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.