Explore Ensemble at Wigmore Hall
Friday 8th July 2022
Enno Poppe, Gelöschte Lieder
Cassandra Miller, Perfect offering
James Dillon, The soadie waste
Lawrence Dunn, Suite
[Note: A shorter version of this piece appears in the October issue of The Wire magazine.]
Each of the four works on the programme, lasting between fifteen and twenty minutes in length, explored in various ways the idea of a group and the historical nature of form. In their own way, each piece was an exploration of a pull between sensual pleasure, conventional or unconventionally beautiful sound, and a self-questioning, interrogative tugging at the limits of formal expectation which opened onto history. The concert opened with the strung-out intensities, tightening and loosening, of what was the oldest piece chronologically, Enno Poppe’s late-’90s Gelöschte Lieder (Erased Songs). A quintet of piccolo (doubling flute), clarinet, violin, viola and piano throw out spiky, fracturing lines moving towards and away from cohesion: dissolving unisons, interlocking peals, all the instruments constantly tangling and untangling, with a propensity to dramatic, extreme high notes. Poppe’s piece is lively, bright and effective, polished and highly assured, striking and compelling as a listening experience almost. Yet its relatively standard New Music textures sounded relatively old-fashioned compared to the next piece on the programme—paradoxically, perhaps, given that that piece has a pronounced tendency to quote music of the past, and an at least apparently simple harmony, melody, textures that are rarely harsh or rebarbative.
Written during the 2020 lockdown, Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering takes melody apart, re-enchanting the basics and basis of sound by revealing them in all their deceptive complexity. Like much of her work, it’s based on fragmentary transcriptions of other musics—in this case, slowed-down recordings of bells from a French convent—as if the original object has been held up to refracting and reflecting light. In much classical music, bells signify grandeur: sound and fury, triumphant exhortation, religious or State pomp, premonitions of salvation or doom: Rachmaninov’s The Bells, Boris Godunov, the 1812 Overture the Symphonie Fantastique. But they can also be rendered as gentle, swaying traceries, pealing in decorative rather than annunciatory fashion: Liszt’s ‘Les Cloches de Geneve’, Ravel’s La vallée des cloches, Arvo Pärt’s various tintinnabulatory pieces. (Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie, with its submerged church rising out of the sea, partakes of both tendencies.) Miller’s bells certainly lean more towards the delicate than the bombastic: gently repeating and slowly morphing, figures for wind and strings mimic the bells’ regular rhythms over implacably calm piano figures. The effect is not mechanical or clangorous, but shimmering and lulling, as much watery as metallic, heat-hazed air shimmering on a summer’s day. At certain points the music rises to hymnal grandeur; in another, extraordinary moment, all the instruments drop out save a lone clarinet, repeating two notes for what seems an eternity before the music moves on.
Writing Perfect Offering during a period of depression, Miller sang along to melodic lines from the slowed-down recording. An absent voice haunts the music: a voice singing itself back into the world by letting go. For Miller, while musical forms are socially produced and historically conditioned, music is also connected to personal, even private emotion, conveyed in ritualised form. Miller deals with a recurrent new music topos—both as problem and resource: that of musical quotation as direct engagement with the music of the past. Composers of the post-war avant-garde--Nono, Lachenmann, Ligeti, and perhaps above all, Berio--have explored quotation as critical framework, reclamation of submerged and subversive traditions, or melancholic glance backward. In Miller’s case, quotation is not disguised or hidden—as it is often is with, say, Nono—nor is it foreground, collage-style—as with Berio. Instead, it’s refracted across the entire surface, visible at almost every point—and, in some ways generating virtually the entire structure of the entire piece—yet remaining uncanny, other than itself. Miller offers what might be called cubist rearrangements of tradition musical objects, retaining their shimmering aura in a fashion that can, at times lead towards a pleasurable, soothing melancholy, at others create a kind of queasy, calm alarm—a slow panic, a distributed anxiety in the process of turning into calm, or calm turning to anxiety. Miller’s pieces don’t propose to make grand statements about music’s history and future, but modest ones: they are experiments, gentle interrogations, that pay attention in a materially precise way to the question of what beauty is and how we’re conditioned to view it.
Music, for Miller, it would seem, is a form of art that’s socially produced and historically conditioned yet connected to personal, even private emotion conveyed in ritualised form. I say ritualised rather than ritual because, while Miller’s pieces often take their musical material almost entirely from quoted, or, as Miller terms it, “transcribed” materials, their form is abstracted from them. Just as an earlier piece, Bel Canto, takes phrases from Callas’ rendition of a Verdi aria outside the frame of the operatic stage, so Perfect Offering invokes both bells and—in its title—a Leonard Cohen song, without taking assuming the form of a religious call or a pop song. Given all this, there’s at once a familiar strangeness and strange familiarity to Miller’s music. In mood and feel, this, along with the consistent mining of the music of the past—whether in direct quotation, or in explorations of and allusions to post-serialist tonality and musical rhetoric—and the invariable adoption of slow, untroubled tempi, is a quality Miller shares with peers and contemporaries like Laurence Crane and much of the music released in the past few years on the Another Timbre label, which by now might seem to be crystallising into a kind of school or style. I have been struck and moved by much of this work over the years, though, as ever when a style becomes widespread, there is attendant risk: in this case, the critical, defamiliarizing edge that, in this case, prevents the music from settling into easy consolation. At their best, the initial power of such pieces was that it was not often clear exactly how to read them, even as they appeared almost absurdly transparent or opaque in their simplicity of means. This was certainly not ‘New Complexity’, but it was not New Romanticism or New Simplicity, exactly. But once this kind of affect becomes too familiar, there is the risk that the work loses its edge. It becomes, in a word, too readable.
To repeat, however, this is a risk rather than a given. Beauty, or its signifiers, can become a problem if that beauty hardens into the repetition of style—though, of course, beauty can’t exist without style. Miller’s music remains beautiful because it pays attention in such a materially precise way to the question of what beauty is and how we’re conditioned to view it, but also because of its intimacy. Perfect Offering is a piece ‘about’ various things, and readable in that sense: about depression and letting go, about separation and distance, about the passing of time, about imperfection and suffering and history and other age-old themes. But it’s never grandiose, and it poses these things as gestures rather than answers, its intimate distance offering each listener space to bring themselves to the piece in a spirit at once reflective and generous. I found it deeply moving.
Written almost twenty years ago, but still full of biting freshness, James Dillon’s piano quintet the soadie waste is named for a social club on the outskirts of his native Glasgow, built on the site of a chemical factory, whose fumes, it was rumoured, still leaked through the floors. Subtitled “wedding receptions, dances and house-housie” (bingo), the piece conjures up cubist visions of social activity, as tight, overlapping rhythms characterise the intense, memorable opening, a cubist invitation to the dance, giving way to more anxiously reflective music before the opening returns with a brilliant flourish. Dillon began in rhythm and blues bands, before a chance encounter with a Webern while he was living on a commune saw him change direction: since then he has, as he's remarked, sought a “balance between intellectual rigour and sensual speech”, attempting to “drag [the] language” of new music “into a space that I could recognise.” His music consciously speaks form the peripheries: away from central Europe, away from the West, finding value in other kinds of sociality, from social clubs to communes to the sound of New Music—itself an outlier within an often musically conservative classical establishment. The soadie waste doesn’t offer social realism, but it does convey a sense of underclass resilience: on the outskirts, outside the metropolitan centre, on Britain’s edges. Over the leaking fumes of an industrial past—a past of dispossession and imperial aggression that still constitutes the ostensibly post-imperialist and ostensibly ‘devolved’ United Kingdom as it exists today—it stages a defiant dancing on the flames, beautiful and strong.
The concert concluded with the world premiere of Suite, by Lawrence Dunn, the youngest of the composers on the bill. I first met Lawrence around a decade ago, at a free improv gig where someone had just demolished a chair: Lawrence looked up with wry and implacable calm as if this sort of thing happened every day. Like Miller’s, Dunn’s work is deeply attentive to musical history, and extremely thoughtful about things like melody and harmony. It’s also determinedly strange, defamiliarizing classical form through the use of quarter tones and apparently out-of-place, sampled recordings. Composed as a single movement, played without a break, Dunn’s Suite falls into discernible parts modelled on the movements that historically comprise a suite. It is, however, far from neo-classicist, staging a kind of enquiry into the form in which it’s written, from within that form.
Initially developing as a collection of Baroque dances, and later as a vehicle for Romantic tone painting, by the early twentieth century, the suite had become uncanny, self-consciously archaic, even arcane, its last gasps works like Ravel’s Le Tombeau De Couperin, a deeply melancholic, ironically classicized work written for friends killed in war, and Berg’s Lyric Suite, which channels cryptic romantic secrets in a febrile atmosphere of vexed love. Suites—at least, named as such—have effectively fallen out fashion since then. So why revive the form now? As the programme notes suggest, Dunn explores the suite as a form that developed in tandem with various stages of imperial history—the growth of European expansionism in the Baroque period, when the court opulence it signalled directly profited from the plunder of slavery and colonial extraction; later, the epochs of nationalism and dissolving empires and their crises. The musical impulse to compartmentalise, to categorise, divide, and collect, Dunn suggests, is a process with wider ramifications as regards imperialism’s practice of division and collection, its violent remapping of the world itself.
This is not so much an overt programme as a backdrop. Three field recordings play at various points in the piece (there were some technical mishaps with the playback in the concert, but they can be heard perfectly in the concert video uploaded to the Explore Ensemble’s YouTube page). The first of the recordings sounds out during the opening. As the ensemble offer knotty, staggered melodic lines and the piano plays a part labelled in the score as “like water”, the faint “sounds of a pier being demolished near the entrance to the Terminal Island Prison and Deportation Center, Los Angeles, US., 2012” add acousmatic background connected to a specific socio-political background which can’t be detected by ear but which by its very presence refutes politically quietist abstraction. Later on, an unaccompanied field recording of schoolchildren singing the national anthem of Suriname in Dutch hints at colonial legacies. Finally, a recording of a fly trapped in a bottle—again, largely submerged within the ensemble texture—gestures towards the trope of the memento mori, a warning of time’s passing, yet without fatalism, suggesting a struggle against the enclosing structures that trap individual perception, history as a nightmare from which we still are still barely awakening.
As the suite has developed—and disintegrated—historically—its functional relation to dance has become all the more distanced, as the dances it contained fell out of fashion and practical use. In the case of Ravel’s Tombeau, allusions to those dances, their rhythms and particular character, form part of a melancholic, arch and ghostly container: the form consciously denuded of its content, while wistfully harking back to those associations it cannot leave behind. In Dunn’s Suite, meanwhile, the kinds of fractured, rhythmically jagged renderings of dance unisons that animate, for example, Dillon’s Soadie Waste, receive a more subdued, uneasy rendering. The music is often characterised by a kind of agitated flow. Rippling might be a good word to describe the feel it often takes; at other points, a conflict between stasis and movement creates a kind of purposive irresolution with a particular, and very compelling tension to it. In the opening minutes, an elaborate, unceasing piano part which almost disappears behind the playing of the ensemble; pianist Siwan Rhys switches to keyboard for subsequent parts, her synth-like sounds at points merging into the thick ensemble texture, at others standing out like matter out of place. The work culminates in an astonishing piece of collective writing, in which a simple melody rises up the octaves, topped off by a screaming piccolo. A brilliant example of how to build and sustain a musical climax, it is, in context, quite unexpected, and all the more effective for it. But Dunn doesn’t let the piece end at its natural resting point. Instead, as Rhys switches back to piano, there’s the briefest of pauses—in which the fly buzzing in the bottle can be heard unadorned—before a kind of sardonic coda, one which refuses the gains of rhetorical accomplishment: not with a bang but a whimper, a muttered afterword to something that had seemed definitively concluded. It’s anything but affirmative, offering unease rather than resolve. Like all of the pieces on the programme, it reverberates as a series of questions as much as a series of reinforcements of answers or what we know already: and, of any of the pieces on the programme, it perhaps offers the most “edge” (a favoured term of Dunn’s).
Within British classical musical culture of late, there seems to be a growing musical conservatism: not so much on the part of performers, composers, or artists, but on that numinous network of programming, funding, and institutional survival within a period of crisis sparked, not only by the covid situation, but by the current government’s increasing hostility towards culture (perhaps the “culture wars” might be renamed by their true term, “class war”, despite the pseudo-populism indicated by appointing Nadine Dorries as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport of the United Kingdom). Spoken or unpsoken apologias disavow all but the briefest of traces of the avant-garde within the world of the classical concert hall—a glance at this year’s Proms line-up, in comparison to the programmes of even, say, five years ago, serves as a good example. And so a concert like that of the Explore Ensemble is all the more welcome for bucking the trend. Thanks, in large part, to the Wigmore’s scheme of £5 tickets for under-35s, and to its programming choices—Elaine Mitchener and Jason Moran as resident artists, fairly frequent performances by groups like Apartment house—there’s a notable change to the usual audiences found in such a venue: often younger, sometimes—though by no means always—less overwhelmingly white and male. Not only this, but that audiences—for this concert, for the Roscoe Mitchell set in late June, for the concerts that Mitchener has been curating during and after lockdown—are engaged, and have come specifically to see this “difficult” music we’re otherwise implicitly told has no audience. On the night, applause for the pieces by Poppe, Miller, Dillon and Dunn was suitably and equally rapturous. Let’s hope we see more such programmes soon.
[Written July 2022]
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