Huddersfield 2009 (4/5)

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There are several pieces and performances I’ve wanted to write about from the Huddersfield festival that don’t fit under a single umbrella. This post will be a sort of catch-all for them.

Rebecca Saunders‘ disclosure, played with real sensitivity and power by MusikFabrik, was informed by a Beckett quote: “I still see, sometimes, that waning face disclosing, more and more clearly the more it entered shadow, the one I remembered.” Thinking about the piece and the quote in relation to each other helps me to understand each of them better. The focus at the opening was on the transition from the very local-level timeline for any player between not playing (add a hyphen if you like) and playing. Silence was not really a factor, nor was controlled sound. The focus was on everything between the two. The playing moved suddenly to sounds which were on the other side of the controllable playing range (beyond it), and then pulled back to a compelling violin solo, powerfully played by Juditha Haeberlin. Saunders’ vocabulary of sounds is enormous, and the form of the piece was enigmatic. I’m sure I would make something else of it on a second or third hearing. (By the way, there is a very useful, brief interview with Saunders from 2002 on the Ensemble Modern site.)

James Weeks conducted the New London Chamber Choir in a wonderful performance of Jonathan Harvey‘s The Summer Cloud’s Awakening. It was a rich piece and, at 35 minutes, a truly immersive experience. I find it difficult to talk about, but fortunately Harvey describes it well:

“Everything is based on the relationship of a brief phrase from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde to the Buddhist vision of reality. The Wagner phrase is stretched out from 12 seconds to five minutes – the ‘longing’ of the Wagnerian phrase so achingly long that it seems almost motionless.”

“The sound is chopped up at speed and flung around and above the listener, often in canonic formations. Huge clusters of sound (‘clouds’ and ‘mists’ are created from the voices and instruments. Some sounds are recorded, but many are created in real time.”

Oliver Coates‘ stage presence was quite unassuming, but his performance, both on this piece and on Saariaho’s Sept Papillons was tremendous. On the Harvey, he used a second cello with two G and two C strings, all tuned an octave down. Harvey aptly describes this as “a deep, strange, heiratic sound.” Weeks also wrote a very useful article about the piece and its preparation that was posted on the hcmf site.

Sebastian Berweck launched the first CD (Extended Piano) of the new label HCR (Huddersfield Contemporary Records) with his recital for piano and analogue electronics that included pieces by Michael Maierhof, Benjamin Lang, Thomas Wenk, Johannes Kreidler, and Enno Poppe. (The CD also includes a piece by James Saunders.) HCR is curated by CeReNeM, the Centre for Research in New Music at the University of Huddersfield. I will be following the label’s releases as well as CeReNeM’s other activities with interest. Berweck’s recital posed fundamental questions about what the piano is, and what it is that a pianist does. In his program note he speaks of “Five ways to get out of the historical straitjacket … as diverse as can be”:

Maiherhof decides to use the piano as what it is: a huge soundboard with a fake reverberation device.

Benjamin Lang decides to use the piano as what it is: an instrument that makes sound everywhere and writes a piece that barely uses the keys at all.

Johannes Kreidler extends the piano with a tape — a tape that destroys the piano rather than enhances it by bringing sounds from our daily dosage of media entertainment into the concert hall.

Thomas Wenk turns back to the analogue…. Taurus CT-600 is certainly not a piano piece. But a piece for piano player maybe?

Enno Poppe uses the pianist for what he is: someone who can play keyboards. In Arbeit (Work) Poppe uses a virtual rendition of the Hammond B3 Organ.

Each of the pieces was provocative in a different way, and Berweck played them all with real skill and commitment. You can see part of an earlier performance he did of Thomas Wenk’s TAURUS CT-600 at the opening of this youtube video, and part of one of Maierhof’s splitting pieces at the 3:06 mark.

A number of other sound samples are available on Berweck’s own site. I also recently came across this documentary about another piece by Johannes Kreidler that is quite interesting. Kreidler’s answer to the objecting audience member is so articulate that I think he may have been planted there. But in any case, it’s a piece that asks some very cutting questions.

There was tremendous energy in both Matthew Shlomowitz‘s Theme Street Parade and its performance by the Quatuor Diotima. Shlomowitz chose not to write a program note, but in an interview about the piece he said that “The basic premise is a formalistic treatment of vernacular material.” I enjoyed my own shifting reaction to the piece. In a festival situation in particular (when so much music is presented) it’s easy to start making an assessment about a piece from its opening moments. This opening was so straight-forward and conventional that I was puzzled. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to do. Then the musical materials were broken apart horizontally and vertically, repeated, examined, distorted. After the violist’s string broke a few minutes into the piece, we got another chance to hear how the material was toyed with. Shlomowitz speaks about “taking very familiar musical themes and doing unexpected things with them…. It’s that pulling-the-rug-out thing that I’m interested in.” The actual material used was quite short. Shlomowitz loops back on it to an extreme point, raising questions about what repetition is and what it does. This piece will be broadcast on BBC’s Hear and Now on January 9th and will be available for the week following. It’s really vibrant and packed with innovation–well worth a listen. In the meantime, I’ll post one more video: a performance by Parkinson-Saunders of one of Shlomowitz’s Letter Pieces. They are all quite interesting, but I’m attached to this one since I was one of the members of the audience that bust up laughing at a performance of it at Listen/Space in New York. How they carry it off in such a deadpan performance is beyond me.

Huddersfield 2009 (3/5) — questions of intention

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I had a general idea of which pieces I would talk about in this next post, but I found it unusually difficult and interesting to figure out a method to my grouping. First I thought I would refer to silence. Then I realized that is really not applicable to all the music I want to talk about. Then I defaulted to American experimental work. But this whole blog is about experimental music, so that’s a given, and national divisions are seeming less and less relevant to me. It may seem ironic, and it’s certainly not a coincidence, that it was a relatively short time after discovering the American music that interests me the most that I started traveling to European festivals. Once I found the locus point of my interest and honed in on the reasons for it, everything around it became interesting for how it did or did not connect to that particular intersection. And as I mentioned in the Huddersfield 2009 (1/5) post, the relationships between these works are multi-dimensional. And easily answered questions like “Where was the composer born?” become much less interesting than “What questions is the piece asking?” I finally realized that all of these pieces are asking questions around the overall topic of intentionality.

Richard Glover’s Gradual Music (played by MusikFabrik on November 28th) has, in Glover’s words, an “uncontrolled surface layer.” The shifts in the sound are subtle, but they occur within a process that is so clear and unobtrusive that the ear is drawn to those subtleties and seeks them out. It is a piece that invites the listener to hear the interactions between the sounds more than the sounds themselves. Though it is otherwise a very different sort of piece, Anthony Braxton did something related to that with his continual use of the sustain pedal in Composition No. 32 for solo piano (played with great involvement and endurance by Geneviève Fouccroulle, who recently released a box set of Braxton’s Piano Music 1968-2000). The pages can be arranged in any order by the pianist. The pedal acts as a kind of watercolor wash over them, connecting the harmonic worlds of each page and in that way imposing a relationship between them that may or may not exist otherwise.

On Tuesday, Philip Thomas did a concert called Small Preludes, Aytoods and other new music from America. Joe Kudirka’s fidelity was the result of a single intention. There was no process. There was no chance operation. There was not even (to my perception) an attempt to direct the listener to differences in surface detail. The whole piece sat on one thing [a chord played at regular intervals] for its entire duration of six minutes. I’m not sure if it would have been a different piece if it were much, much longer. In his program note, he writes, “The line itself … exists in only one dimension – as limited as a thing may be, but also potentially infinite – as long as one wishes to measure; as long as one wishes to uphold this fidelity. In this way, the line is always new. It does not back-track. It simply progresses; unending exploration of one dimension in one direction.” This is one of the few instances in which a program note latches onto and enriches my experience of a piece even long after the fact. It doesn’t refer to the materials of the piece at all: the piano, the chord, the durations. It is purely about intention.

On the same concert was Doug Barrett’s Derivation III, which, he writes, “is part of a series in which a single piece is the result of a transcription of either a field recording, usually made on a city street corner, or a recording of another Derivation piece.” Instrument sounds are “often sparse and easily overtaken by the environment in which they are performed.” The focus is on a different time and place, but there is an intentional transparency to the circumstance of the performance, leading to the experience of being in one place and another, one time and another–and probably more present in both than usual. It is an overlay of the intentional reproduction of past, unintentional sounds with raw, present, unintentional sounds.

Michael Pisaro’s fields have ears involves several different types of overlay. The field recording of a mountain field in (sunny, dry) Val Verde, California had an immediate, almost tangible effect on me for its contrast with what I can only remember as a gray and rainy day in Huddersfield. The 20-minute recording was cut into four five-minute segments which were rotated through the four speakers in each corner of the room. Depending on where an audience member was sitting, they would have a more focused experience of one of those recordings, while the others were still going on. These recordings each include a portion of “a kind of ascending scale” of sine tones. The piano part includes “a very soft harmonic/scalar grid” that relates to the sine tones and an interlude. I have had to rely on the program notes for a description of what went on. It has taken me some time to put my finger on the fact that the play with these various layers and levels of transparency was such that although I have a very clear and wonderful memory of my experience of the piece, I have little to no recollection of how the components of it operated and interacted. I can always look at the score later. I remember having a conversation with another composer and friend and landing on the idea that when you listen, you can be given what the piece (and the performance) has to offer. When you look at the score, you can see what you have been given. In my experience, the two activities rarely coincide.

That being said, there are two more pieces to talk about in which the construction is described in a fairly complete and very helpful way in the program notes. Pisaro’s pi was performed by Philip Thomas over the five consecutive weekdays of the festival at 11am. These performances appeared to be so self-similar that all of the micro- and macroscopic differences between them took on increased weight. The first 2,954 decimal places of pi are presented. Each digit appears within a five-second unit. Each unit of each decimal place occupies half a second, on a single pitch that remains constant for the whole piece. (There are 15 pieces in the collection.) Whatever remains of the five-second unit carries over as silence. Each piece has a different pitch and a different duration, ranging from 5 minutes to 54’10”. These performances became a kind of home base for me, a resting point–even more so than the brief time at the guest house between the last event of one day and the first of the next. I started to be alert both to how well I was listening and to how much I was hearing. Some registers of the piano were more audible than others. Some revealed small differences–what Pisaro calls “the subtle shadings of piano timbre created by minutely different patterns of repetition”–more than others. The performances all took place in the atrium of the Creative Arts Building, which offered plenty of its own sounds. Wind turbines were banging, coffee was being ground, people were (hardly ever quietly) going in and out of the building. And yet this other thing was going on in the same time and place, and there was no boundary set up between the sounds that were part of the piece and all the other sounds that were happening around it.

In A Few Silence (performed on Monday as one of the hub shorts) Doug Barrett drew in those kinds of incidental, other sounds as the actual content of the piece. For five minutes, the audience watched and listened as the six performers transcribed what they were hearing. No sounds were placed deliberately for those first five minutes. As the audience (including me) became more aware of what the performers were doing, I sensed an increased alertness, a collective keying in to whatever sounds were occurring. I think it was around the four-minute mark that someone coughed rather loudly. By then, most of the audience, as far as I could tell, knew to landmark that sound. In the second five minutes, each performer played his or her own transcription. There were points (like that cough) where their performances lined up. Most of the time they did not. I found that really wonderful. Since they were spread across the front of the room, and they were tracking sounds that had no built-in hierarchies, they each had and were performing a different listening experience. The sounding result made those differences clear. It made an enormous difference that the audience was present for both the transcribed event and the performance of it. We were very much a part of the whole experience. I’ll put one of two available performances below. You can watch the other one and download the score here.

Now I need to backtrack for a moment. Four paragraphs of this post are about pieces that were played by Philip Thomas, and I haven’t yet said anything about his playing. That’s not a coincidence: it does have something to do with him. But I mean that in the best possible way. His whole approach revolves around presenting the music as effectively as possible, and really being an advocate for it. All of the work I have talked about here is best presented as transparently and as unobtrusively as possible. Thomas made it very clear at the end of each pi performance that no applause was expected or wanted, as he gathered his music and made a very directed exit to the stairwell and up the stairs. It became clear to me by the second day that if we had applauded, it would have placed a kind of temporal boundary between the event and the non-event which was very foreign to the piece. Many of these pieces seem quite modest in their technical demands. They are not. To play them well requires tremendous sensitivity, consistency of tone, a solid mastery of time, and a clear conception of the ideas and possibilities intrinsic and extrinsic to the work. Thomas achieves all of this with a calm focus. He explains his own approach quite elegantly in this video, which is embedded on the hcmf site. I’ll include a brief quote from it and then let you see the rest for yourself.

What I’m most interested in is somehow having an experience which somehow changes me, changes my understanding, the way I relate to the world around me…. I wouldn’t want to advocate one sound or another. It’s just music that invites me in some ways to listen with fresh ears.

Huddersfield 2009 (2/5) — ELISION

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One of the big reasons that I went to the Huddersfield festival this year was to finally have the chance to see and hear the Australian ensemble, ELISION. For one thing, I’ve heard a number of compelling recordings. And then there is always this electricity that seems to attach to the idea of the group. I wanted to see and hear what they do for myself. Here’s the thing, though. That electric current is only partially explained by the skill and excitement and focus they bring to their work. And it’s not something that anyone could adequately represent in words, recordings, or videos, even if they tried. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of seeing and hearing them live. So I’ve set myself up for failure. But it’s worth trying to relay what I can about these three concerts.

What became completely clear to me during the unremittingly intense performance of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth was that this piece would not exist if it were not for ELISION, their players, and their focused commitment to music that is highly charged on every level. This reaction was at least partially confirmed (and not at all contradicted) by Barrett’s response to a question along the same lines, saying that he wrote the piece as a member of the ELISION ensemble who happened to be a composer. The few changes in personnel since the original production of the work did not alter that impression for me. There was an unmistakeable, fiery commitment to the work across the entire group. The playing was incredibly virtuosic and soloistic, but there was a clear awareness of the context of the piece. For me that was underlined by Carl Rosman’s change of roles. He was the clarinetist in the original production, but this time he conducted. He knows the work, inside and out. This concert will be broadcast on BBC3’s Hear and Now on January 23rd (and available for the week following). I’d suggest marking it down now–it’s not to be missed.

Tim O’Dwyer curated an event called For Braxton (described in this interview) in which a number of Braxton scores were overlapped with one another by subgroups of the ensemble, joined by John Butcher. There were some great moments, including Graeme Jennings’ awe-inspiring performance of O’Dwyer’s transcription of a Braxton solo for violin, and when Rich Haynes and Carl Rosman and Tim O’Dwyer all played contrabass clarinets in unison. Other members of the ensemble were looking on with huge smiles, obviously enjoying it every bit as much as the rest of the audience. I don’t expect to see a moment like that again, ever.

Daryl Buckley (the artistic director of ELISION) came out at the start of the Thursday concert to give a brief introduction and announce some changes to the program order. He went on to say that it was a concert of student and faculty works at the University of Huddersfield, “but we think it’s a lot more than that.” It absolutely was.

The concert opened with Liza Lim‘s Invisibility, for solo cello. I’m at a loss to describe the intensity of those eight minutes, though I remember them vividly. It would have been apparent even without reading the program note that the piece was “written for and dedicated to Séverine Ballon.” Ballon went far beyond meeting the substantial technical requirements of the piece and completely immersed herself in it. Lim describes the piece as part of an “ongoing investigation into the Australian Aboriginal ‘aesthetics of presence’ in which shimmering effects both reveal and hide the presence of the numinous.” It opens with the use of a serrated bow: the hair is wrapped diagonally around the wood of the bow. When the cello is played with the normal bowing motion, the string reacts according to the constantly changing position of the bow hair in relation to it. It’s a very clear example to me of an extended technique being used to advance a much bigger idea. Along similar lines, the four strings are each tuned to a different tension, also affecting the intensity of the meeting between bow and string, as Lim says, “to give an impression of forces flowing at different depths.” A second, regular bow was used after the serrated one, exploring more of the subtleties of the differing string tensions. And then Ballon used both bows simultaneously. I knew that sounds were shifting in ways that I could not hear (and in ways that I could), that things were happening that I could not understand, and that the entire experience–from the quality of the intensity to the sounding result–was unrepeatable. Knowing all that brought my senses further alive.

Tim McCormack‘s Disfix for bass clarinet, piccolo trumpet, and trombone had a very different quality of intensity, to say the least. I think of it as multiply embedded explosions. I don’t even know if that is possible, let alone accurate, but it’s how I remember it. The performances by Rich Haynes, Tristram Williams, and Benjamin Marks were hugely energetic and truly stellar. Einar Torfi Einarsson‘s Tendencies was a set of nine short pieces. He wrote, “The division in movements depicts the appearance of difference, the faulty differentiation and fragmental tendencies of perception.” I had difficulty finding enough similarity between one piece and the next to feel a real sense of difference or fragmentation.

The program included two solo pieces by Aaron Cassidy. Ben Marks played Because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking (or, Second Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). The silences in this piece grew increasingly tense as they interacted with the sounds around them. Just looking at this brief score sample, I am only partially surprised to find that the silence I see notated there is as long as 15-21 seconds. And watching the youtube video, it’s clear that others are longer. During the performance, it felt like time was awkwardly suspended for those silences. (This is coming from someone who has sat through many performed silences that are much longer than that.) The whole piece sets up these contradictions between what is sounding and the amount of physical and mental energy required towards that result. Marks holds the slide position of the next sound for the duration of the silence. Often the slide is moving but no sound is produced. The answer is always “more”–more energy, and an effect that, if not heard, is perceived otherwise. But you can watch the video and draw your own conclusions.

Tristram Williams then performed What then renders these forces visible is a strange smile (or, First Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). Though it’s part of the same set and uses many similar techniques, it’s a very different sort of event, with a wild, visceral, and overt intensity. (Watch for Williams’ own reaction to the performance as he bows.) You can see something of the level of activity in this score sample as well.

Knowing something about Bryn Harrison‘s music and about the focus of ELISION’s repertoire, I was very curious to see what meeting point they would find. You can tell from what I wrote last year about a piece by Harrison and from this post so far that I have enormous respect for both. But they seemed to me to come from very different aesthetic places. Stasis, repetition, and temporal disorientation are common in Harrison’s music. On ELISION’s “about” page is a prominent reference to its “complex, unusual and challenging aesthetics.” I like Tristram Williams‘ characterization on his own website: “ELISION has been at the pointy end of New Music Internationally now for over 20 years.” surface forms (repeating) was a wonderful meeting point (not a compromise) between Harrison and ELISION. The players were in perpetual, rapid motion for the full ten and a half minutes. The dynamic level always stayed low. There was a tremendous tension sustained throughout. And for me, part of the complete focus that it commanded was the continual asking of the question, what is it? The sound world seemed to me to be either microscopic or cosmic in its dimensions. Finally I landed on the image of a tiny nucleus controlling the action of an entire planet of water. The form of the whole is constant and unchanging, but everything within that form is constantly changing. There is a very useful interview with Harrison in the new book edited by James Saunders: The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Without quoting too extensively, these couple of sentences about his working process shed some light on the piece I heard on Thursday: “I began to see each bar almost as an area of compression, in which I could subtly contract, expand or in some way distort the rhythms. I would then overlay, combine or link material into longer chains of note values to form whole sections of music or even entire pieces.” It was awe-inspiring to watch any one of the players, but there was no way to get away from the fact for more than a moment that they were operating as a collective unit.

That is one of the interesting and really effective tensions about ELISION for me overall now, having seen and heard them perform live several times now. They are some of the best soloists in the world, and much of the writing for them (in Opening of the Mouth, for example) is highly soloistic. But they interact with one another at a fundamental level. It is not just about doing a job, or playing their part. They listen, and interact, and engage with the music in such a strong and clear way that I can hardly stop thinking about it a week later.