Happy holidays to all of you. Big things are planned for 2010, so stay tuned!

In the mean time – I’ve added the ability to receive The Rambler by email. Click the link on the right to sign up.

See here for my top 5 list.

Although I’ve isolated 5 outstanding concerts of 2009, many of my more interesting musical experiences this year were in those events that were less flashy, less overtly impressive, or simply less polished.

In their own ways, Vladimir Martynov’s Vita nuova (Festival Hall, 18 Feb | review) and Stockhausen’s Inori (Barbican, 17 Jan | review) are naive, new agey bombast, but they both sort of work. The musical merits of Vita nuova are less clear, for me, but as a piece of drama it still worked – and as a 21st century artistic statement made with apparently great sincerity and fervour it intrigued and baffled to a degree that perhaps only Stockhausen could match.

Clariphonics were a breath of fresh air among the Park Lane concerts I attended (Purcell Room, 7–8 Jan | review): lovely players who actually seemed to care about new music (and programmed some interesting items by lesser known figures to boot). The RCM’s Ossian Ensemble (Royal College of Music, 13 March) were another group of young players who impressed, taking on some difficult repertoire, and matching it up with some beautifully arranged presentation – each piece was presented in a separate room that took you further into the eaves of the college. Atmospheric, but not cheesy.

Music We’d Like to Hear (1, 8, 15 July) was, as always, a beautiful thing, and this year introduced me to the gorgeous music of the Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics. I swooned a little. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants at the Barbican (26 November) were outstanding, and a perfect night off for the working half of my musical brain. ELISION performing Lim’s The Navigator in Paris (8 December | review) were on electric form and would have made the top five in most other years.

2009 was a really strong year for new live music, I felt, and that’s despite effectively taking 2 or 3 months off in the middle while I was moving house. (During which time I missed all of Spitalfields, all of the Proms, two-thirds of Music We’d Like to Hear and probably more besides.)

Here, in date order, are my top five:

Ian Pace, King’s College, 4 February

B.A. Zimmermann: Capriccio: Improvisation über Volksliederthemen; Konfiguration: Acht Stücke für Klavier; Boulez: Sonata no.3 (Trope, Constellation–Miroir); Henze: Variationen; Otte: Tropismen I; Stockhausen: Klavierstück X

Easily the most thoughtfully-programmed concert of the year. Pace’s selections were designed to emphasise continuities between the pre- and postwar German avant gardes, connections that are (perhaps too conveniently) obscured in the conventional narration of postwar European music. On the purely aesthetic level, Zimmermann’s Konfiguration was the discovery of the evening. What I said then.

Richard Haynes, Shunt, 13 and 14 April

David Young: Breath Control; Richard Barrett: Interference; Chris Dench: The Sadness of Detail; David Lang: Press Release

A complete original. Some of the best playing I’ve seen all year (although I admit I saw Richard quite a lot in ‘09 …) and a richly conceived, multi-layered show that challenged but ultimately won over a non-new music crowd. Points too for finding a way to bridge the gap between European post-serial and American post-minimal traditions. What I said then.

Polish Radio Choir Kraków, National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, et al, cond. Krzysztof Penderecki, Canterbury Cathedral, 2 May

Penderecki: St Luke Passion

Closure: my first chance to see St Luke live, at the end of a conference on Polish music at which I probably presented my last piece of work on the piece for some time. It is a hugely flawed work, and one that I had lost patience with some long time ago (PhD research will always kill the love), but this performance was much, much better than I had hoped for, and momentarily convinced me that this really is one of the great works of the late 20th century.

ELISION, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 20 November

Richard Barrett: Opening of the Mouth

Another moment of closure (ha ha). Every year there seems to be a piece that occupies my thoughts more than any other; this was never more true than with Opening, which tickled my brain more or less constantly between March and November. The chance to hear it live was another very special opportunity, and ELISION didn’t disappoint. The acoustics of Bates Mill may have messed with the ensemble balance a bit, but this was, nevertheless, the year’s stand-out concert for me.

Geneviève Foccroulle, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 20 November

Anthony Braxton: Compositions no.1, 10 and 32

This was one of the most remarkable piano recitals I’ve ever been to. I only knew a little Braxton beforehand, and most of that read not listened-to. No.10 wasn’t that interesting: sounded like a run-of-the-mill graphic score to me, but No.32 was unforgettable: 30 minutes of relentless fortissimo clusters that overrode any conventioanl idea of sense in favour of an undeniable, and utterly original, expressive force. On its own this was more than enough, but the careful, jazz-inspired unpicking of serial plinky-plonk cliché in No.1 – that nevertheless remained as absolutely serious in its purpose as any Structure or Klavierstücke – was a revelatory exposition of the power of non-thematic, atomised, parametrical musical thought. Stunning.

But this only tells part of the story: see my next post for those that bubbled under.

Interesting post by Jeremy Denk on movie monsters and classical music:

Both Lecter and Cullen traffic in blood, and their bloodiest scenes bleed classical music. Yes, we can say, the director is suggesting that classical music is “beauty” against which the horrors of bloodlust are seen more starkly. But if the music is supposed to be the opposite of the bloody scene, isn’t the implication somehow that the beauty of classical music is “bloodless”? Lecter is a soulless monster, and he loves Bach; Cullen is a soulless vampire, who uses Schubert to calm himself while he repairs a wound. Always soulless; always other; always anachronistic; classical music is the preference of monsters. I can see how the age of the music connects to the immortality of the vampire, I can see how the Bach connects to Lecter’s genius, but why must classical music be the language of monsters, of the fringe?

I think there’s a simpler (necessarily generalised) solution to this: classical music is emblematic of old, aristocratic Europe, and it suits US film-makers very well to make their baddies European. It’s a crude geo-political model that is guaranteed to get them whooping in the aisles. The first Die Hard, with its Beethoven leitmotif and recitativo secco underscore every time Alan Rickman opens his mouth, is an obvious template here.

(Thanks, by the way, to Heather Roche for alerting me to this post.)

Mmm …

THURSDAY 7th JANUARY 2010
7.30pm, £7 /£6

John Butcher (saxophones)
John Edwards (double bass)

Christine Sehnaoui (saxophone)
Olivier Toulemonde (amplified objects)
Mathias Forge (trombone)

Angharad Davies (violin)
Lina Lapelyte (violin and electronics)

NETWORK THEATRE
246A Lower Road, Waterloo
London SE1 8SJ
http://www.networktheatre.org/

John Butcher leads an almost scientific survey of the sonic possibilities of the saxophone in a given environment whether performing improvisation or compositions. He has performed with Christian Marclay, Toshimaru Nakamura, Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford…
http://www.johnbutcher.org.uk/

John Edwards began on the double bass in the late 1980s. In 1990 he came in contact with musicians such as Phil Minton, Evan Parker, Louis Moholo and Eddie Prevost. He is now an essential member of the London music scene and a staple of european festivals

Christine, Mathias & Olivier create a personal language on how to make electronic music on an acoustic instrument. Far away from narrative or dramatic music, they use extended techniques to deal with the relation between listening and the concept of perception, time and space.
They are touring the UK and this will be their only performance in London.
http://christinesehnaoui.blogspot.com/ www.myspace.com/christinesehnaoui
www.olivier-toulemonde.com/
http://www.creativesourcesrec.com/artists/m_forge.html

Angharad Davies is an active performer in contemporary, improvisation and experimental music both as a soloist and within ensembles. Since making London her base in 2002 she has developed a specific approach to the violin, extending the sound possibilities of the instrument by attaching and applying objects to the strings or by sounding unexpected parts of the instrument’s body.
http://www.angharaddavies.com/

Lina Lapelyte lives & works in London &Vilnius. Lina works as a sound artist and composer, performs live using violin and electronics. Her work encompasses sound installations, concert works, scores for dance, theater and film. One of her field of interests is collecting information and changing its meaning by putting it into a different context. She is a composer and performer in the laptop quartet 20,21- the ensemble devoted to the performances of graphical notation scores. She produces experimental radio programs for the ResonanceFM radio station. Her music was used in films made by Anja Kirchner, Bruse la Bruse. She collaborated with artists Douglas Benford, Arturas Bumsteinas, Eddie Prevost, Anton Lukoszevietze, Enrico Glerean, MAndelbrot.
http://www.myspace.com/lapelyte

My review of Liza Lim’s The Navigator, in concert performance at the Bastille Opera is now available on MusicalCriticism.com:

Liza Lim’s third opera, The Navigator, is not short of ideas. Its inspirations begin in ancient Greek myth, the Mahabharata and the story of Tristan and Isolde (as told in the Breton folk tale and by Wagner), and this is before one considers its explorations of desire, war, creation and annihilation, its structure through the in utero development of the five senses, its sexuality or obscure symbolism; and before one has heard a note.Let’s start here: One of the most striking things about this score, even for the listener who finds its super-rich mix of ideas and allusions too much to take in on a first hearing, is that it does not rest for a moment. The instrumentarium (including electric guitar and a sub-ensemble of Baroque harp, viola d’amore and recorders) is huge in possibilities, and Lim writes with seemingly limitless fecundity. From the first naked notes of the prelude, written for solo Ganassi recorder and played superbly by Genevieve Lacey, the composer’s focus never drops.

Continue reading here.

Writing style guides will tell you not to hedge. The argument, broadly true, runs that uncertainty and ambivalence make for writing that is stylistically weak. As a music writer, however – an ‘aural journalist’, even – what one is writing about is ontologically uncertain and ambivalent. One doesn’t encounter music in the same way as one encounters the pavement beneath one’s feet: the experience of music is all about ‘seeming’ and ‘appearing to’. I strongly believe that music is, in the truest sense, subjective. The difference between ‘X’s music is [adjective]’ and ‘X’s music seems [adjective]’ is huge. One is punchier, no doubt, but it’s not the one that captures the essence of what a musical experience is. In fact, it isn’t interested in music as an experience at all but as an external, objective given. Editing one into the other changes the nature of what it is that one is reporting on: the musical work as an objective phenomenon, or the subjective experience that the experience of that musical work engenders.

But within the language of empiricist English this is a difficult distinction to make without resorting to a lot of philosophical back story that many would find offputting or even controversial. It’s a long-winded way to say simply that you are changing the focus of your writing from what you thought last night’s concert was to what it did. In the end I hedge my editorial approach and turn out something that is either stylistically stronger but not quite what I want to talk about, or clunkier but more precise.

This must be a problem that all music writers have to deal with. Any pointers for who seems (ha!) particularly adept at handling it?

In the middle of writing a review of Liza Lim’s The Navigator, I’ve been obsessively watching and becoming increasingly awestruck by this video of Deborah Kayser’s performance as The Angel of History. It seems only fair to share:

Many of the voice effects are achieved with the aid of a Wacky Whistle, and I love the vocalisation of the Angel as a composite animal-insect-human-divinity (which taps into so many darker, more believable, images of how angels might be). Lim and Kayser have been working together for 20-odd years now, and this is aria is a pretty remarkable State of the Union address on that relationship, something that is even more apparent when one looks at the score, which is detailed enough but only alludes to the range of nuances, allusions and effects that Kayser draws out of her part.

Complete lists of my published reviews and writings are now available.

Proceed with caution.

I was at the QEH last night for the London première of Richard Barrett’s Mesopotamia; I may have more to say on this in the next day or two. In the meantime, my article on the piece has just this morning been published in INTO, the magazine of Sound and Music:

In March 2003, as a US-led coalition embarked on the invasion of Iraq, Richard Barrett was beginning work on a new orchestral score for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. As the humanitarian and cultural crimes of the Iraq war sank in, the piece gained an emphatic title – NO – and became the first in a projected eight-part series of works entitled resistance and vision. ‘I started to think that the way I had been conceiving the relationship between music and ideas had to make some radical change’, he said then, in an interview with Tom Service. ‘How is an artist like me, who is committed to socialist ideas, to respond to this situation?’ Barrett’s new work, Mesopotamia, written for the London Sinfonietta and first performed by them at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival on 28th November, and subsequently at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 3rd December, is the latest completed installment of resistance and vision (a third part, Nacht und Träume, for cello, piano and electronics, was first performed in Huddersfield last year).

Continue reading here.

Thanks to Richard for his help with this piece.