calls it “one of the most intensely creative periods in Cage’s life.”
You’d be hard pressed to find two better singers than Rose, and especially Lixenberg, to perform this music with the required dedication. The virtuosity on show in, for example, Solo no.47 or Solo no.90 is impressive; to have sustained this across a total of 90 separate recordings is staggering. For my taste I had trouble with the electronics, which work closely with the grain of the voices – a legacy of modern-day technology; one for the HIP movement? – rather than against it, rather dulling the expressive edge.
Having said all that, when it works it works very well. Song Books Mix 2 (actually the final track of the CD 2) keeps 17 songs in a state of pleasing mutual sabotage for 23 minutes. It’s not as abrasive or as extrovert as some Cage performances, but neither does it allow gentleness and elegance to fade into mush.
In an interesting comparison of two recent-ish live performances of Song Books Ben Harper writes, “the closer [Cage’s music] comes to life the better it works as art”. Some will find too little “life” in these recordings, certainly. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable achievement, and one that may take some time to be repeated.
Note: the penultimate paragraph of this review was added shortly after its first publication.
Carla Rees, Scott Miller | Devices and Desires | rarescale records rr004
Back in November 2011, alto flautist and rarescale director Carla Rees gave the first performance of Anterior/Interior by Minneapolis-based electroacoustic composer Scott Miller. The next day they went into the studio to record the work, and finished so quickly that they had two hours spare. They recorded some improvisations – and the result is this CD. Two of those improvisations are semi-structured, the other three are completely free.
In the Book of Common Prayer “The devices and desires of our own heart” are occasions for sin. As a virtue, they are the basis of Miltonian free will. For an album of improvisations between flute – one of the most light-footed of all instruments – and computer the tension between freedom and constraint is presumably part of the thinking here.
Rees plays quarter-tone alto flute throughout. As one of the UK’s leading contemporary music flautists she’s well familiar with sonic potential of her instrument, and as well as tones and microtones harmonics and various modes of attack are used throughout. Nearly all the electronic sounds are sourced from the flute, whether from a sample bank or in real-time. Using Symbolic Sound’s Kyma X sound design environment, Miller manipulates and transforms these on the fly, in response to Rees’s playing. His performing style matches Rees’s in its gentle playfulness. (In liner notes to the CD, seemingly only available online, Miller explains that in live performance he controls his computer with an array of input devices, including iPad, foot pedals and Wii controllers.)
Anterior/Interior begins with the flute acting as a little more than a sound source, from which Miller’s computer analyses and resynthesises an array of textures. Slowly, though, the flute part takes on a character – lit by its electronic backdrop – as a lone keening voice, which becomes a song of increasing intensity until a swift dénouement. It’s a likeable introduction, and sets a lot of the sonic template for the rest of the album.
However, I much prefer the improvised tracks. Here Miller and Rees take their instruments, and their strange, asymmetric partnership into more interesting territory. In Beauty is Eternity Gazing in a Mirror, Rees’s microtones are transformed into squelching puddles, whooping insects and rainforest hum. (There is an air of David Tudor to a lot of the electronics, in fact.) Omaggio a 1961 explores drier reverb territory, while Haiku, Interrupted teases at decaying resonances, fading finally into the sound of a wheezing, broken children’s toy.
The stand-out track is possibly Seriously, this is a commitment, which blends a quirky electronic bleep-beat with occasional Coltrane-esque howling from Rees. Here, more than in any other track, Miller and Rees accentuate the differences between their instruments (rather than their synthesis), and it leads to some of the most fruitful points of dialogue.
Devices and Desires may be ordered through the rarescale website and elsewhere.
This review was written within 24 hours of seeing MITTWOCH, and my first Stockhausen opera, for the first time. It feels at the moment like one of the most incredible works of art I have ever witnessed. If there is the tone of religious zealotry in any of what follows, then at least let me say that it comes from what is in my heart, at the moment. Feel free to take issue in the comments. But even so, in a world in which so much – too much – new music sounds the same, it is pretty special to experience something that no one else could have conceived, let alone have written down.
MITTWOCH is the last part of the LICHT cycle to be staged, which I think makes it the last of all Stockhausen’s works to receive a full performance (unless some parts of KLANG are outstanding? nope – Lukas Hellermann tells me musikFabrik have performed all the completed parts). As such, it felt like a pretty good place from which to appraise Stockhausen’s overall life’s work.
The greatest of the postwar serial composers, Stockhausen explored its implications further than anyone, and for far longer. In LICHT, serial thinking – or the parametrical thinking to which it gives rise – becomes the path to a true Gesamtkunst. Set your parameters wide enough and they can encompass the universe. Channel them skillfully and they can shape whatever you want.
Whereas an early work such as KREUZSPIEL uses gamuts of pitches, durations and dynamics (bounded externally by a top and bottom extreme, and internally by the size of their incremental steps), LICHT uses divine principles, rituals, elements, voices, instruments, colours, senses, animals, etc. Some of those that define the dramatic, thematic and musical form of MITTWOCH are as follows:
Divine principle: intuition–harmony
Theme: love–friendship–cosmic solidarity
Element: air
Sound: singing
Voices: soprano–tenor–bass
Instruments: basset-horn with flute–trumpet–trombone
Sense: sight, especially the right eye, pure reason
Colour: bright yellow, iridescent in all colours
Animal: dove–camel
Another continuing thread in Stockhausen’s output, and one enabled by the serial method, is his love of polyphony. Not in a 16th-century sense of the word, but as the simultaneous sounding of multiple things. Early on he had, and evidently retained throughout his life, an exceptional gift for superimposing musical materials without them drowning each other out or losing overall definition.
ETUDE (1952)
A final touch is purely a sonic preference. Stockhausen had an evident love of short, repeating sounds, that when played slow judder like machine-gun fire, and that speed up to scraping and buzzing before transcending their own rhythmic constitution to become pitch. KONTAKTE is a study on precisely such sounds; COSMIC PULSES is another. KLAVIERSTÜCKE IX and GRUPPEN approach them again from different angles. Sounds like these occur throughout MITTWOCH, whether as buzzing bees, disintegrating electronic drones, tremolo strings, shortwave radio signals, helicopter blades or a stuttering singer. The sense of sonic unity that is engendered is quite staggering.
I say all this not because it is of musicological interest, but because it informed my experience of the work, and indeed provides clues both to how the work functions as a piece of music theatre, and how it relates to the rest of Stockhausen’s career-long output.
His is an art of enlightenment, of revelatory transformation through the juxtaposition of objects. So instrumental competitions, bees, the laughter of children, paper aeroplanes, a meeting of delegates from the countries of the world, octophonic sound projections, kites, doves and the cosmos in MITTWOCH are all points within the same space, defined by parameters such as swarming, buzzing/juddering, air, flight.
Family-like, or thesaurus-like, each is partly an expression of the other’s genetic code, partly something new. In isolation they might be ordinary, but collectively they articulate a unique expressive space. The listener/audience’s role is to navigate their own path, construct their own meaning from this (an interpretation of serial music as aleatory that M.J. Grant has delineated through much early serial music). Think of the Google Translate game: pass a single text through enough languages and its meaning will be transformed. However, some unexpected common thread will remain.
At the heart of it all, the sound and theatre of a string quartet (or: a human-responsive tremolo-glissando multiplicity-unity machine) in helicopters (or: altitude-swarming-rotation-judder-vision machines) is perfect. It couldn’t be otherwise. Musically it is probably not the composer’s best work; ecologically it raises troubling questions for the responsible limits for all major works of art. But as a coup de théâtre it is spectacular, and utterly integrated into the themes of the work.
A word on the moderator. Radio 1 DJ Nihal had his critics from the off. After watching the live stream at home I would have been among them. Yet having seen him in the flesh, in his third performance, and with a more responsive audience (fewer fanboys after the first night?), I’m prepared to think differently. His tone wasn’t right on Wednesday, no. But it was greatly improved by Friday – most of the flat jokes were gone, he was more relaxed with the audience and he seemed to have built a real rapport with the players. (Sadly, because of the weather, the pilots had to whisk the helicopters away and weren’t able to participate in the Q&A.)
It’s a peculiar role (possibly unique?), and questions have been asked since Wednesday about why he was picked to do it, and not someone more obviously informed about Stockhausen’s work, someone more in tune with contemporary music in general. (It should be added that his enthusiasm for what he was a part of, at least on Friday, seemed absolutely genuine.)
From what I understand, Nihal was on Graham Vick’s teamsheet early on – before the Elysians themselves, for example – so we have to conclude that this scene was built, to some extent, around his personality and experience. In the end, it worked pretty well for me. So much of the opera is about ascent (towards the cosmos or the divine?) that the presence of the mundane – questions from the audience, etc – struck me as a useful counterpoint. Theatrically, the opera also undertakes a complete demolition of the fourth wall, culminating in the Farewell, and of which the Q&A/reality TV section of HELIKOPTER-STREICHQUARTETT forms a part. On the night I felt this was not unrelated to the ascent image, or to the general theme of change or transformation, processes undertaken by the audience as much as the characters. (Not forgetting that the musicians throughout are as much characters themselves, even if they are just “playing” the role of “violin 1”.) It was also intriguing that the Q&A, despite being completely out of the composer’s hands, kept returning to this theme: how repeated performances of the work was changing the players’ and pilots relationship to it, for example.
Another difficulty shared by many – including myself – was with the final scene, MICHAELION, in which the cosmic parliament chooses a new leader, the camel Lucicamel, out of whom emerges a new president, the Operator, the translator (via shortwave radio) of cosmic information. A series of delegates from distant galaxies present themselves to him before they are dispatched into the universe, singing of consensus and love.
This is the first scene to present anything like a coherent plot, and it is clearly meant to present some sort of narrative resolution to some of the themes of the rest of the opera (as well as to hook it all back into the overall LICHT cycle). However, there is an issue straight away because its dramatic arc hinges on Lucifer’s transformation at the end of this scene – “Mankind, hear: MICHAEL EVE are healing the World, LUCIFER will be around through the music of LIGHT” – but within MITTWOCH at least Lucifer has not yet been a presence (or indeed have Michael or Eve), so there can be no investment in his transformation. The principles of change, unity, perhaps even healing, can easily be discerned in the preceding scenes, but only in a more abstract sense. Connecting them to the character narratives of the overall cycle seems arbitrary when the opera is heard on its own. Strange as it may seem, given the presence of a planet-defecating camel, a president of the universe holding a cheap radio and a series of inter-galactic representatives playing children’s toys, I had the feeling that Stockhausen hadn’t gone far enough here: his weakest scene was the one that came closest to conventional theatre.
There were too many highlights to list. The level of technique and imagination that oozed out of every minute of this 6-hour performance was something to behold in itself. Vick’s staging was engaging, often extraordinary and only rarely incomprehensible. By taking the sensible decision to view Stockhausen’s staging demands as broad indications rather than unbreakable script he was able to strip away many of the complexities on which previous productions had foundered. Indeed, walking into the two vast, unadorned halls of the Argyle Warehouse in which MITTWOCH was performed, simple and endlessly flexible, unlike any opera house, you wondered why no one had thought of this before.
Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s partner and musical director for this performance, also deserves special mention. MITTWOCH, as is probably clear by now, would be nothing without the spatialisation of its music. As the sound projector for most scenes, Pasveer’s influence on its musical success was profound.
There wasn’t a duff performance all night. The Elysian quartet were heroic (and ashen-faced) in their battles with the inclement skies over Birmingham. The moments of synchronicity as they played, kilometres apart from one another, were amazing. And as game participants in the reality TV show that framed their playing, they couldn’t be bettered. London Voices, who sang the epic, complex and athletically physical MICHAELION from every corner of the space were remarkable. As were the twelve soloists (eleven airborne) in ORCHESTER-FINALISTEN, among whom special mention must go to trombonist Andrew Connington for his frolics in the paddling pool, and bassist Jeremy Watt, for his impersonation of treefrogs and a sailing ship. However, special notice must be reserved for the 36 singers of Ex Cathedra, whose energy and control over the 45 a cappella minutes of WELT-PARLAMENT were breathtaking, and the astonishing solo performance of Stephen Menotti as Trombonut, the trombonist who charms, dances with, fights and loses to Lucicamel, before recovering to play out the remaining 30 minutes of the opera as part of a trio with bassett horn (Fie Schouten) and trumpet (Marco Blaauw). All in character, and all from memory. A total badass.
As MICHAELION ended, the auditorium dissolved. With the stage completely emptied, the action rose out of the audience, as the extras who had been there all along as passive participants in the MICHAELION drama stood to reveal yellow placards on which slogans and imprecations had been written in black marker: “Listen,” “Peace,” “Lucifer is changed.” With the electronic music of MITTWOCHS-ABSCHIED playing behind us, we exited one last time into the first hall where we began, where an after-show party had already started: waitresses served drinks, and the cast (still in costume, but out of character) mingled and chatted freely with members of the audience. The carnival the work had always been tending towards was complete.
