Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024

[Extended cut of a review forthcoming in The Wire.]

A bastion of New Music for over one hundred years, the Donaueschinger Musiktage continues to make its way into the twenty-first century as that century reaches its quarter-way point. Along the way, many questions; and perhaps, some answers. Taking place before I arrived was an early concert by double-bassist Florentin Ginot in works by Rebecca Saunders and Clara Iannotta, though I caught him on Saturday night in an outdoor performance in the ‘enchanted forest’ setting of the Schlosspark, the trees framing another glade of speakers which projected creaking, woody electronics which merged environmental and virtual sound in pieces by Carola Bauckholt and Lucia Kliger. At one point, the sound of a passing train appeared to come from the speakers before we saw its lights speeding past the glade; at another, I could have sworn I heard owl hooting through the trees, only to look up and see Ginot rubbing on a string.

I also missed Enno Poppe’s hour-long piece for ten drumkits, Streik, while somewhere between the bus stop and the freeway, but the festival’s association with radio station Südwestrundfunk (SWR) ensures that virtually all the music is broadcast, enabling a listen-through on return. Much of the work’s play with spatialisation—as well as the visual spectacle of ten drummers—is lost encountering the music this way, but, on this purely audio evidence, it effectively negotiates between stuttering announcements and raucous clatter, and retaining interest for its hour-long running time is no mean feat. (Though Poppe’s claim in the programme notes that an ensemble of this size “needs a composer” arguably overlooks the work of percussion ensembles not controlled by composers—albeit ones not necessarily operating in the frame of New Music. Take Max Roach’s M’Boom for a start. Quiet as it’s kept, the Black avant-garde was there well over half-a-century ago.)

Between the big orchestral concerts held on the Friday and Sunday in the Baarsporthalle, a gymnasium temporarily converted to concert hall, were works for smaller forces, though one would be hard put to describe them as “chamber music” in anything but name. In a smaller gymnasium next door, earplugs were handed out for a Friday night concert of the late Phill Niblock’s final compositions—perhaps a first for the festival. Neil Leonard’s programme note beautifully describes Niblock’s woodwind pieces as “something akin to an Ellington chord [...] sustained beyond the limits of a single player’s breath”. That was heard here in BLK + LND, a duo for Leonard, on bass clarinet, and double-bassist John Eckhardt, along with the ever-present drones of along with the ever-present drones of Niblockian electronics. As the audience sprawled on the floor, Leonard moved his way through them in an exploration of spatial effects, while Eckhardt and the speakers formed fixed points around which to anchor the sound. In Biliana, a solo work for Biliana Voutchkova, voice and violin united to take on a timbre that seemed to draw on folk musics. Niblock’s music is a kind of return to basic principles—the combination of unison tones, the drone, the open string—in ways that both abstract them and render them palpably material, vibrating in a kind of small-scale sublime. He will be missed.

The next morning, amidst the more high-tech surroundings of the Donauhalle, Mark Andre’s hour-long selig ist...followed traces of mourning. The work was written in memory of a friend’s child, and includes samples from Berlin’s Charité Hospital and the Tränenpalast, or ‘palace of tears’, at Friedrichstraße, where families from either side of the Wall would say tearful farewells. In concept and instrumentation, there were resonances with Nono’s …Sofferte onde serene, but whereas that work’s tape part is often rough-edged and palpably physical in its transformation of Maurizio Pollini’s piano playing, the electronics here functioned more like a sort of additional, infinitely-detailed sustain pedal to Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s piano. In the afternoon, the ensemble lovemusic offered chamber works by Kari Watson, Hannah Kendall, David Bird, and Laura Bowler that were, as Bird put it, in various ways “pop-facing”. Amidst taped interludes featuring an old-fashioned radio as a prop, electronics functioned here to explore what the programme notes (via Bachelard) termed “the dialectics of inside and outside” in various ways. Perhaps most effective, though, was the use, in a work from Kendall’s tuxedo series, of an older technology, that of multiple music boxes, containing snippets of hymns, spirituals and works from the classic repertoire, history over-layered in a kind of haze. (It was through the premiere of Kendall’s large-scale work shouting forever into the receiver at Donaueschingen a couple of years ago that I first came across her work, in which a rigorous historical consciousness is profoundly allied to aesthetic experimentation in ways that feel especially vital.) Meanwhile, across the road in a small cinema, a beautifully understated film by Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva depicted the rehearsals for Occam Ocean Cinquanta, the orchestral work by Éliane Radigue and co-composer Carol Robinson premiered at last year’s festival, further suggesting ways in which traditional ideas of the ensemble—whether those concern instrumentation, the role of improvisation, or the development of pieces along ‘narrative’ lines—continue to be interrogated in search of new ways of conceptualizing music itself. 

Radigue’s was the big opening piece at last year’s festival. Opening the Friday night orchestra concert this time was a very different work, Simon Steen-Anderson’s Grosso, featuring the group Yarn/Wire and a gigantic Leslie speaker. As its title implies, the piece is a kind of concerto grosso, retaining the format of the concertino group within the broader mass of the orchestra, but without necessarily treating that group soloistically. Over its forty-something minutes, the piece worked through repertoire of lightly ironized gestures—among them, vibraphone descents that might have accompanied a flashback dissolve or a sci-fi cartoon, and passages for multiple harmonicas—in various configurations. Audience response was certainly positive, and there was a lot of intricate texture, but there was something about its surface I found off-putting: a playfulness that felt oddly joyless, a music in perpetual quotation marks or parentheses. Pascale Criton’s Alter similarly questioned the frames in which we hear music, but in ways that felt more closely related to the question of a more deeply shared experience. As soloist, the magisterial Juliet Fraser was set amidst a sea of orchestral microtones, at first singing fractured syllables and consonants on the borders of language, and then an English-language text she’d herself written about pandemic isolation, ending with a plea for collective listening. A surprising and effective shift to intimacy, this conclusion functioned to gently break the third wall—or at least, to gently crack it—not as a magic trick or a stock alienation effect, but in ways that sparked welcome reflection.

The concert closed with George Lewis’ The Reincarnation of Blind Tom, a concerto for composed orchestra and two improvising soloists: Roscoe Mitchell, on soprano, and the latest iteration of Lewis’ machine improviser Voyager, now an AI programme for piano, working off the composed music from the orchestral principals. Furious scrabbles from the piano or smeared, acidic soprano saxophone alternated with tuned gongs, brass plunger mutes, downward slides and smears. As ever with Lewis’s work, the piece has a broader conceptual underpinning. Blind Tom Wiggins, the pianist prodigy whose near-superhuman musical memory and pianist virtuosity saw him play the White House aged ten while still enslaved--and to whom Pat Thomas has also recently paid tribute--here offers a figure for reflecting on music’s role in mediating ideas of human agency and human freedom, with the AI pianist offers at once a ghost (or reincarnation) and a presence from the future, capable of the hyper-human virtuosity Wiggins was said to possess. 

The work, Lewis commented in a Q&A, is not so much about idea of “machine consciousness” or of “what it means to be a machine” as it is about “the phenomenology of freedom”. Blind Tom could play just about anything, but, as an enslaved person, his musical ‘freedom’ occurred within conditions of profound unfreedom. In such cases, music, as the supposed index of what it means to be human, to be a subject, have a soul, in turn posed a problem for the system in which enslavement relied on denying human agency, the capacity to feel or desire, to the enslaved. And today, the algorithm is guided and framed by racialized bias, the AI considered, in Lewis’ words, “something to take power with”, the tool of the Elon Musks of this world. So often framed as a kind of neutral or scientific mode of technological advancement, AI is shaped—as are all modes of technological advancement—by existing biases, often racialized and gendered, and by existing structural imbalances. Today, for instance, as AI opens new artistic horizons and triggers existential dread about job security, AI-databases decide which Palestinians to kill. And back in the 1980s, as Georgina Born details, there was controversy about the role of the US military in computer technology developed at IRCAM, where Lewis first developed Voyager. It’s vital to be aware of these contexts, and Lewis’ piece was salutary in drawing attention to these vexed questions of freedom. Improvisation, of course, played a key role in debates about the musical capacity of racialized subjects. If improvisation can be dismissed as somehow 'not real music', entire modes of music-making outside a certain idea of the western tradition can be discounted. Voyager doesn’t know the difference between composition and improvisation, Lewis suggested, and perhaps we don’t either, but the uneasy dalliance between the two continues to be a kind of unspoken problem within new music. In restoring the tradition of improvisation to the concerto format from outside the confines of the cadenza, the work performs a valuable service, as improvisation is finally, slowly, accorded a seat at the new music table, the improvising soloist expanding the palette of the orchestra and vice versa. 

Yet if things are changing, they are changing slowly. There was marked discomfort among some sections of the audience during the improvised performance that followed by the trio of Roscoe Mitchell, on bass and sopranino saxophones and little instruments, turntablist Ignaz Schick and percussionist Michele Rabbia. By my reckoning, at least a quarter had walked by the end, and there was a snigger or two to my left as Mitchell switched from saxophones to his table of little instruments and Schnick pulled electronic swoops from his turntables. To many of us, these were not unfamiliar musical gestures, but to sectors of those in attendance, it seems, they are perhaps (still!) seen as illegitimate, and it’s precisely the ambiguity they raise that indicates their radicality. This might seem bizarre, given that Mitchell has performed at the festival before, for instance, his 1977 duo with Richard Teitelbaum as part of the now-defunct ‘SWF-Jazz Session’ slot following Lewis’s own duo with Anthony Braxton the year before. But old habits die hard. Facing a hostile reaction from the audience at Willisau in 1976, Mitchell repeated  the opening phrases of ‘Nonaah’ dozens of times, until the audience came on side. That was nearly fifty year ago, but perhaps there’s still a need for that kind of gesture. That’s to say: there is (still!) great value, within a new music context, in work that still retains the capacity to discomfort, and thus to interrogate basic assumptions about what is acceptable, or not, within this supposedly experimental frame. The sparseness and space, the awkwardness heard in the music: the way overlapping lines apparently fail to connect, the moments it falls away into the edge of nothing, are precisely the places where such music does its work. When the trio reaches a pause or near-pause, they are not playing composed silences, but improvised silences. I don’t just mean that these are improvised because they take place within the frame of musical improvisation, but that the quality of the silences themselves, and their framing, feels radically open, unstable. This music dares to be awkward, unscripted, to show—and not, as in the case of some of the pieces, to choreograph, stage and compose—the joins, the parts where things don’t fit, where a musical language might be negotiated through live, improvised, real-time encounter, an ongoing dialectic rather than the presentation of (however beautiful) a completed thought. The place to begin is in the cracks, at the edge.

 This is not necessarily a generic designation, but a matter of context. On the Sunday, Michael Finnissy’s choral work Was frag ich nach der Welt may, in a sense, have been one of the most ‘traditional’ pieces on the programme, in that it worked exclusively with a form that has existed for centuries—the a capella choir—in a setting of 15th century poetry by Andreas Gryphius that interpolated elements of a mass by Heinrich Schütz. (The piece’s title is also shared with a Bach cantata.) Likewise, its sonic vocabulary harked back more to the sounds of what might by now be heard as the ‘traditional’ avant-garde, concerned with line, with gesture, with rhetoric and musical argument, more so than with texture or timbre. Yet it was precisely through this historical untimeliness that it reached contemporaneity. Finnissy explained in the Q&A his interest in the way the texts balanced formal strictures (poetic Alexandrines)--a distancing or objectivizing of experience-- with the reality of war trauma. In Gryphius’s Europe, tormented by the 30 Years War that destroyed two thirds of the population, including half of Gryphius’ family, that destruction was up close. Today, we watch wars on a screen—Gaza, Ukraine—and those mediations take on a new light. The point is not to evoke the ‘timeless suffering’ of war, so vague it becomes liberal generality, but to think the way art frames and re-frames these experiences: what changes in them, what stays the same. The work comes to us doubly out of time: as an echo, or what Finnissy calls an “annotated discussion”, both of pre-modernism and of 20th century modernism. Its contemporaneity is to be out of time, even as its setting of German war poetry of the 1600s layers onto our experience (distanced, mediated, prohibited) of Gaza. Sounded in unison at the beginning and end of the work, the title phrase—“what do I ask about the world?” (or, “what do I care for the world?”)—remains a vitally open question.

 

 

On the same bill, Claudia Jane Scroccaro’s impressive On the Edge gently interrogated the concert format, the work opening as the audience filed in, with the choir distributed around the walls of the hall, speakers playing both live and pre-recorded vocals and filtering the ambient sounds of the concert hall, so that the line between the pre-recorded and the live was blurred. Though the work derived in part from her work at a women’s shelter in Paris, where women could often not speak directly of their trauma but approached it through songs, such as lullabies, Scroccaro in a Q&A the next day noted her reluctance to aestheticize and appropriate these women’s experiences, turning such questions into part of the fabric of the piece itself. Setting poems by Mina Loy revolving around the figure of the outsider, the work asks how to speak, and who speaks, for whom. Taking the stage, the soloists repeat words from Loy—“Come to me, there is something I have to tell you but cannot say”—each syllable a downward-sloping melisma in looping tendrils, as if caught in its own, perpetually preludial loop, the condition of narration, explication, revelation. Music here contains both trauma and balm, speaking by not speaking, revealing or refusing to reveal through an opacity at once lulling and barbed. As material from the lullabies emerges, swelling and rumbling on the verge of perpetual climax, electronics swirl up like tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, after-echo of an explosion we can’t hear: rather, we can only witness the after-echoes, the traces of its origin. The soloists walk off the darkened stage, singing, joined by the choir, in an undoubtedly effective madrigal of leave taking, the sound moving to the back of the head, the back of the room, in a kind of spatialized fade-out. It hangs there, the resonant conclusion of an unfinished thought, this music that is always coming after, always leaving, never quite managing to depart.

The final concert was similarly devoted to expanding the idea of the orchestra. In the second half, Chaya Czernowin’s unforeseen dusk: bones into wings added six amplified singers who, she notes in a pre-concert Q&A, function not so much as soloists as, in her words, “survivors from a storm”, cast adrift amidst quiet, amplified sounds and constant, see-sawing pitch slides: episodes and structures that strive, by the work’s end, to “take flight”. Meanwhile, it’s not often, perhaps, that those words ‘exuberant’ or ‘entertaining’ can be genuinely applied to new music, but the two works in the first half buck the trend. In both, it’s hard to say whether electronics replicate orchestra or whether orchestra replicates electronics; better to call it a case of mutual transformation. Francisco Alvarado’s piece REW.PLAY.FFWD took its inspiration from a by-now dated piece of technology—though one of late enjoying a revival—the cassette tape. Orchestral whooshes and whoops, accelerandos and ritardandos imitated the tape’s rewind and fast-forward function as a kind of rollercoaster or perpetual motion machine, interspersed with hushed interludes sparked by bowed electric guitar harmonics. Sara Glojnarić’s DING, DONG, DARLING! did similar work with digital sounds, somewhere between Tyondai Braxton and footwork, glitter and jitter. Hi-hats, played live or pre-recorded, stuttered alongside proliferating electronic basslines, contemplative string chords interrupted by brass stabs that refuse to separate the zone of contemplation and action. A spoken voice intoned the title phrase with camp relish at two points, the evocation of what the piece identifies as a queer utopia. Both works had an infectious energy and were received with whoops and cheers, Glojanrić’s taking the Orchester Preis. One of the trends in the New Music of the past half-century has been to deal with the problems of history through the veil of mourning, the pathos of distance, and another to ignore those problems through a formalistic or decorative concern with colour and timbre. Alvarado and Glojnarić’s works, like that of Lewis on the first night, suggested a third approach: fully aware of those questions of history, of the exclusions and oversights of music new and old, but refusing to give up on notions of play, of joy. Critical play, critical joy, joyful criticism, joyful participation in the endless work that still has to be done. 

 

March News

I have a new prose pamphlet out from Phil Baber's The Last Books, in the Yellow Papers series: Five Essays taken from a longer MS called Present Continuous, the full version of which will be published by Pamenar Press later in the year). Phil makes beautiful books, and his care with typesetting and design, as well as his attentiveness to the text itself, doesn't go unnoticed. You can buy the book here, and I'll be launching it in London on April 1st.

In the virtual world, a long interview with Dave Burrell is now up up at Point of Departure, taking in Mr. Burrell's astonishing, decades-long career. Along the way: the Berklee College of Music, working with Giuseppi Logan and with Sonny and Linda Sharrock, the Pan-African Festival in Algiers, the 360 Degree Music Experience, the little-known duo record Questions and Answers with Stanley Cowell (pictured above), his remarkable--and still unproduced--opera Windward Passages and his recent historical pieces on the American Civil War. Many thanks to Dave, Monika Larsson, and Bill Shoemaker (and wishing Bill a swift recovery from surgery).

Also virtually present: a piece on Michael Finnissy's recent Hammerklavier, as performed by Zubin Kanga at the Royal Academy of Music at the tail end of January, is up at Artforum. (Thanks to Zack Haber and Chloe Wyma.) The performance followed up on the concert premiere a few months ago of Finnissy's wonderful--and quite different--piece for solo harp, 'Our Proximity to Gothic', also at the RAM; Finnissy's output, as anyone with the scantest acquaintance with his work will know, is prodigious, each piece a world of detail, of historical reference points and of an exquisite handling of form, timbre, texture, structure, and these new works further evidence--if any were needed--of his importance in the contemporary music landscape (even as their temporal range makes terms like "contemporary music" seem inadequate).

Finally, a longer piece on the Julius Eastman revival of the past few years (following up on previous writing on Eastman on this blog) is up at 032c. (Thanks to Shane Anderson.) It was a particular pleasure while writing this to explore the recent interpretations and recordings that have begun to emerge some of Eastman's more obscure late work. Julian Terrell Otis' beautiful rendition of Eastman's 'Our Father' encapsulates what's so striking about the music Eastman went on to write (or, in many cases, to perform without score) after the more famous pieces for which he's now known: a condensation, a reduction, a focus stark and haunting. I made a YouTube playlist of some of the available performances as part of the research--you can find that embedded below.

LONDON GIG DIGEST: LATE JULY / EARLY AUGUST 2013

Mopomoso - Scatter etc.
The Vortex, Sunday 21st July 2013.

Just over the road from the more hip Café Oto, the Vortex tends to focus its gig schedules on jazz and, for want of a better-word, ‘EFI’-based improv, though of course the same musicians can be found in different combinations at both venues. On this occasion, the group I was particularly interested in seeing was Scatter, a quartet of Phil Minton (vocals), Pat Thomas (piano), Dave Tucker (guitar) and Roger Turner (drums), and they set out a fine sound, Tucker’s guitar sometimes jerky and spasmodic (and using e-bow without ever-resorting to the easy drones that accessory so often rather predictably entails), Thomas alternating between inside-piano shards of his own and more rolling chordal and melodic passages, Minton’s face doing its usual panoply of expressive character-impressions as he switched from bird-like whistles to old-man croaks and eerie high tones, Turner with that combination of ramshackle clattering and complete rhythmic and group focus that makes his playing simultaneously reliable and unpredictable. Maggie Nicols and Minton exchanging yodels between stage and audience at the end of the closing set, that of Nicols, violinist Mia Zabelka and Russell.

AMM#7: Alan Wilkinson and THF Drenching on Vimeo.

Full Moon Launch of Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (paperback edition)
Cafe Oto, Monday 22nd July 2013

I only traipsed in for the tail end of this, on what was apparently the hottest day of the year, catching Watson’s sound-poetry with Oscillatorial Binnage, various sets with his children improvising along on vocal-gobbledeygook and harmonicas, ending with the reason I’d turned up at all, Stuart Calton, a.k.a. TFH Drenching and Alan Wilkinson engaged in a loud and piercing alto / dictaphone duet, blasting off Oto’s candle-drenched sweat like a cool shower; or, indeed, an acid bath. The feel of the evening, as far as I was able to catch it, was of a kind of community catch-up, no doubt in the style of Bailey’s Company Weeks: as if Oto had been temporarily taken over, booked out for a private function, though I don’t mean that in a negative sense. This wasn’t the kind of evening for hangers-on, for people who’d popped in with little idea of the actual music because Oto is a ‘happening venue’, and then spent the entire set playing a game on their phone (as, unbelievably enough, I saw one audience member do during a ten-minute Roscoe Mitchell circular-breathing workout) or whispering away during the relatively quiet and restrained final section of a Wastell / Allbee / Beins set, and so, even if most of the audience had some sort of personal association with Watson and his work (to judge from the bulky cigarette crowd outside the door when I arrived), it felt far less of an in-crowd set-up. If the music itself tended to be a little forgettable, then, that feeling of warmth and dedication from the situation per se was nonetheless welcomed.

Wagner, Tristan Und Isolde
Robert Dean Smith, Violeta Urmana, BBC SO / Semyon Bychkov
BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Saturday 27th July 2013

Sitting in the choir meant a focus on orchestral textures, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and moments when singers or instrumentalists would position themselves above the stage came out bright and clear, the cor anglais solo at the start of act III in particular. If Dean Smith’s vocal projection, as Tristan, left something to be desired, an impression corroborated by reports from other parts of the hall, the other performances were generally of a fine standard; and perhaps the semi-staged approach solves some problems in Wagner interpretation, even, or perhaps because it (semi-)stages its own absurdity (in the final act, a singer sitting down meant that they’d died), of a piece with the perfunctory manner in which Wagner deals with that kind of dramatic narrative action; the music itself can outweigh the datedness or the historical problematics that saturate every aspect of staging decisions in full productions.



London Contemporary Music Festival
Bold Tendencies, Peckham
Thursday 25th-Sunday 28th July / Thursday 1st-Sunday 4th August

This packed double-weekender of (mainly) composed music from the second half of the twentieth century took place at Bold Tendencies, the Peckham arts / bar project (Franks’ bar is on the roof) located in a multi-story car-park conveniently located opposite the overground station. A huge range of music, with the result that even with a single gig it often felt as if there was barely any time to process things: one might, say, transition in under a minute from the ferocious and exhilarating complexity of a Michael Finnissy piano piece to an intense Anthony Pateras improvised solo on the same instrument, and that’s before the Ferneyhough had started. That the programme was full enough to require this level of unremitting intensity – the concerts still tended to last for at least two hours, even without intervals – is dizzying (and was perhaps a strategy decision as well, to prevent the inevitable loss of concentration and bar-wards drift that an interval in this setting would have provoked) and exciting, which perhaps explains the relative lack of critical response thus far, despite the high levels of attendance and the presence, no doubt, of various ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ critics in the audience. Anyhow, I ended up attending most of the concerts and this is the first attempt, ‘official’ or ‘unofficial’, at setting down any of the things that have been simmering through my head since then.

I’ll start off by saying that is most certainly the first time I’ve ever queued for nearly an hour to see a performance the music of Helmut Lachenmann (pieces for piano coupled with some of the more obscure avant-garde works of Ennio Morriconne), and whether hearing those Lachenmann pieces in this particular location, as opposed to, say, the Aldeburgh recital hall where I heard them last year, serves the music particular well or not, it’s certainly an impressive feat of publicity, networking, and all the rest, to achieve that level of popularity. That said, I do think we need to examine the notion of ‘popularity’ that too easily gets bandied about in talking of the undoubted successes of this festival, and to examine the way events like this serve or do not serve the political connotations to which Lachenmann’s music strenuously addresses and commits itself, commitments which may be equally compromised within the usual bourgeois concert settings, but which it wouldn’t necessarily be right to argue are better or more fully heard outside them either. This isn’t to say that we should turn to Luigi Nono’s ’70s mode of playing his electronic compositions to factory workers, though that practice does at least grant those not privileged with a particular level of education a capacity to ‘understand’ difficult art that would never in a million years be granted by patronizing culture industrial discourse machine of today. I’m hardly the son of factory workers myself, and my educational history began (somewhat eccentrically) and has continued on a level of relative privilege; but I discovered Messiaen, Schoenberg and the whole world that opened up (alongside John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, et al) not through some ‘High Culture Programme’ but at the local library of a not-exactly ‘culturally-minded’ M4-corridor town and through tuning in and taping broadcasts on the radio, and I suspect a lot of people committed to this music (perhaps more as listeners than as performers, though that might be a spurious distinction) followed similar paths. (A friend discovered this world through playing the lone Stockhausen LP that had somehow found its way into his state school library, for instance.) In some ways, that might be a more far-reaching and long-lasting mode of ‘access’ than an event which ultimately attends to a very particular social bracket of young, hip, 20-or 30-somethings from London – not that this negates the value of such events, simply that we must be careful, in talking about these things, not to ignore other, less spectacular means by which ‘high culture’ escapes particular exclusionary brackets.

Moving classical music into locations outside the concert hall, then, does not necessarily entail a broadening of the class (and race) base of its audience; perhaps even the contrary, because in a spirit of ‘cool’ or ‘radical’ disguise, it actually participates in the process of gentrification which, in its pretended solidarity with the working class neighbourhoods it first inhabits, then displaces, in the upward-spiral of rent set in motion by the cultural cachet with which it has now imbued those neighbourhoods. The audience becomes younger, but it relative wealth bracket, albeit one slightly more precarious in terms of its financial security, less fixed in its job positioning, than that of the more comfortable members of a typical Aldeburgh or Glyndebourne festival programme, is still hardly that of the working class: this audience is the bourgeoisie in its hipster guise, or, as Keston Sutherland put it when he read at Bold Tendencies a few weeks previously, in an insult that was masochistically lapped up, or simply unnoticed, by the very crowd he was addressing, “the rich of peckham”. ‘Hipster’ is, of course, an over-used and under-defined term, less economically specific than the sharp ‘rich’, which cuts through all the lifestyle dress-up to the naked financial truth, or half-truth, underneath; but if you’re going to find hipsters, it’ll be at Bold Tendencies, with its £4.50 lagers, its 30-minute queue for the roof-top bar (with a queue that long, you just know it’s achingly hip), its rolling tobacco and its Derek Jarman garden (as the bouncers inform you, you can sit on the pieces of railroad timber designated as benches, but not on the ones immediately next to them which are part of the garden itself). Indeed, the Proms, with their attracted audiences of eccentric and cranks and music-lovers of all ages (still, of course, predominantly white) somehow feel to me more inclusive than this free festival in a Peckham car park. And a man in a sleeveless suit who approaches multiple members of the queue while mumbling something nigh-on inaudible about having composed the initial, more fulsome orchestral version of ‘Tristan Und Isolde’, is far more deeply and fundamentally an outsider than the immaculately-turned ‘personal twists’ of fashion and hairstyle modeled by the hipsters from and attracted to Peckham.

But it’s not as if I’m outside this bracket; the slight tinge of guilt I felt every time I stepped out from the station and turned into the car-park, following the hordes of other jean-wearing twenty year olds in an escape from halal shops, African hairdressers, and the likes, to White Cultural Heaven (where sometimes the only black person in the entire venue, it seemed, was the bouncer), is perhaps simply an exacerbated version of that which I’m insulated from in organizing and attending events within educational institutions that are much more fundamentally dedicated the exclusion of non-white, non-public-school-educated students, and are pervaded by an undercurrent of sometimes barely disguised sexism. Furthermore, I should also point out at this point that I’m extremely glad the festival took place, for which the organizers Sam Mackay, Lucy Railton, Aisha Orazbayeva and Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and all the musicians and volunteers should be praised (Mark Knoop’s performances in particular were frequently astonishing, and I can imagine getting big-name musicians like Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine over to play on the same bill, or, indeed, bringing in Glenn Branca, was quite an organisational task). Along with the various contemporary Kings Place concerts (my review of Orazbayeva’s Nono performance can be found a year or so ago back in these blog archives), the LCMF’s existence is evidence of a younger generation’s interest in, and active promotion of a contemporary music that’s too often relegated to bit-parts alongside old warhorses in regular classical programmes, and of a thinking about that music’s role within the wider climate of contemporary culture. These organizers and musicians are clearly deeply serious and organizationally sound, whatever the slight hiccups of, say, the persistent feedback caused by pedalled passages down the lower end of the piano, or unavoidable conflicts between the fairly noisy, semi-open environment and some of the quieter pieces that were scheduled (say, the battle between the regular passing train and the finger-key clickings of Lachenmann’s ‘Guero’; which actually turned to entirely appropriate and rivetting effect as the train passed again during a much more thunderous part of Lachenmann’s ‘Serynade’.) Perhaps this latter indicates some of the reasons that car-parks aren’t more often used as venues, the actual virtues of having an enclosed space in which people are more restrained by spatial etiquette in terms of wandering in and out of the performance space and to the bar and conversing through parts of the music they don’t like, the enforcing of particular qualities of attention and listening that are not in themselves bourgeois or stuffy values but of a serious engagement with music that refuses to reduce it to social occasion or aural wallpaper. Not that the LCMF wasn’t characterised by intense close-listening on the part of its core audience (the culprits being more those who passed by the concerts on their way to and from Frank’s bar upstairs, passing comment as they went). Lots of these things, of course, couldn’t have been anticipated at the planning stage, or even mitigated against if they were, but I think it’s important to raise them, not so much as a specific criticism of or dig at the LCMF, but as part of the problems that will have to be seriously thought about if a sustained movement towards alternative venues for the performance of contemporary music is to be considered.

Setting this aside for the moment, let’s consider the concerts presented. The first Friday: Lachenmann’s piano pieces generally came through well – ‘SeryNade’ in particular struck my as extremely strong, this being the second time I’d seen it performed in concert; it makes much use of pedal-work for complex resonance-effects, and includes one particularly gripping section in which chordal repetition creates a kind of paralyzed, frozen or stuttering quality of obsession, weirdly resonant with the way John Coltrane might approach and worry at a phrase from every angle, trying to exhaust and work through its every harmonic implication. The piece, despite its title, seems to work through the residue and sediment left by the history of the classical piano repertoire, and particularly that of Romanticism, absorbing its gestures and re-fashioning them in critical fashion: a music of deep historical engagement, with a very particular way of working through such issues. The Morricone pieces, which I was quite stoked about before-hand, proved disappointing, by contrast; I understand the programming was inspired by Lachenmann’s comments about Morriconne being his favourite composer, but I suspect he means the better-known film music (mitigating his reputation as a high-modernist hermit who scorns all forms of popular culture) rather than the rather structurally-inane ‘avant-garde’ pieces we heard on the night. ‘Proibito’, for eight trumpets, saw those trumpets moving through particular sets of extended techniques in somewhat disconnected fashion, and felt as much as anything like a student composition: a composer trying out ideas without much sense of how to formally string them together. The piece for solo viola and tape (‘Suoni per Dino’) was more structurally coherent, and had obvious similarities to particular sequences Morriconne will write in tension-filled scenes from his Western film scores, in which a sparse but repetitive figure on timpani or some other form of percussion will underlie a series of more abstract sounds. But whereas that rhythmic quality contributes directly to the tension in those scores, here it felt like an unnecessary sop to the slowly-overlapping looped harmonies above it, which might even have taken on a Feldman-lite quality if they hadn’t been thus bolstered. That said, I’d imagine these pieces are rarely performed, and it’s certainly good that the opportunity was given for them to be heard.

I missed Glenn Branca on the Saturday for Wagner at the Proms (see above), but stayed for the full nine-hour-or-so whack on the Sunday, a ‘drone day’ culminating in the Palestine / Conrad double-bill. Jem Finer’s opening ‘Slowplayer’ struck me as the worst kind of satisfied, funding-sated dross, perhaps acceptable in a gallery or installation-type setting, but completely unsuited to a concert context: working through a stack of records which appeared to include Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and the stooges, he proceeded to play them on the specially-modified record-player which gave the ‘piece’ its title, a player which didn’t give above 7RPM. So we got the elongated groans and drawn out gasps of barely-distinguishable records, sometimes with somewhat desultory mixer-manipulation from Finer, who wandered around the space taking photographs of the audience or picking through the record-stack. Somehow paralyzed in my seat, I stayed for the full two-hours, but the suffering involved was somewhat mitigated by the follow-up of Eliane Radigue’s ‘Chry-ptus’, transitioning into James Tenney’s ‘Having Never Written a Note for Percussion’, that crescendo-diminuendo piece for tam-tam which fully exploits the resonant possibilities of that instrument in a way that requires complete physical and mental focus on the part of the musician and, if they’re willing, the audience. If I felt lethargic and fed-up at the end of the Finer, by the end of the Tenney, I felt some combination of blissed-out, exhausted and emotionally eviscerated (perhaps simply a result of tiredness and temporary fragility, and thus not the best indicator of ‘objective’ reviewing standards). Rounding the afternoon off, Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’, as arranged for a polite electric-guitar-vibes-keyboards-reeds-and-strings ensemble, was hardly in the same league, though I have a soft spot for an album I haven’t heard for years, and it was nice, if nothing more, to encounter it again in live form. Barely an hour’s break saw the main event. First half, Tony Conrad and Jennifer Walshe’s duo Ma la Pert with an hour-long improvisational piece: Walshe stuck mainly to vocals, though she’d occasionally join Conrad’s amplified violin and table-based bass string droning with bits of cello - a big range of extended techniques and a tendency towards a kind of vaguely ‘ethnic’ emotionalism grew a little wearying over the full time, as if she was unwilling to allow the drone full space to develop – perhaps the piece would have benefited from being a little shorter (but perhaps I’m also being churlish). Charlemagne Palestine’s stuffed-toy-tumbler-and-talking routine doesn’t really do much for me, but the ‘Strumming Music’-style exploration of piano resonance was at times mesmerising, even if I have perhaps less time for it than I did on initially hearing the original album: it felt a little too obvious and over-dramatic in its emotional effects and affect (rather like elements of Walshe’s singing), verging, even, on the sentimental (and not in a good way). But the final encore, a short trio featuring all three performers, was, to paraphrase the title of a particularly beautiful archive recording of Palestine and saxophonist Terry Jennings, ‘Short and Sweet’, if at times a little hesitant (but live first-time collaborations can be forgiven for this).

So that was the first weekend. In any case, despite the tinges of unease that prompted the vicious introductory splurge above, it wasn’t until the penultimate day of attendance at the LCMF’s second weekend that I noticed the wall-scrawl ‘Triumph of the Bourgeoisie (Upstairs)’. Weirdly, or not so weirdly, that little descriptor came back towards the end of the festival’s final scheduled piece, a performance of Philip Corner’s ‘Piano Activities’ - or rather, the performance of the performance of Corner’s work by Wolf Vostell, Charlotte Moorman, George Macunias, etc, in 1962, in which the piano was destroyed. But whereas Macunias at least partially justifies this violence by claiming that the piano had cost $5 and it would have cost more to hire removals to take it away than to destroy it, the Bold Tendencies realisation was clearly geared towards a kind of mild-shock, the actual impact of the shock softened by the fact of its hipster-event cushioning (putting a couple of pianos in a car-park anyway is something of a shock, perhaps). This isn’t to say that some of the sounds coaxed out weren’t compelling - they were, particularly mic’d-up - but the thing is that these sounds could equally well have been-produced through close-micing of non-destructive piano activity: rubbing the strings needn’t be done with a giant chain, only a small one (or, as per Cage’s 14, with horsehair), tapping the resonant underside of the instrument could equally well be done with fingers or first than with a hammer, and so on. Corner’s initial score was designed precisely towards this end, as an extension of Cage’s extension of the piano through preparations, and in that light, it would have fitted perfectly into a programme which had seen Anthony Pateras, the day before, switch between piano, prepared piano (the same model, indeed, that was destroyed as the festival’s final event) and analogue synth, and in which Mark Knoop’s astounding recital had approached the issue of piano-writing (albeit mostly keyboard-and-note based, unlike, say, Lachenann’s previously-performed Guero) from many different angles. As Knoop impeccably segued into the Corner, assistants emerging from various points and audience converging around the piano like vultures; Knoop and co. handing out smashed piano keys and various other bits of piano gut to the audience like saints’ reliquaries. If, here, I seem to be falling into exactly the position of the Guardian article by Ben Beaumont-Thomas which has generated a mini-stream of twitter debate where the organizers, perhaps understandably, take BB-T to task for making this one event characterise the festival as a whole (and see also this response with regard to the availability of pianos), I think that, regardless of economic issues or of the issue of allowed bourgeois destruction, as an interpretation (or translation) of an interpretation of Corner’s score, the piece is partial and based on a particular, spectacular incident in its performance history which does not encompass or fully and accurately represent the piece itself. And yes, Fluxus did happen forty years ago, and more. And yes, the entire history of the incorporation of various forms of performance art into recuperative institutional frameworks and the co-option for the potentially political radical for high-bourgeois ends needs to be taken into consideration. One might argue that the same could be said of any piece of western classical piece performed or written on a fairly expensive piano, but I think that would be to dodge the issue. Food for thought, anyhow.

With that out of the way, onto the rest of the festival. If I didn’t necessarily buy the equivalence drawn between ‘New Complexity and Noise’ (the Friday gig’s title) – Michael Finnissy’s hyper-complex piano music is very different structurally to the apparently equally-virtuosic but formally rather slick piano improvisation by Anthon Pateras that followed it, and Russell Haswell’s noise set concealed its rhythmically rather square machinations behind sheer PA’d volume – turn it down and it’d sound rather uncomfortably caught between IDM and noise music proper, as if, I don’t know, Cremaster had met Autechre but they hadn’t quite clicked. Finnissy’s ‘English Country Tunes’, ferociously played by Mark Knoop, were what stood out the most of anything on the evening. Seeing them live really reinforces their value: I periodically watch Finnissy videos on youtube and am never quite sure how to engage with the work or what to think of it, though in some rather un-delineated sense I get the sense of admiring them or the very fact of their existence, but here, an extended, two-to-three minute passage featuring simultaneous writing in the extreme high and low ends of the piano achieved a concentrated ferocity comparable to the improvisations of Cecil Taylor; rather than just being the timbral shock effect it could have been, the material was rhythmically and harmonically compelling, and the juxtaposition with a more overtly folk-influenced or –haunted register felt entirely appropriate and not in the least like a disjoint or a cop-out. Pateras and Steve Noble did a series of improvisations in various solo and duo combinations; their playing was flashy but somehow almost always entirely safe, with none of the risk that good improvisation, in this particular, more ‘interactive’ mode at least, to me tends to entail. Perhaps the best piece was the one for prepared piano and drums, in which Pateras hammered out a percussion all of his own, using the full range of the instrument and making it seem like a resourceful instrument in and of itself; nonetheless, here, as in the other pieces, it felt as if both musicians were somehow afraid of being bored and of boring the audience – rather than sticking with, locking into any particularly compelling area that opened up, they would discard it and move onto something else, almost as if to show that they could, so that the logic was smooth but disjointed, an endless flow of ideas all given equal weight and thus in their totality giving the feeling of a kind of insubstantiality, impressive moment to moment and even in terms of a kind of general effect which would get the audience talking afterwards, but, in their actual totality, almost rather bland. Of the remaining pieces, Ferneyhough’s ‘Cassandra’s Dream Song’, the solo flute piece, doesn’t strike me on nearly the same level as the Finnissy; Aaron Cassidy’s solo pieces, for trumpet and trombone are clearly doing interesting things in terms of notation and timbral exploration, though they perhaps haven’t quite worked out what to do with these areas in the ways that Finnissy’s have (Cassidy is, after all, a much younger composer than either of the two F’s). That said, it was the earlier piece, ‘songs only as sad as their listener’, which struck me most, with its tremulous and sparse repeated note, muted but amplified so as to emphasize maximal fragility within the human-instrument interaction, emphasizing the externals of breath and mouth-positioning so that the brass sometimes seemed to be an extension of a human wheezing and crying, a half-choked plaint: as if the trumpet part to Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question’ had been cut down to its bare minimum and left to stand without the accompanying orchestra, perhaps.

Saturday I skipped, out of concert-/ cultural-overload exhaustion. Sunday afternoon, mainly consisting of new pieces selected from competition entries for the festival, was mostly desultory: the opening piece, for wandering trombones, might have suggested a Scratch Orchestra-style performance strategy, but it was material of the worst sub-minimalist kind, utterly banal and with no redeeming features that I could see or hear; somehow, the perfect existential accompaniment to a five-minute failure to light a half-smoked cigarette on a windy car-park rooftop. Michael Haleta’s piece for forty musicians moving in delineated squares while dragging or banging various junk-instruments (a giant plastic flower-pot (which pretty much drowned out everything else as it was enthusiastically dragged and scraped against the car-park’s concrete floor), a cymbal-round-the-neck, various shakers, a set of clothes pegs tied together with wire, a rock on a string) superficially seemed close to the performance strategies of James Saunders’ pieces, but with apparently none of the close thinking and attention to structure that goes into them: the division into four movements seemingly entirely arbitrary, and the various possible permutations of a fairly simple idea with regard to partially-improvised group dynamics and negotiations, even in such basics as speed and area covered, left unexplored. The pairing of vocal works by Mark Applebaum-Pauline Oliveros was at least intriguing, if sometimes a little too self-consciously wacky in its performative shenanigans (though Richard Bullens’ piece for perambulating clarinets was perhaps the more gimmicky, given the apparently complete lack of relation between a potentially interesting exploration of spatial dynamics and the actual substance of its conservative-modernist musical material). A series of works for acoustic guitar and electronics were dire. I would suggest a diet of early Taku Sugimoto, Derek Bailey, and sackcloth and ashes. The concluding piece, Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together’, is a reminder of the existence of a political minimalism, though I doubt many of the audience had much idea about the Attica Riots that form its text: the indeterminacy of its notation also suggests a connection between early minimalism and more avant-garde performance strategies that second, or third-generation minimalists (and the, probably fourth-generation, by now near-total recuperation of minimalism into the de-rigueur TV-and-movie soundtrack and advertising ambient-background score go-to style) almost completely ignore. The piece itself perhaps tends towards sentimentality in its second movement, but its patient extension of sparse text fragments is actually handled without histrionics and with a sense of implacable conviction that is quite moving, and certainly a million times less gimmicky or formally glib than almost all of the commissioned pieces that had preceded it.

The evening’s lengthy keyboard ‘recital’ (or more accurately, set of recitals) opened with Jane Chapman’s harpsichord programme. The miking of the instrument rendered its relative clunkiness and stringy, twittering-machine-like quality nakedly apparent; perhaps a disadvantage in more traditional repertoire, but of a piece with the programme, in which Ligeti’s hyper-virtuosic moto-perpetuos and Louis Andriessen’s rather uncomfortably extended melodic permutations sat alongside to me rather glib electronically-aided explorations (or illustrations) of the instrument’s inner workings by Paul Whitty, and some wonderfully exaggerated cliché parodies or near-parodies from a few centuries earlier by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer, perhaps my favourite of all the set’s constituent parts. Leon Michener’s recreation of Terry Riley’s ‘Persian Surgery Dervishes’ was advertised as taking place on an electric organ, but in the event, occurred through a combination of an apple laptop, a midi keyboard, and a baby grand; undoubtedly a labour-intensive reconstruction (Riley’s piece was at least semi-improvised and was never turned into a score), though the techno elements were a little baffling (one half-wished he’d go the whole hog and turn the whole thing into a techno-remix; or that we’d actually hear some Riley-influenced techno; or that the approach was more purist). But Mark Knoop’s piano recital on that same baby ground was nothing short of astonishing: playing entirely from an ipad, he transitioned between quite widely diverse pieces without missing a beat, leaving no space for applause between individual compositions and thus building up an extremely focused set of associations and networks between the items on the programme. The effect was sometimes comic, as when Mozart would be followed by a crashing modernist chord, sometimes seamless, as when early Feldman turned into early La Monte Young, so that the Young initially sounded like the final phrase of the Feldman repeated and extended. If the two recent pieces, by Adam de la Cour (conceptually neat and simple, featuring a loud boxing-ring bell sound which transitioned between (from what I can recall) vaguely Joplinesque parody-passages and ferocious, Finnissy-like keyboard-scampering) and Lauren Redhead couldn’t hope to ‘compete’ with Mozart, or Schoenberg, or even Leo Ornstein, they nonetheless fitted well and didn’t seem overtly out of place: certainly, they were far superior to any of the new pieces played earlier on in the day. The other Piano Activities that rounded things, and the piano itself, off, we’ve touched on before, so no need to re-tread that controversial ground. But, really, I haven’t seen this much varied contemporary music jostled together in such a short and packed space of time ever, I don’t think, at least outside of Aimard-era Aldeburgh or some of the South Bank’s Total Immersion weekends, and I’m still somewhat buzzing and exhausted from it – in the best possible way, I’m sure…

Mark Wastell / Mensch Mensch Mensch.
Cafe Oto, Tuesday 6th August 2013

Much more low-key, this: a modest crowd, as perhaps expected. Wastell’s tam-tam work couldn’t help but force me into a compare-and-contrast exercise with the performance of James Tenney’s ‘On Having Never Written a Note for Percussion’ at the LCMF a week or so before; whereas that piece has a clear crescendo-diminuendo structure, moving from the barely-perceptible to a roaring rush of resonance in which one might fancy oneself hearing disintegrated choirs of spectral human voices (no, really) - a piece which, unexpectedly enough at the time, felt curiously moving to me – Wastell’s investigations are less linear and thus, tougher to follow: not because of an excess of activity, but rather because of their extended concentration on particular areas of the tam-tam’s surface and register that transition into similar areas with a minimum of fuss, aided by electronic amplification. Café Oto is, as always, incredibly hot, and I was already tired, so my attention wandered at times, but it was a thoughtful set, certainly. Mensch Mesnch Mesnch (Liz Allbee and Burkhard Beins’ mainly electronic duo), by contrast, engaged in various explicitly ‘theatrical’ structures in a set that was curiously balanced between the tightly organized, a mode of performance that was explicit in the effect and affect it was going after at a particular time or in a particular section, and the improvised space for meandering or for sudden and disorientating shift. Looking at Beins’ set up afterwards, I discovered a number-list which delineated the various areas to be explored: trumpet, synth, sine-waves and tuning forks, sampled piano note, etc - and this of course made perfect sense afterwards, the semi-composed sectionality of that approach, the way that transitions between sections would be clearly and almost violently demarcated by the apparently sudden decision to stop or start a particular action in which one was engaged - Allbee putting down her trumpet, Beins cutting out a sustained rumbling bass sound, and so on. I’m perhaps more interested in the moment in more explicit compositional strictures as spur for improvisation – and perhaps that general delineation of areas restricted the music in a way that lessened risk, rather than forcing a great concentration and focus – but it was a nice set, overall, starting with great fanfare-like blasts of trumpet from Allbee, who pointed her instrument, which had a bike-light inserted into its bell, at various spots in the darkened room as she played, and ending in completely different territory with an exploration of tuning-fork and sine wave resonance into which Wastell’s guest tam-tam blended seamlessly. Peter Brötzmann will be something else again.