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.

Stockhausen - GESANGE DER JUNLINGE / WELT-PARLAMENT (from MITTWOCH AUS LICHT) – BBC PROMS, Royal Albert Hall, 19.07.2013

Performed by Ex Cathedra / cond. Jeffrey Skidmore. Sound projection by Kathinka Pasveer. (Also referenced: Helmut Lachenmann, 'Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied' / Gustav Mahler, 'Symphony No.5', performed by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra / cond. Jonathan Nott / with the Arditti Quartet.  BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, 15.07.2013.)

Perhaps it’s too easy, or too obvious to say this, but the Visions of Karlheinz Stockhausen would seem to emerge from an egomania based on a particularly old-fashioned, though still prevalent notion of genius, albeit not often these days presented in such nakedly pompous terms – the great artist from Sirius in touch with cosmic vibrations, which he translates into music; apparently with far less of a twinkle in his eye or tongue in his cheek than Sun Ra in his claims to be from Saturn, far less of a play with the traditions of 50s sci-fi, big-band jazz, the history of African-American music as a signifying resistance to oppression; more the vaguely cultural imperialist mystical windbagged ramblings of a rich old white man. The combinations of this egomania with a kind of hippie ‘world-music’ mish-mash of various forms of mysticism and religion passing off for the concern with collectivity with which the music of composers such as Luigi Nono or even the more open-ended scores of post-Cageian associates of the Wandelweiser group much more actively and specifically engages, mean that any encounter with his later music in particular increasingly have to be taken with a pinch of salt. The same could be said, I suppose, of the religious framing of the near-entirety of Messiaen’s output, equally grandiose in its marshalling of large orchestral resources or long spans of time; but I can’t help finding that there is something to do with Messiaen’s continued engagement with the presentation of time’s progression, or non-progression, the structural blockiness of his music, the pleasure of its textural surface in musical terms that don’t need to be related to any of its various scenarios, borrowed from fairly traditional scriptural sources, that makes it easier to listen to on its own terms than Stockhausen’s. ‘Welt-Parlament’, the a-capella choral work which took up the majority of tonight’s programme, is the second scene from ‘Mittwoch aus Licht’, the ‘Wednesday’ section of the enormous operatic cycle which occupied him for nigh on thirty years, and which is by turns self-consciously excessive, wacky and grandiose. In almost all the reviews of the piece (staged as part of the complete ‘Mittwoch’ in Birmingham last year), some minor discomfort or uncertainty is expressed about how to place the tone of this congress (the Welt-Parlament are holding a session in which they debate the meaning of Love); after concluding that the scenario and the dialogue that takes place within it is a hippie continuation of pieces such as ‘Stimmung’ or ‘Hymnen’, it is praised for its scope, for the staging, &c., &c, as if we were thankful for its very existence, rather than attempting to get under the skin of some actual problems that might exist for and with it.

I mean, for sure, it can be hard to know how to take the piece: it seems impossible, for example, that lines like “Love is cosmic glue” or injunctions to “find love” in your inner voice, which is the voice of God, or some-such, could have been written with a straight face. “Love is forgiveness” sings one of the parliamentary soloists; “Not always” replies the President, to which the choir respond with elongated “Ach-So”s. The historical and moral stakes of Love itself, in political or theological terms, are nowhere present in such utterances; nor, it would seem, are they intended to be. Regardless of the rather baffling tone of the libretto, though – which seems somehow to sit too comfortably for satire, and, if satirical, remain uncertain of its target -- the fact that much of the music is sung in invented future languages at least removes some of the dramatic absurdity: taken on its own terms, the choral writing is often beautiful, in a post-Ligeti, post-Stimmung way, with ripples of sound travelling down the rows of singers. For Stockhausen’s sense of spatial dynamics, largely due to his pioneering work with electronic music, is always in play, as it was in the initial diffusion of ‘Gesange der Junlinge’ from speakers around the Royal Albert Hall, its watery electronic bloops and bass booms and phased or pitch-shifted shards of the solo choirboy recording which is its source emerging unpredictably from different points of origin. If that piece could be criticised by the use of that rather amorphous, but frequently-deployed pejorative term ‘dated’ – impressive for its logistical achievement at the time, though many of the sounds could be easily recreated using simpler electronic means, now – one might also add that its structure doesn’t seem as sharp or as tense or as thought-through as it might; there is none of the wrenchingly tense silences present in the music of Helmut Lachenmann, none of the drama of Nono’s late-60s tape pieces, but rather, a kind of meandering quality, excited with the possibilities for creation that the technology and basic concept have created, but not always quite sure how to progress through and with them.

Returning to the notion of space, we might also witness also the entrance and exit of the choir at the beginning and end of ‘Welt-Parlament’, mumbled mass voices gradually fading in and out to the discrete accompaniment of the electronic metronomes each singer carries; some strange versioning of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’, perhaps, though without engaging that work’s teasingly questioning relation to patronage and the labour of its performers. (Stockhausen’s relation to the massive riches heaped upon his music would seem to have been that these were perfectly in line with the cosmic excesses his vision demanded, the most extreme of which is perhaps the entirely tedious ‘Helikopter String-Quartet’ which also forms a part of ‘Mittwoch’).

In terms of the ‘Welt-Parlament’ scenario – this debate on love by a variety of international representatives, taking place, I believe, somewhere literally above the clouds – there’s scope, one would have thought, for a music of debate, even of dialectical confrontation – though as the theme of ‘Mittwoch’ is reconciliation, or, as Stuart Manconie puts it in his book on Stockhausen, a kind of middling, or middle-ground, following the wars of ‘Dienstag’, that’s less the focus here. What happens in the end is that the so-called ‘debate’ on love leads to the airing of certain platitudes over a general hum of assent, sometimes with theatricalised gestures of indignation or disagreement on the part of the performers – which, however never really present themselves in the music; this hum sometimes focuses around droned centres, syllables stretched and thrown around the choir, invented languages or magic names intoned somewhat in the manner of ‘Stimmung’ (‘licht’ gets repeated a lot, seemingly associated with a particular hand gesture that looks a bit like a poorly-done gang symbol; Stockhausen goes bloods-and-crips), and sometimes allows space for coloratura exercises, little solo interventions. Perhaps this is intentional: speeches / arias as demonstrations of a flaunted technical skill that masks the lack of any significant message or contribution, epitomized by the temporary election of a female president (as the manifestation of the cycle’s Eve) when the male president runs off to prevent his car from being towed away; this election celebrated with a self-congratulatory delight in the mere mechanism of election itself, the appearance of correct process without any real consequence outside the self-enclosed ritual of the government chamber. Given this, and given Manconie’s potentially useful notion of a kind of banal middling, we might posit that Stockhausen is, however gently, humorously sceptical of his own quasi-internationalist visions, which it’s also easy (and probably correct) to see as extended hippie hang-overs; the vision of the galaxy-president as a camel-version of the cycle’s Lucifer, shitting out planets, in a later scene, or the announcement-‘interruption’ that the world-president’s car is being towed away in ‘Welt-Parlament’ would seem to mix in a kind of child-like poking of fun at authority figures – even as Stockhausen himself, it might be argued, remains, to a certain extent, the most absurd authority-figure of all, a child playing with his toys in the supposed interests of humanity as a whole, to whom, he, as the supreme artist Lucifer, has come to bring Licht. [*]

Yet there is never really any sense that Stockhausen is aware of what is at stake in the questions of government, community, internationalism or even universalism that his scenario breezily touches on. The alternation between soloist and choir might, of instance, have a long history in relation to, say, Greek dramatic art or to Bach’s Passions, for instance – or to its instrumental manifestation in the concerto form – but that’s never really exploited or dealt with apart from in the potential satire of the solo-as-display I’ve suggested above might be present. Similarly, the gender segregation of the choir (apart from two male singers (counter-tenors?) among the women’s side) would suggest a rather un-reconstructed notion of Love, or, indeed of parliamentary governance. Debate as un-dialectical self-congratulation; the appearance of an attempt at collective governance as precluding any actual necessary engagement with its practical implications. This might be seen as a send up of the impotent fake internationalism of the U.N., but I don’t think Stockhausen’s ‘politics’ traveled that far. Certainly, there’s no sense of that critique being made with the notion of the struggle for an actual internationalism behind it: Stockhausen was no communist. If ‘Hymnen’, for instance, wanted to be the twentieth-century version of the ‘Ode to Joy’, its internationalism was equally fake, and, as Adorno puts it of Beethoven’s work, partial, non-universal: see here Konrad Boehmer’s critique of the political-leanings of the anthems selected by Stockhausen, and his utopian vision of an “irrational petty-bourgeois supra-nationality." By contrast, Helmut Lachenmann's 'Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied' - performed at Monday's prom in a choice pairing with Mahler's Fifth Symphony - provides an engagement with the history of German national identity in music, through the transformation of Haydn’s Emperor Quartet into an anthem associated with bombastic chauvinism, an ethical fragmentation and consideration of the appropriation and complicity of a ‘pure’ music with repellent nationalist ideologies, which might provide us with a better vision of how one might address such issues.

It would be possible to argue, of course, that the climaxes of Lachenmann’s piece occasionally reached a fairly traditional kind of modernist angst-bombast. A few years ago, indeed, the composer-improviser Radu Malfatti expressed discomfort with this aspect of Lachenmann’s music in an interview for Dan Warburton’s now-defunct Paris Transatlantic magazine: “for me, his pieces are still hopelessly old-fashioned, the structures and the forms tumble around in 19^th century-idiomatics: with all his beautiful sounds [by ‘beautiful’ Malfatti here means Lachenmann’s use of extended techniques in order to further the range of instrumental material available, rather than in what he would call a ‘regressive’ sense], I still hear rondos, climaxes, anti-climaxes, and so on.” Yet, against Malfatti, I would argue that, like Mahler’s, Lachenmann’s climaxes highlight their own status as moments of ‘power’ or force or angst as the weak and ineffective moment that, as clichés, they are. The issues surrounding connections between nation, music and mass murder that ‘Tanzsuite’ attempts to address, through its scrupulous re-working and stripping away to a last ghost gesture of German song material, might be said to express itself in two forms: first, an almost-nothing, in which, say, the entire texture is reduced to the whisper or scrape of a violin bow being drawn across the body of the instrument, barely audible in the extended space of the concert auditorium. This almost-nothing, however, always implies climax, a layering of additional instrumental over smaller groups or soli (as implied by the concerto grosso form) – thus, rather than any ‘still, small voice’, it is invariably fraught with the tension of an anticipated return, of an extension that never settles comfort, always liable to interruption or discontinuation but too extended to remain an easily-assimilated interlude. Second, a full-blown climax, which, however, implies its own dissolution back to fracture, to that ‘almost-nothing’, and thus seems to contain something hollow within it. The fairly large orchestra on-stage, then, always seems reduced, impotent, those climaxes sounding out an attempt at bombast that comes across as over-compensation, and through such a move – the inhabitation of fullness and large-scale exaggeration by extreme forms of reduction, and vice-versa – Lachenmman’s piece becomes a dialectical engagement with the orchestra as a particular ensemble category. One could, if one were being crude, apply some crude fascism metaphor to the orchestra , its members swaying to the charismatic will of conductor and composer, everyone with their particular role and their right place; more specifically, though, ‘Tanzsuite’ is an engagement with the presentation of a ‘national music’ that becomes associated with particular orchestral sounds (see, for instance, Adorno on the use of brass within the ‘New German manner’ of the Wagner / Bruckner school), as forms of false collectivity which, in its splintered re-fashioning of how such an ensemble might sound out, is fully engaged with questions of musical form choked with layers of corrupted historical sedimentation.

If, initially, then, Lachenmann’s use of climax and of the resources of the orchestra might at times seem to slip into what Malfatti calls a ‘regression’, it is precisely those moments which ensure a critical and dialectical relation to musical history and to regression itself. The fact, meanwhile, that Stockhausen avoids climaxes of that kind – the feeling of ‘Welt-Parlament’ is somehow oddly serene – suggests, not a ‘progressiveness’ or an escape from the tired clichés of 19^th-century German Romantic music, but that less is at stake. For Lachemann, exaggeration is always musical, accomplished through gestures and textures of amplification or reduction, and their mutual exacerbation of each other, while for Stockhausen, exaggeration occurs mainly through pin-pointed theatrical gestures – the amplified blowing of kisses, the cartoonish car-towing interruption, the setting off of multiple electronic metronomes, the stammered announcement of the next scene by the fat singer left on stage after everyone else has accomplished their beautiful exit. Too often, these moments (primarily comic) feel like spectacular gimmicks, little moments of frisson designed to play against the expectations of a stuffy and stagnated opera house; yet this is all they remain, little moments, talking points for reviews, rather than immanent engagements with musical tradition and its attendant social rituals. It’s not too dissimilar from Werner Herzog’s descent into an essentially empty collection of self-consciously ‘wacky’ gestures in ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’: moments designed for crazy Nick Cage / crazy Werner you-tube clips in a manner little different from the compilations of the most absurd moments from the crappy Cage-starring remake of ‘The Wicker Man.’ Stockhausen can at least be presented as a charming curiosity, a mad scientist, a crazy inventor, a quasi-celebrity who makes extreme statements about 9/11 and writes music to be performed in helicopters; fun to think of as existing, even if one would never listen to it in any depth. Lachenmann’s sustained engagement with musical history and with form, even if it might not seem to challenge the bourgeois formal boundaries and parameters of its concert hall setting, is a more sustained and serious questioning of that setting and with that which is heard in the setting, and one that is primarily concerned with listening, rather than with egomaniacal ornamentation, with the frisson of bourgeois frippery. While the outraged reactions of cultural conservatives whenever a piece of contemporary music is somehow slipped into the Proms programme are hardly a reliable gauge, and while Stockhausen, as a far more famous public figure and a frequent target of bile, is also frequently attacked, the twitter outrage over Lachenmann’s piece suggests something of the way in which, outside any consideration of its structuring principles – merely, that is, on a ‘surface level’ – it remains fundamentally more challenging and troubling in its affect.

Up on cloud nine or on Sirius B, with stars in his eyes, I suppose Stockhausen was never going to be connected enough to music’s historical stakes to attempt anything like this. Still, to return to 'Welt-Parlament', I kept wanting, even as the spectacle and the music itself were impressive enough (though the choral language felt, oddly, rather too comfortably conventional in its beauty, too safe in its affect), a music that could take the potential for debate within that form and really delve into formally; some version of the extended debating scene from Ken Loach’s ‘Land and Freedom’, or the debates in Peter Weiss’ ‘Aesthetics of Resistance’; or Plato’s Symposium; or some sense of what Love might mean in theological or political terms, as in J.H. Prynne’s extended, word-by-word close-reading of George Herbert’s ‘Love III’. What love might mean in terms of hunger and consumption and individual and community, negotiation and gift, the economics of personal relation, and so on. But mainly what I got, in the end – and though I’m certainly glad there have been two Proms performances of contemporary music in one week, before the onslaught of Britten and the queasy-banal propaganda celebration of Royal-Baby-coinciding ‘Britishness’ – was feet heavy with cosmic glue.

[*] [A further note on Stockhausen and humour]

For Adorno’s Mahler, moments of parody and the grotesque are often entwined with those which should be – and on the surface might superficially appear to be – tinged with grandeur or power or force, the undercut bombast of brass climax as revealing the pain at “unappeased suffering” rather than a distanced laughter at the naturalized, never-changing perpetual motion of that taken to be the world’s unchangeable course: the omnipotence and omnipresence of capital and the exploitation of labour. Stockhausen’s humour has no such moral basis - that essential component, also, of real, engaged and effective satire. Rather, his is the playing around of precisely that bourgeois subject who imagines a distance and a freedom from "the world's course" that alienated labourers are not allowed to have. Charming as it might be, it is of the same impulse as his egomaniacal view of himself as conduit for humanity’s advancement and best interest: Marx’s bourgeoisie, in ‘The German Ideology’, mistaking the interests of a particular economic and social group, a particular class, for the interests of the whole.

Aisha Orazbayeva: The Traces of Sound

Works by Lachenmann // Feldman // Boulez // Nono
King's Place, London, Monday 23rd April 2012 

Aisha Orazbayeva's recital of works for solo violin played to a smallish room, an attentive audience who knew what they were in for, and there was narry a cough or an ill-judged (boogie-stop) shuffle to be heard – apart, that is, from a strategically placed throat-clearing whopper (or so it felt) at the very end, seemingly demanding that applause break the heavy hush that had settled at the end of Luigi Nono's 'La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura'. Likely, half the audience didn't know the piece had finished, or only half-suspected as such, given that their eyes were shut in contemplative concentration (the heavier breathing that accompanies such poses a curious sonic side-effect which, in its own way, took on the irritant status usually occupied by the cough). My eyes were shut too, for most of the piece – though the theatrical dimension, in which the soloist moves between six music stands, each laden with a large sheet of folded manuscript paper inscribed with hand-written notation, notes and indicators sometimes scribbled and highlighted in apparent incompletion, demanded at least a little over-the-shoulder peak, now and then (heads craning and turning almost in the manner of school-children taking a look at the fascinating events occurring outside the window, when they know they should be facing the front of the class (in this case, the lit stage, with its central music stand and row of eight speakers, all turned to face the wall)). That slightly awkward dynamic is perhaps not what Nono had in mind – his description of the piece as “a madrigal for many travellers” – the generation of a group identity through multi-tracked singularity – suggests a kind of communality that, in practice, is perhaps not usually found in the concert hall; though it is also, of course, about ghost dialogue and schizophrenic uncertainty and all the rest of that uncomfortable stuff (something dealt with more explicitly in Boulez’s ‘Dialogue de l’ombre Double’), and, given this, that awkwardness might to some extent be intentionally built into the piece. Well, OK, but ‘intention’ is not really a word I like to use; I feel myself falling back into the terminology of the controlling composer almost as soon as I write about a more traditionally-composed work, it seems, and I would want to resist that urge. So, intention is less important than the actual experience of the work in performance, and it seems to me that ‘La Lontananza’s theatricality is somewhat limited, perhaps claiming more for itself, in terms of spatial experimentation, than it actually delivers: despite the distributed speakers and music stands, despite the play between live and recorded sound (partially controlled by whoever is at the mixing desk on the night, as active performer in themselves), we are still in a controlled situation, being delivered a composition – as opposed to, say, the more fluid shared dynamic of post-Cageian silences, or the rebarbatively chummy, dialogic intimacy of gnarly pub-improv. Not that listening to fluid jazz improvisation is necessarily different (though the sense of communal participation, shouted encouragement, etc, before it turned into the stale cliché of applause at the end of every solo, or on the occasion of every segue into banal riff-playing or tune-quoting, has perhaps been lost in the enshrinement of jazz as museum piece cultural exhibit, Lincoln Centre et al) – I think the problem, though, is that Nono’s piece gestures towards a kind of potentially participatory theatricality (participatory in the sense that it least causes the audience some discomforted engagement, even if it doesn’t ask them to volunteer or make their own sounds or anything that crude), without really ever doing more than making that slight gesture, a suggestion that doesn’t gestate or develop a into fully-blown realization. Then again, the whole thing seems to me almost a work in progress, despite its length (probably near on an hour, though I didn’t check the timings precisely). I don’t mean this in a derogatory way – it is, in fact, what opens it up beyond the pitfalls I’ve been outlining, what constitutes its fascination through failure, or through the risk of failure. Nono prepared the written part hastily, in time for the work's premiere (it had been commissioned by Gidon Kremer), withdrawing it to work and re-work on it after, and perhaps, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson suggests leaving it still essentially incomplete on his death a year later. Through its rather higgledy-piggledly pre-recorded tape element, it becomes a work that draws attention to the material circumstances of its construction, to the labour involved in its production (here, no doubt, Nono's Marxism coming into play) – no effortless technical ease, no glossy product removed from the roots of its making, but a fragile and sometimes rambling working through of the ghosts of technique, the particular stylings of a musician's playing personality (I can't help hearing the sawed raw lunges that spring up at various points as very Kremer-esque), a move from a nervous if-not-busyness, then un-quiet, restless flitting, to the work's still heart, a mesmerising quietude in which the tape part almost disappears, or so meshes into the live playing as to become absorbed into it, the motion of bow on strong as reminiscent of breath, whisper hush only brushed, feather-dusted or delicately tinged with pitch, timbre taking centre stage in a way that I can't now help but hear through the prism of the improvised music that followed - viz. Angharad Davies, maybe even certain elements of Wandelweiser – the sound of an instrument moving away from its history into a blended otherness of extended technique and extremes of quietude and register. But, unlike that kind of 'reductionism' (the label itself reductive), Nono is very much concerned with paying explicit homage to the instrument's history (of course, I'm not saying that the improvisers aren't aware of this - see, for instance Seymour Wright's comments on his practice as an engagement with the entire history of the saxophone, his dedications to such figures as Jimmy Lyons, Pepper Adams, Steve Lacy, etc - all of whom sound, on the surface, a million miles away from his deconstructed instrument - just that, in 'classical music' as opposed to 'free improvisation', the goal of making audible historical reference as theoretical and practical engagement may be higher on the list of priorities). OK, this is, after all, a piece whose title combines the notion of idealized nostalgic past with that of a utopic future, so history, of whatever kind, has to be in there – even if that history comes through more as a slightly jumble of manipulated studio documentation (the occasional sound of an Italian-accented voice, presumably the composer's own; various incidentals bangs and crashes, probably relating to opening and closing doors, etc; what sounds like the violinist going through various techniques in a way they might in order to demonstrate to the composer the resources the instrumental composer might deploy in their piece) than as, say, the extended bricolage of quotation, re-framing, re-working that we find in certain works of Berio and of Lachenmann. I do wonder about how structurally successful the work, ultimately, is – hearing that middle section, and making the connection, explicitly in my mind, at that point, to A. Davies, I wondered if I would prefer not to have heard a live improvisation in which that material would have been developed for perhaps twice the length of time: there were moments when it felt as if so much stuff had been gathered that it was thrown together somewhat willy-nilly (OK, I realize this is exactly the criticism most non-initiates make of improv); and while this had the effect, of say, jolting one out of reverie or trance through a sudden burst of taped noise or one of those afore-mentioned Kramer-esque bursts, it also seemed to come and go without the structural precision or concentration that one might find in the work of, say, Feldman (where detail, in itself scrupulously notated and worked out, is experienced by the listener as part of overall shape, slow change, slow, as barely-noticed pulse slip (as opposed to the more obvious syncing in and out of Steve Reich's phase patterns), not necessarily 'going somewhere' (the progress narrative of climax, development, recapitulation, etc), but working with and through material in an organically organized tightness). This was, it must be admitted, my first experience of the piece, and I'm no Nono expert; I would say, though, that 'Non Consumiamo Marx', an electronic piece using recordings of chants and slogans from May 68, along with woozy electronics, suffers the same meandering quality, tho' as fever-dream reminiscence I suppose it works well – I'm just not sure it was really intended to have that quality, more to be a report from the barricades, political noise music, the avant-garde at the front of the street battle. Orazbayeva's careful and rather whimsical pacing between the music-stand stations, as if a parody of tip-toe walking, did heighten, though, the element of fragility which what I've called, perhaps unfairly, the piece’s directionlessness does engender: her walking well-suited the work’s own processual movement, its structural disappearances into itself, only to emerge with sudden asserted re-appearances, perhaps over-asserted in a desperate attempt to make a grand flourish, a definitive statement which is, however, never completed, fading back into indefinite temporality, into indefinition, incompletion, perhaps experienced as failure (the fall of Communism, prefigured a few months before its occasion by the work), perhaps as the necessary flux of the world and of its history as non-schematized potentiality.

Enough, now, of this garbled verbiage garbage! Those, anyway, are the thoughts the Nono prompted – and I’d like to look further into it, time permitting – but there was a first half, albeit a brief one, so I’ll just briefly sketch that out before I call it a night. We were promised another work for violin and electronics, this time a premiere, by the composer Martin Matalon, but that had disappeared from the programme on the night, to be replaced by a couple of quickies from Lachenmann and Feldman, along with the advertised ‘Anthèmes I’, a Boulez soupcon). The Lachenmann ‘Toccatina’, in its complete avoidance of the rhetorical flourishes of the violin repertoire that even Nono fairly frequency referenced, felt nicely-focussed and serious in its intent – though, as with other Lachenmann pieces, I felt its workings-through of non-standard techniques to be still a little, I don’t know, schematic and repetitive, still too tied to certain tenets of classical form. This is, in fact, the criticism Radu Malfatti makes of HL in his Paris Translantic Interview, which I re-read a couple of day’s ago, so perhaps I’m being unduly influenced; what I will say is that the upwards and downwards movement of the initial string-striking (with base of bow) may have over-stretched its welcome, but the final minute or so, in which the violinist bows a different part of the instrument’s body in turn, sounded wonderful. (There’s a piece by James Saunders which takes that sound of bowed wood as its only source, and I didn’t find that too inspiring at the time, but I may be tempted to listen to that again after hearing Lachnemann’s more limited use of the same technique.) Orazbayeva, a refreshingly un-showy, focussed stage presence, moved straight onto the Feldman without a break for applause (perhaps some people thought this was part of the same piece, though I doubt anyone who possesses the slightest acquaintance with either composer’s work would make that mistake): ‘For Aaron Copland’, a five-minute piece from 1981, is like a sparser version of that closing viola melody at the close of ‘Rothko Chapel’. In its unaffected sobriety – a kind of reticent mourning – it becomes quite devastating, as I listen to it on my headphones through the medium of youtube at one o’clock in the morning, the rain outside having finally stopped. In concert, I remember being disturbed by the heavy breathing of an audience neighbour, that fuss making the five minutes seem shorter than it was (something of the, ‘O, is that it already?’ vibe stirring up, which I felt a little bad about; knowing that my (dis-)appreciation of the piece was not a result of performance or composition but of a silly momentary irritation). The Boulez ‘Anthèmes’, on the other hand, seems to me a less interesting piece in itself. Looking back on my write-up of the Boulez performances at the 2010 Aldeburgh Festival, I recollect experiencing ‘Anthèmes II,’ the extended version for violin and electronics, as somewhat glib – nice surface, but nothing particularly challenging or of lasting structural interest – and in solo iteration, there’s even less to hang on to, so that the thing felt more like a catalogue of particular techniques than anything else – not as virtuoso showcase, more as little experiments Boulez had been making and decided to turn into a fully-fledged composition. The programme note described it as ‘cold’; perhaps that’s right, though my main problem was that it felt too conventional in its violin vocabulary, in a way that the Lachenmann, with its non-standard techniques, and the Feldman, with its unadorned melodic simplicity, did not, and which the Nono for the most part did not either. Good stuff, altogether, though; and nice to hear this music on programmes and in venues that better suit it than pre- or post-chestnut Proms sandwiches…

Spitting Words and Rocks: The London Education Protests, 10.11.10

Oh hello, there was a march through the centre of London yesterday, it went past the House of Parliament and along by the river. It was organised by the NUS and UCU and was protesting education cuts and said things like: “NO to scrapping the EMA / NO to the privatisation of Arts, Humanities and Social Science teaching / NO to cutting ESOL provision / NO to higher fees / NO to fees in FE for ‘adult learning’ / NO to soaring levels of debt / And YES to fairness, equity, and a properly funded state education system.” And this march was supposed to go along its route and then there would be a rally at the end and we would watch some videos and speeches projected on a big screen and then everyone would go home or to the ‘afterparty’ at LSE; and there would be around 15,000 people there, in the middle of the week, in the early afternoon. But then there were 50,000 people from Wales and Scotland and England and some 5,000 of them went to the nearby Millbank Tower and caused damage to private property, which is a mortal sin, and they were not orderly and glass was smashed and there were figures on the roof with an anarchist flag and with fists and they stood out against the blue sky.

So, the media coverage of the demo was predictable, given the way that any of the past few years’ protests and riots in Greece or France have been routinely denounced as dangerous, irresponsible, ‘against common sense’ – the work of thugs, hooligans, ‘yobbos’. In article after article we see the 5,000 protestors who gathered and merged and jostled in the courtyard of 30 Millbank, Conservative Party HQ, similarly denounced as a small ‘extremist’ element (“a minority of idiots” as the NUS president described them). These ‘evil, or at best misguided’ [by whom?!] idiot-thugs (never mind the fact that a number of people there looked delicate and fragile and might be trounced by football hooligans) ‘damage the cause’; these thugs make all reasonable people hate them because they smash a few windows and enter the hallowed sanctum of those who are pushing the low of competition and profit and the law of the market down our throats and telling us to like it and stop choking; because they threw a few eggs and rocks and because there were flares and a small fire was lit with small and delicate wisps of charred paper floating over the crowd and down on them like some sort of confetti; because someone brought out a ghetto-blaster and the crowd started nodding their heads to muffled Drum ‘N Bass and suddenly everything felt like a cross between a rave a riot and a soundtracked piece of film or theatre (a surreal revealing of the real unreality of life under the present system); because the atmosphere was that of a carnival or a party, albeit one driven by frustration and anger – and yet the overall feeling was one of exhilaration – as someone said to me afterwards, ‘I realized when I was standing in that crowd that this was the happiest I’d felt for a long tine’; because this was a piece of fucking street theatre, a performance, an action, a happening; because this was where the avant-garde and performance art met and merged with ‘popular’ culture and the mass euphoria of the crowd in a club or a music festival or a football match or a demo; and where the impulse to destruction stemmed from the same spirit as the impulse to creation and enabled it and fostered it and fuelled it; because this is where theory becomes, became feeling. ‘My education is a fist.’

The point of an action like this is that it cannot be restricted, cannot be shepherded and moved on by the march stewards or the cops, cannot be made to move on rather than sitting down in front of the Houses of Parliament, cannot be reduced to the end-point of a big-screen and speeches made on a bus parked in front of Tate Britain and videos like movie trailers with pounding orchestral music and bogey-man Nick Clegg so that the march becomes the multiplex; all the momentum of whistles and drums and chants and people standing on the roofs of bus-stops and builders on scaffolding being cheered by crowds of students and grinning back could not be made simply to dissipate and disappear, to tail and trail off back down the road into ‘normality’; that we – you – want something more and cannot suppress that longing any longer.

The chants and songs, the rhyming couplets and swearwords and plosive voice explosions that you hear on marches such as this respond to the sloganeering and slick phraseology of advertising/ political-spin-culture, where a catchphrase cons us into acceptance and lulls our thinking minds to sleep; “Ready for Change" comes up against “Tory scum, Here We Come”. We might even say that this is poetry, poetry as antagonism and response and counter-thrust. It may not be ‘good poetry’, the slogans might even ‘embarrass’ you or seem trite and child-like. Yet they are there; this is change we can believe in, or at least it is a glimpse of the change that might happen were the momentum of yesterday afternoon to continue, to build up, to be followed up.

“When we mourn violence done against buildings more than violence done against people, we have totally internalised capitalist rationality. Perhaps attacking buildings is the only way to reassert the importance of being human.”(The Third Estate)

"The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy." (Emmeline Pankhurst)

“He was in the street, not a professional context but an open framework, a social and public space where all types of different people pass by, and there he was, taking risks without being afraid of looking utterly ridiculous! It reminds me of something that happened during the recent riots in Athens, where journalists came across a gang attacking places that represented neoliberalism to make noise, using breaking glass and burglar alarms as instruments. Improvising in the city. That's so inspiring, like the Futurists, the Scratch Orchestra and Black Block joining forces in an extreme form of sonic dérive! Imagine using police sirens as your instrument! Imagine what a beautiful drone twenty of them would make! The urban space offers so many possibilities for noise production, let's use the city as our venue – we'll always have an audience!”(Mattin)

"Love is not the unswerving bias of police dogs; it has to be made from scratch at the first indication of its possibility.”

“The wall of glass smashed in, looks like what Wordsworth saw; in the flint windbreaker, lying on the empty floor; to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life; psychosis as the mirror of your dreams, or justice.”(Jow Lindsay)

Pierre Boulez at the Aldeburgh Festival

Pierre Boulez/ Ensemble Intercontemporain
Saturday, 26th June 2010

*Evening Performance*

Varèse - Octandre
Ligeti - Chamber Concerto
Elliott Carter - What are Years? (world premiere)
Pierre Boulez - Dérive 2

Ensemble Intercontemporain, cond. Pierre Boulez
Claire Booth - soprano (Carter only)

*Late Concert*

Pierre Boulez - Dialogue de l’ombre double
Pierre Boulez - Anthèmes II

Jérôme Comte - clarinet
Jeanne-Marie Conquer - violin

“The most elegant way of solving the opera problem would be to blow up the opera houses.” "All art of the past must be destroyed." It is with controversial statements such as these that Pierre Boulez will forever be associated – for some. But, as should be obvious to anyone who shares a more than cursory acquaintance with the facts of the case, a portrayal of the man that is merely based on such snippets just will not do. For instance, let’s take the case of his more recent compositional output. In a 1993 interview with Andy Carvin, Boulez outlines the notion that his late compositions form a part of the same intricate ur-text – though this implies more a microscopic, densely-detailed focussing in and absorption with a particular set of materials, than a mystically grand, over-reaching ‘great project’. "My recent music is much like a family tree - one tree spawns many other trees, and so on. Dérive I is from Repons, mostly music I left out, so I derived it from the piece, hence the name. Dérive II is based off of studies I did for Repons. Dérive III is also like that. Repons itself was my response to Poesies pour pouvoir, which I had written over twenty years earlier. As long as material from another piece is not used fully, I like to expand on it until it is exhausted. This is why they are all works-in-progress."

In relation to this, one might recall words written thirty years earlier, in ‘Sonate, Que Me Veux-Tu?’: "Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'." The late works might therefore be seen, at least in part, as a practical enactment of such theoretical concerns: there is no one big discovery, but a continual working off tiny fragments, both the ghosts of past form and texture, and the novelties of radical new material, created in the work of the Second Viennese School and Darmstadt.

Thus, despite the big, controversial statements, made in the 60s, which always seem to be brought up as a stick to beat Boulez with (irrespective, perhaps, of the actual merits of his music (and irrespective, also, of the precise content of those statements), what we have here is a complex and intensive investigation of *musical* possibilities, rather than a big, broad-brush, slap-dash, shock-value modernist act of terrorism.

Given this, it should surprise no-one that Boulez’s appearance at the 2010 Aldeburgh Festival appears far less controversial today than it might have done as recently as twenty years ago; now in his eighties, Boulez has managed to largely shed his reputation as enfant-terrible and agent-provocateur; he is probably even more renowned as a conductor than as a composer, and his works can now be taken on their own merits. Thus, the programme he performed, along with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, needed make no concessions to conventional tastes: this was a firmly modernist selection (though Varèse’s ‘Octandre’ (1923), which opened proceedings, is hardly a new piece), containing, alongside the aforementioned Varèse, Ligeti’s ‘Chamber Concerto’, an Elliott Carter premiere, and one of Boulez’s own more recent works (albeit one which, though it only reached completed form in 2006, was begun in 1988).

The Varèse and Ligeti pieces, with which the concert began, were slightly marred by an occasional sense of strain from individual players, the timing or pitch sometimes being fractionally off – especially during the fiendish, mechanically repetitive figures in the outer movements of the Ligeti. But Varèse’s utterly unique style – those simultaneous high, whistle-frequency piccolo shrieks and bottom-end trombone growls, the exquisitely constructed dissonant sharpness and timbral contrast, the ghost of fanfares, moulded through a haze –nonetheless came through very well, as did Ligeti’s almost foot-tapping, moto perpetuo, jazzy rhythms, sliding strings, and gently swaying, organ-centred drones. The Carter piece (can this man really be 102 years old?), a short cycle of Marianne Moore settings, was perhaps more conventionally structured than is normal for him – at least, in terms of texture; there was a fairly straightforward contrast between ensemble blocks and the soprano’s solo line, rather than a multiplying web of individual interactions and dramas within that ensemble, but there were some satisfying moments, such as the second movement, during which the chamber group was reduced to just cello and harp (playing some particular striking fast, high figures, right at the top range of the instrument), and a lovely final exchange in the last movement, in which a whole succession of motifs seemed to be triggered by a throw-away vibraphone phrase.

The real meat of the concert, though, came with the second half, during which just one work was performed: Boulez’s own Dérive II, one of his more recent pieces (it was completed only a few years ago), during which a constant stream of material is derived from harmonic material unfolded at the very start; this material is then expanded and expounded upon for the next hour or so. Though the sense of continuous, onward flow (there are very few moments to catch the breath), might seem to point to certain affinities with improvisation, the constant, back-and-forth references to previously-played material, the intricacy in which motifs evolve, seemingly disappearing into material which they have generated, only to return in their original form once again – this indicates a much tighter organisational logic than that allowed by improvisation. Nonetheless, perhaps the *listener* in some way has to work in an improvisational manner, to adapt to the speed with which ideas unfold, and to develop particular strategies for listening that take account both of the interaction between particular soloists and sub-groups in the ensemble, and the flow of the music as a whole, emerging from the ensemble as a whole.

Metaphorically speaking, the piece might be likened to interlacing tracery; vines, weeds wound round each-other; entwining patterns, the fantastic complexity of calligraphy. Boulez seems obsessed by relay figures, passed round from musician to musician, as well as by dividing the ensemble into mini-ensembles, united by their particular sonorities: droning, oboe-led woodwinds (reminiscent of ‘Rituel In Memoriam Bruno Maderna’), piano, vibraphone and percussion, with their metallic, chiming, gamelan-quality, and smoother, lusher strings (once more evoking memories of an earlier Boulez work – this time, the ‘Livre Pour Cordes’). In addition, the cello, sometimes lyrical, sometimes ferociously active, often seemed to be favoured as a solo instrument (though more in the sense that the material it played was independent, distinct from any particular group that was playing at the same time, than in any ‘soloistic’, concerto-like sense). There was much to savour here, both colouristically and harmonically: were it not for the near-information-overload of this virtually pause-less piece, one might be tempted to place it quite firmly within a tradition of sensuous, richly-textured French music that stretches from Debussy to Dutilleux, and even to the Spectralists. And Messiaen, Boulez’s teacher, and perhaps the ultimate exponent of this trend (so much so that he could veer towards the Hollwyood-esque; though this in no way counterbalanced his clanging, stridently percussive sensibility), seemed to crop up a few times, particularly in some melodic material for bassoon that appear about two-thirds of the way in.

One came away with the impression that ‘Dérive II’ basically says, ‘if you can’t be bothered to immediately give this music your full attention, you’ll become hopelessly lost’; in absolutely no way could this be construed as ‘background’ or ‘programme’ music, and the avoidance of melodrama, of the ‘grand gesture’ might be seen as a fundamentally anti-Romantic element. If there is any excess here, it comes through the rigorous attention to detail, through the fastidious working-through of material, rather than through conceptual over-reaching, through self-inflated, egotistical folly. And the audience on this occasion seemed to realize this, to be willing to lend their concentration to the piece; there was great applause as Boulez, who, appearing somewhat frail, supported himself by holding onto a harp, stepped down from the podium – an ovation that seemed more than merely token.

Nit-picking, one might perhaps question how much Boulez’s conducting actually influenced the performers in his own piece – so complex were the scores in front of them that they could only dart quick glances up to the front of the stage, making it unlikely that they were really responding to most of his signals. I suspect that much of the work in this regard was done in rehearsals – Boulez drilling the Ensemble, instilling in them a sense of the ebb and flow of his own piece, and remaining on stage as a reference point perhaps as much for the audience as for the players. And, to be sure, it added something to the sense of occasion to see the octogenarian up there conducting, his back to the audience, hands moving out to the side in quick, neat, precise motions that suggested he was totally in control of what was happening.

This was not the end of things, however; a portion of the audience, and Boulez himself, proceeded from the main concert hall over to the smaller, but perhaps even more attractive space of the Britten Studio: another high-ceilinged room, this time with more steeply-tiered seats (somewhat like the arrangement in a cinema), and no ‘stage’ as such – simply a large floor-space in the front of the room (which seemed even larger for this particular performance, as the works to be played were for solo instrumentalist). ‘Dialogue de l’ombre double’ made the most of the space’s theatrical possibilities; as the lights dimmed, the solo clarinettist (Jérôme Comte) almost sidled in through the side-door, and, during the piece, he made his way round six music-stands, where, as well as playing the score, he triggered electronic material via foot-pedals (this material consisting mostly of untreated fragments of the solo lines which he was playing live – reminiscences and premonitions of what had come before and what was to come), to create the ‘double shadow’ of the title. This is one of Boulez’ most immediately accessible pieces, with plenty of returning melodic material and much use of ascending and descending trills, and Comte gave a seamless and expert performance. Hearing the ‘dialogue’ on CD is one thing, but there was something very special about hearing in performance the contrast between the live, acoustic material, and the electronic playback, as well as the way that they merge, overlap, engage each-other in a kind of slow, teasing dance.

If one was basing one’s judgements simply on conceptual grounds, ‘Anthèmes’ (a piece which Boulez has subsequently re-worked for a large ensemble), might have conjured up associations with the solo violin repertoire. However, in actual fact, it lacks not only the virtuosic extravagance of Paganini, the composer most associated with such work, but the sense of starkness and unadorned emotionalism of, let’s say, Ysaye; instead, it’s often rather pretty (though by no means inanely so), the same melodic material returning again and again to create a sense of contemplative near-stasis that is, nonetheless, belied by the flowing quality of the music. Lacking the dialogic complexities of shadowing and echo present in ‘Dialogue de l’ombre’, the solo voice here seems to be *enhanced* rather than fundamentally questioned, or engaged in conversation, by the electronics: one particular figure is made to sound as if it’s being played by cross between a string section and a not-quite human choir, via the afterglow of delay effects, and the eerie breath-sound of the bow slowly sliding up the string becomes almost unnerving; while the most noticeable rhythmic effect occurs during the passages of scampering pizzicato, their entries and echoes staggered by electronic delay. In itself, though, ‘Anthèmes’ was almost as theatrical as ‘Dialogue de l’ombre’: there was something inherently dramatic about the spectacle of one person in the spotlight, triggering powerful echoes all round the auditorium, simultaneously *in* control (so acquainted with the piece that it could be played from memory) and *unable to* control the electronic shadings and imitations.

In sum, this single evening of works and performances by Boulez was as much of a success as could have been hoped, and might be construed as something of a triumph. It’s certainly a reminder of the sometimes overlooked beauties and complexities of his own compositions, as well as of his status as a titan of the modern music scene. And while one might question the way that the classical world appoints its superstars and sticks with them to the point of adulation (towards the end, Stockhausen seemed to be able to put into practice any crazy idea/whim he wanted to), one could hardly begrudge Boulez his considerable achievements over the years. This was a great coup for the Aldeburgh Festival, and a great experience for those fortunate enough to have witnessed it.

Freedom of the City Festival 2010

FREEDOM OF THE CITY 2010
Conway Hall, London, 2nd-3rd May 2010

My previous visits to the annual Freedom of the City festival have been limited to just the one, back in 2007. Back then, it was a smaller affair, held in the back room of the Red Rose pub, with a relatively modest number of artists performing. After a year’s absence, due to the termination of the Red Rose as an improv venue, it came back all the stronger in 2009, relocating to the more centrally-placed Conway Hall – a far roomier space – and attracting a number of improvisers from abroad to join the mainly British-based line-up. Organizers Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost and Trevor Brent had achieved even more of a coup this year, persuading trumpeter Leo Smith to headline both days of the festival. This was not, of course, the first time that Smith had joined with European improvisers, or, indeed, with those specifically based in England – he played in Bristol back in the 70s, and has recently teamed up with the small ‘stable’ of musicians associated with Treader, the improv label run by John Coxon and Ashley Wales (a.k.a. dance music duo Spring Heel Jack). It was in something approaching this latter configuration that he closed the festival, holding his own in a noisy quintet featuring Coxon on guitar and the priceless Pat Thomas on piano and electronics; but perhaps the finest moments of the whole weekend occurred during his performances on the first day, playing an electrifying improvised concerto with the London Improvisers Orchestra, then engaging with the double-drum duo of Steve Noble and Louis Moholo-Moholo in an ecstatically-received set that, at its best, was perhaps as fine as improvised music gets.

But this was by no means all that the festival had to offer. I’ve opted, on the whole, for a blow-by-blow account of the various different set-ups, though it would probably be unfair to set down detailed analysis of performances which I did not find wholly satisfying, for one reason or another. Consequently, I’m not going to review every act. During such a packed schedule (well over ten hours in total), attention can wander, and dissatisfactions which may have very little or nothing to do with the music as such can intrude on critical facilities. I might perhaps make the criticism that the presentation was uniform: one group set up and play, people clap, there’s an announcement and a short break, then another group set up and play, people clap, etc. This may be due to my ongoing dissatisfactions with the concert presentation of free improvisation, which I feel could be (needs to be) shaken up in some way – otherwise we approach the deadened sterility of the classical concert hall, against which the vitality of both jazz and free improvisation can set themselves in their finest moments. Perhaps there’s no way round the sense of déjà-vu, the almost by-rote effect of so many performers coming up on stage in succession; festival fatigue is the inevitable drawback of bringing so many musicians into the same space, on the same occasion. And of course I’d rather hear eight groups in a respectful atmosphere and a conducive setting, than two groups in a dingy pub. In any case, FOTC remains pretty much a unique event in the British improv scene, and needs all the support it can get, given well-documented difficulties in securing funding and cultural acceptance in the UK (surely, as Evan Parker opined in one of his microphone ‘rants’ between acts, something like this deserves a mention in Time Out).

DAY ONE

Before getting onto the music, it might be worthwhile offering some preliminary notes on the venue. The Conway Hall is a fairly large space, and attendance must have reached 100 or so on the Sunday, the better-attended of the two days; it never dwindled down to less than 50. The décor is a little quaint (my eyes kept flicking to the motto inscribed over the stage: “to thine own self be true”), exhibiting a kind of early twentieth-century liberal ethos (one of the rooms in the building is named after Bertrand Russell, and, on further research, it turns out that the Hall was built as headquarters for the South Place Ethical Society, the oldest free-thought association in the world). The acoustic isn’t that resonant, but this probably suited players like Peter Evans and, in particular, Leo Smith, whose sound is so massive that it might become deafening elsewhere! Upper galleries and plenty of space for seats meant that there was capacity for the audience to move around, rather than having to stick to the same seat for hours at a time, while corridors outside the main stage space gave plenty of space for mingling in between acts. All a far cry from the Red Rose…

The Sunday afternoon session (lasting from 2pm until around 6) opened with a solo set from Peter Evans, who is a very fine jazz left-field jazz musician (‘The Peter Evans Quartet’, from 2007, contains a happy blend of old-fashioned melodies and chord sequences with noise-rock guitar eruptions); he is also, as this performance indicated, an exceptional free improviser. Though based in New York, he has released a solo record on Martin Davidson’s Emanem and worked with that label’s stalwart, Evan Parker. Nonetheless, it seemed that not everyone in attendance was familiar with his work, and they were pleasantly surprised by what transpired. The performance split into roughly two halves, though it was a continuous forty-minute set: the first half found the trumpeter concentrating on circular breathing, amplifying breath noises through a volume pedal, extending the possibilities of the instrument with the use of subtle electronics as John Butcher has done with the saxophone. The second half, in which Evans switched to cornet, was mostly acoustic, with more ‘notes’ in play: jazzy inflections combined with repeated, almost brash minimalist phrases (like tougher versions of John Adams’ fanfares). The latter were perhaps rather over-done (there could have been more of the textural investigations with which Evans began), but they were certainly impressive in a technical sense.


Peter Evans: Photo by C. Neil Scott

Cellist Okkyung Lee, like Evans, had travelled over from New York to play here; on this evidence, she struck me as a somewhat limited player, especially having seen Hannah Marshall’s superb duo with Mick Beck at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival the preceding Friday. I don’t doubt her technical skill, and it’s clearly unfair to definitively label any musician on the result of one performance; however, the duo with Lytton didn’t really come off. Lee tended to bow with one hand while sliding the other up and down the strings, without pressing down onto the fingerboard. The cello can do more than this: use of the instrument’s body, plucking, and even melodic phrases. Lee’s approach worked as generalized atmosphere in the later trio with Evans and Evan Parker, but she seemed crowded out by Lytton, unable to fully respond to his energetic twitching round Dalek drums, and an encore, which might have provided the chance to find another angle on things, never really took off either.

By contrast, Lol Coxhill, Tania Chen and Dominic Lash demonstrated a clear mutual understanding from the git-go. Coxhill, as ever, was tartly melodic, spinning out flowing lines or thinning out his sound to almost nothing in breathy textural complement to Lash’s multi-hued bass and Chen’s rumbling on the lower reaches of the Bosendorfer. The music had a kind of jazz aura to it, but never through overt referentiality, and Chen’s sound could be said to owe as much to contemporary classical as to jazz. She left plenty of gaps so that her phrases acquired a certain weight around them, but the music wasn’t heavy or sluggish – rather, it had a substantial delicacy to it that, in a way, harkened back to Jimmy Giuffre’s groups of the early 60s.

The afternoon seemed to have been constructed, whether by design or accident, in a kind of ascending approach: from solo to duo to trio, and then to a full-blown big band, as the London Improvisers Orchestra took to the stage and beyond, sprawling out onto the floor below. Two hours might have seemed like overkill, given the usual chaotic nature of such large groupings, and the tendency to resort to conduction clichés in order to tame the unruly beast. In fact, though, the performance remained at a high standard throughout, the various conductors picking out particular players and groups of instruments and letting them do their thing for extended periods, rather than cutting them short before they’d had a chance to develop something. Choice combinations included the two-piano interplay of Steve Beresford and Veryan Weston, placed on either side of the stage, and the raucous trombones of Alan Tomlinson and Robin Jarvis. It all built up to the big climax, a short concerto for the festival’s ‘star performer’ Wadada Leo Smith, Dave Tucker stepping out of the orchestra ranks, where he’d been grinding out fierce swirls of sound from his guitar, to conduct. Any doubts as to whether Smith would be audible over the orchestra were soon dispelled; the question was more, would one be able hear the orchestra over his trumpet! His sound bounced off the space with a clarion force, but this wasn’t a tasteless, Maynard Ferguson display, for he played with an abundance of considered space between phrases, ending with a gorgeous muted passage over sombre, full ensemble chords. Great too to hear him sing and soar out over orchestral sections – strings, winds, horns – in passages reminiscent of the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra’s fantastic 2LP-set ‘Communications’. Louis Moholo-Moholo, in a corner with Javier Carmona (third drummer Tony Marsh was on the other side of the room) could be heard thumping with huge vigour, even when he hadn’t been cued in, as if anticipating his small-group set with Smith later on that day.

By now it was early evening, and there was, it seemed, hardly time to catch breath before proceedings resumed again. One of John Russell’s QuaQua groups – on this occasion, a septet – played mostly textural music, Chris Burn controlling his inside-piano rustlings with a volume pedal, saxophonist Stefan Keune concentrating on held, altissimo notes, and Satoko Fukada scratching away on violin (in contrast to her more classically-inflected work with Veryan Weston and Steve Beresford), though Henry Lowther plotted a more exclusively melodic course through things. The following trio was an enticing prospect: Leo Smith in an unusual pairing with two drummers, Louis Moholo and Steve Noble. There was potential here for a more overtly rhythmic approach than that we’d been hearing so far. Noble, is, of course, adaptable to pretty much any style, his undoubted improv pedigree mixed with the ability to play highly attractive rhythmic music that may or may not reference particular genres, while Moholo always brings an exuberance and enthusiasm to his playing, in whatever context. It may have taken a while for things to settle – this was, after all, a first-time musical meeting for the three men – but, by the time they’d all locked-in to each-other’s playing, they were able to create something very special indeed. Noble likes gongs and crashes and colour with bursts of on-the-beat playing; Moholo is content to stick to one aspect of his kit, or to click claves and whisper out loud to Smith, “no baby, no.” Smith puts his hand in his mouth and makes clicking, clucking noises, else crouches like the electric Miles, silhouetted black against the red back-light, surely deafening the front row with that sound...The first piece finishes on a note of perfect satisfaction, there has to be more: Smith announces music “to make the stars go to sleep,” then unfurls the most beautiful muted melodies. And it’s a melodicism that’s totally free of clichés, jazz or otherwise – a rare gift.



After such a superb set, what followed was bound to seem something of a let-down, but things went downhill quicker than expected. It has said that, in science, only the experiment that proves the hypothesis is ‘valid’, whereas in music, all experiments are valid. There are, though, occasions when things clearly just do not work, and the performance by SUM was one of these. Eddie Prévost on freebop drums, Ross Lambert on bull-headed guitar, and Seymour Wright actually producing recognisable notes from his saxophone, attempted a sort of skewed, improv look at jazz (they describe the group as a ‘total jazz trio’), but, this time at least, their playing ended up lacking the best qualities of both jazz and improv. Wright stubbornly stuck to a very small selection of notes, obsessively honking the simplest of motifs or shrieking in the extreme upper register of his instrument – free jazz with no sense of momentum, energy or intensity – while Lambert seemed unable to commit to any particular approach, sometimes throwing in jazz chords, sometimes throwing in a few Bailey-like harmonics, but, most crucially, leaving very little space in the music. Prévost came off best, manfully negotiating round the edges of bebop rhythms, but the music as a whole came across as ugly, static, stagnant – a real disappointment, given Wright’s superb, and very different, solo work, and the undoubted philosophical effort that all three players put into what they are doing. Perhaps that was the problem here: a kind of thought experiment with regards to the jazz tradition that didn’t translate into compelling music.

The final trio of Okkyung Lee, Peter Evans and Evan Parker was as expected: one felt that Evans was rather constricted by the kind of phrases Parker played, never really able to propel himself into the bold timbral investigations that had made his solo set so fascinating, while Lee was undermiked and, as in her duo with Lytton, rather pushed into the background of the music. Perhaps a circular-breathing duo, with Parker on soprano and Evans on trumpet, might have offered wider textural possibilities; on the other hand, it would have risked being even more predictable than the trio that did play. Perhaps I’m judging things by the wrong criteria, and as a technical exercise the set was impressive – but it never felt edge-of-the-seat enough for my liking. The musicians were listening to each other, but not pushing each other, not leaving the safe middle-ground which had been established from the outset.

DAY TWO

I made my way back to the Conway Hall for the second day, having marked out as potential highlights sets by John Butcher, fURT with Adam Bohman and Ute Wassermann, and the return of Wadada Leo Smith. There were noticeably less audience members than on Sunday (though one might bear in mind that the massed ranks of the London Improvisers Orchestra probably bumped up the numbers significantly when they weren’t playing); nonetheless, the turnout was respectable.

Butcher was up first, paired with Mark Sanders. Anytime he plays, something absorbing is bound to happen, such is his control of his instrument and sense of the minute detail of the unfolding soundscape, and this performance did not disappoint. Given the history of saxophone/drum duos, it was refreshing that the music here never felt like free jazz, achieving its gripping pull on the listener through clarity of ideas rather than speed of execution or the laying down of virtuosic mountains of notes. Butcher opened on tenor, multiphonics imbuing the saxophone with an almost glowing sound, the upper reaches tempered by the lower notes’ burnished undertones. At first he played what was not quite a full melody, but a definite motif nonetheless, carefully structuring things by twice alternating this motif with another figure, before proceeding: a kind of opening invocation, a preliminary statement, a preparation. The performance then unfolded at a pace which one could almost describe as unhurried; but that turn of phrase suggests a kind of lazy relaxation very far from the close-listening, focussed intensity displayed by both musicians. Sanders used bells, bowls, mallets, displaying an often non-linear sense of rhythm that, given the context, was entirely appropriate, working in tandem with Butcher’s smearing, hovering, overlapping frequencies and textures.

After a ten-minute tenor section containing a sustained, crescendoing trill which played with space in a similar manner to Peter Evans the day before, Butcher switched to soprano, an instrument on which he adopted a number of sonic approaches: tongued, finger-slapped, almost percussive sounds that turned the notes away from their harmonic implications, while leaving tonal possibilities within reach; supple strings of notes, which might even have had some connection to conventional soprano sax jazz-isms, but which were peppered with harmonics; and, most strikingly, whistle-frequency sounds that called out with the force of wind, full of shrill urgency and near-physical presence.

The changeable weather outside came peeping through the partially-covered glass roof, the sun’s appearances and disappearances behind clouds seeming at times to mirror Butchers’ and Sanders’ alternations, entrances, and exits – as if in some subliminal or more overtly conscious way environmental conditions outside the building had influenced the performance (or maybe, thinking mystically, the improvisations influenced the weather!). That doesn’t mean that the performance was reduced to the merely imitative or illustrative modes of Romantic classical music, for improvisation’s concentration is on sound as sound, and on human interaction with instruments and with other humans playing them (rather than the translation into music of a lone composers’ inner feelings on seeing a landscape). Yet Butcher and Sanders did create a kind of tone poem, if we take that phrase up on its poetic implications, rather than as musical terminology: obliquely echoing, returning, departing, unfolding within a structure that seemed almost to create itself, participating in its own making rather than forcing more mobile elements into a restrictive, pre-existent mould. Their dialogue was respectful but not ‘polite’ : ‘solos’ , individual statements, were not look-at-me virtuoso displays arising from a false structural obligation, but appropriate opportunities for particular sonorities to be explored, new directions to emerge. One of the best performances of the festival.

A group who’d assembled at Eddie Prévost’s workshop were next to take the stage. These were not, in fact, some of its better-known participants – Prévost was the only musician on stage that I’d seen or heard of previously – but they appeared to share a dogged determination to avoid the timbral clichés associated with their respective instruments. Whereas Prévost was in ‘out jazz’ mode the previous day, here he was functioning as percussionist rather than drummer. Indeed, he could barely be called a percussionist as such, spending almost the entire set bowing a gong to produce ringing, sonorously eerie tones; his snare, the sole survivor of his drum kit, remained unused except when he unfastened it, turned it upside down and used the faint wash of its sympathetic vibrations to feather another bowed metal surface he’d placed atop it. The group’s performance refused the sort of structure that was clearly in play even in Butcher’s radical re-examination of the possibilities of his instrument (though baritone saxophonist Dave O’Connor was surely influenced by Butcher at least in part; in fact, his playing was even more stripped down to the essentials of breath and tongue and flesh on metal, in and through air). Instead, there was very little linear movement through and towards narrative or signposted ‘event’, even if there was an almost continuous succession of sounds, with little actual silence. Though overt ‘interaction’ was avoided (in the sort of call and response, mimicking-of-each-other’s lines approach that comes more out of jazz), the music was still about exchange: Jennifer Allum seemed to play her violin more as tapped, scratched percussion than as a stringed instrument, while Prévost played his ‘percussion’ like a droning string. Grundik Kasyansky’s electronics were the loudest element in the mix, but sudden bursts of noise, indicative of the approach he could have taken, were held back for the most part, emerging as sporadic spasms and muffled radio string music. A pebble dropped off the edge of the stage after an age during which he held it poised in the air imparted a rather desultory moment of ‘drama’; the players’ stillness and tight-lipped expressions have become de rigueur for such music-making, it seems, and there is at times a slight feeling of stasis, the lack of a certain momentum. By this I don’t mean momentum in the overt free jazz sense, which is irrelevant here, but I do feel that the music can become poised rather uneasily between quietude and something more wrenchingly physical. Perhaps such music is not best suited to the concert environment, more to a small, private (workshop) space, where there’s less pressure for something to ‘happen’. And the aim of such art is not to create a ‘work’ but to be part of a continuing dialogue, the continuing exploration of sound for which Prévost’s workshop has become such an essential part.

The following set was billed as fURT with Ute Wassermann and Adam Bohman – an enticing prospect, given fURT’s wrenching, sped-up electronics, Bohman’s maverick table-top assemblage of crunchy junk and resonant bowed glass, and Wassermann’s ‘birdtalking’ (neither quite like speech nor quite like traditional ‘singing’, the latter is a truly expressive use of the voice, retaining its ‘otherness’ from man-made instruments, but with a versatility more generally associated with instruments than with the pure power of the lungs). In the event, Richard Barrett wasn’t able to make the gig, and was replaced by Paul Obemayer’s band-mate from Bark!, the drummer Phil Marks. Ironically, the drum-set didn’t have quite the same percussiveness the extra electronics would have provided – the sounds are more conventional, less abrasive – though Marks did have an infectious kid-on-a-candy-rush energy which fitted well with the music’s jagged sound-worlds and scampering, flittering, manic intensity.

On this second day, much of the afternoon session (and indeed the evening as well) was dominated by inside-piano players: we had three or four pianists all ‘working to extend the parameters of the instrument’ (Sebastian Lexer is always billed as ‘piano+’), in a manner documented by a recent series on the Another Timbre record label. Yet what resulted seemed to be that they all used the same bag of tricks, seduced by the growling, very lowest notes of the Bosendorfer (so low they have a kind of electronic, clanging sound to them, which must surely have been attractive to players interested in the interplay between acoustic and electric sounds), and by the harmonious, high-pitched hum of e-bows held over piano strings (which tend to create a rather deadening ambient cloud that sets the direction for several minutes at least, rendering interaction and change less easy to facilitate, and the texture as a whole more predictable, if superficially quite attractive). To play notes or even phrases on the keyboard itself would have seemed moreunconventional in such a context. Lexer probably had the best of it, his bell-like tones and occasional, vaguely Feldmanesque chords, modulated with a faint touch of lingering electronic echo, slotting quite nicely with Jamie Coleman’s inward trumpet, which, though always on the verge of melancholy, never wallowed in it or meandered through a generalised ‘blueness’. Meanwhile, electronics man Pascal Battus both functioned as percussionist (banging his hands on a mic’d-up table to create a propulsive crescendo, and amplifying his own neck pulse via contact mic, for example) and filled the more expected role of noise-maker/scrabbling texturalist. I do have some reservations about the (over)use of contact mics by electronic practitioners – it gives an edge to its amplified sounds which can become rather wearing – but Battus mostly steered clear of cliché.

The Stellari String Quartet (Philipp Waschmann/ Charlotte Hug/ Marcio Mattios/ John Edwards) were very fine, as expected. Interesting to note this group alongside another all-string ensemble featuring Waschmann, the Oxford-based quintet Squint, who I also heard at a recent gig; both set-ups obviously have a strong textural similarity with contemporary classical music, with the Stellaris perhaps less inclined to linger over melodic sections, more inclined to spark simultaneous firing-on-all-cylinders from each musician. Edwards forsook his more usual snapping, roaring hardman free jazz role (at which he excels) for sympathetic bowing alongside Mattos (whose approach I found much more nuanced and varied than that of Okkyung Lee); Hug, the group’s founder, seemed to favour sustained playing of all the viola’s strings at once, using a specially-developed bow that curves over and round the instrument’s body. Waschmann, meanwhile, came out with half-melodic suggestions, reminiscent of 12-tone contours, that did not preclude insistent scrapes and glissandi; at one point, he moved the violin away from his neck and held it slightly forward from his body, furiously bowing with greater and greater ferocity as he leaned towards the other members of the group, as if attempting to force – indeed, insisting on - a collective change of direction. Textural meshes and overall cohesion did not preclude individuals suddenly launching off into new directions, even bullish ones, such as this, and the Quartet held one’s interest throughout their performance.

It was Leo Smith’s return that rounded out the evening, and once more he proceeded to play some of the best music of the night. The quintet in which he was involved mixed players from several different generations and traditions, and it wasn’t at all clear beforehand what strategies they might try and find to negotiate these: the programme notes, in their attempt to predict what might happen, tried to place Alex Ward and John Coxon as ‘post-modern’ improvisers, liable to reference any number of genres in their playing, with Smith and Pat Thomas as more connected to a tonal, American jazz tradition. (I’m not sure that description doesn’t fall victim to some kind of unconscious racial-musical stereotyping, dividing up the younger, white players from the older, black ones. In any case, attempts to draw lines between the musicians in this way will inevitably be inaccurate, race or not: for example, Thomas’ electronics are more in line with Coxon’s noisy guitar than with jazz, and his piano playing has a good deal of ‘contemporary classical’ to it.) None of these players (the fifth member of the group was Paul Lytton) are known as anything other than confident, individualistic musicians, and the results were consequently loud and raucous, as every one went for it at once, forcing each-other to a potentially dangerous level of noise from the off and barely letting up. Particularly by the rousing climax of the second piece, Ward had joined up with Smith’s trumpet to form a kind of crazy New Orleans combo, though more as part of the overall texture than as any kind of frontline (Ward’s playing also had a touch of klezmer to it, while Smith seemed intent on bringing down the walls of Jericho). Coxon’s guitar was used in all manner of different ways: turned on its back and tapped as an impromptu drum, scratched and scraped, noise-rock style, wrapped in carefully-controlled feedback, treated to ringing harmonic chords from the Bailey school, and unexpectedly, sounding out strongly melodic propositions that were quickly joined by Thomas’ piano: a fine use of neo-idiomatic texture in a way that felt genuine, arising from the music and the moment rather than from any kind of superficial ‘post-modernity’. And Lytton, of course, was right there with them all. On being informed that everyone had to be out of the building by 11, Smith fulfilled the audience’s requests for an encore by playing what may be the shortest piece ever heard at a free improv concert: “1/2 a second” in his words. One brief stab from the full ensemble and – BOOM – Freedom of the City was over for 2010. And worthwhile it was too. Bring on 2011!

Note on Youtube Footage of performances from Freedom of the City Festival 2010

Several individuals were filming and taking photographs of the event; it was also recorded for the BBC (presumably to be broadcast on the show’s more left-field jazz show, Jazz on 3, probably in excerpt form), and, we may hope that some of the performances might also make their way onto CD releases by Emanem, Matchless or Treader. The footage that’s made its way onto youtube generally has fairly decent sound quality, though the picture quality does leave something to be desired. With several different people uploading the videos they’ve taken, there’s inevitably going to be some overlap: for example, at least ten different videos of the Leo Smith sets are available. Probably the easiest way to go about things is to click on the user accounts of those who’ve uploaded the videos (for which see links below), and to work one’s way through what’s available.

* ‘shuffleboil’ – http://www.youtube.com/user/shuffleboil
* Helen Petts – http://www.youtube.com/user/helentonic
* ‘dzgast’ – http://www.youtube.com/user/dzgast