sound expanse

The coming weeks are especially rich with concerts. Here's what I know so far:

Wednesday, January 27th
Basel
Gare du Nord
For the first time in Europe:
Ben Johnston: The Demon Lover's Doubles for trumpet and microtonal piano
Paul Huebner, trumpet - Clemens Hund-Goeschel, piano

Wednesday, January 27th
New York City
The Gershwin Hotel
The ai ensemble presents a night of solo and chamber works of Feldman & Lucier.

Friday, January 29
Berlin
Ultraschall
Tristan Murail: Contes cruels (2007)
Seth Josel, E-Gitarre - Wiek Hijman, E-Gitarre
Mathias Spahlinger: akt, eine treppe herabsteigend (1997/98)
Carl Rosman, Bassklarinette - Michael Svoboda, Posaune
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Johannes Kalitzke, Leitung

Saturday, January 30
Berlin
Ultraschall
Clara Maïda: Shel(l)ter (2009), Zyklus für Ensemble und Elektronik
Ensemble L'Itinéraire, Jean Deroyer, Leitung

January 28, 29, 30
Montréal
Conservatoire de Musique de Montreal
alt:neu--Quatuor Bozzini plays Kagel, Brand, Walshe

Friday, February 5th
New York City
The Morgan Library and Museum
JACK Plays the complete Xenakis quartets

Saturday, February 6
Los Angeles
The Wulf
Music by Larry Polansky

Sunday, February 6th
Amsterdam
Muziekgebouw aan't IJ
Stockhausen + Kagel Retrospektive
MusikFabrik

Monday, February 8th
London
King's Place
Invisibility--ELISION ensemble (see the previous post and associated links)

Tuesday, February 9th-Wednesday, February 10th
New York City
Diapason Gallery
Over the course of the night that separates the 9th from the 10th of February, composer-musicians Jason Brogan, Sam Sfirri and Taylan Susam will take vigil in the relaxed, sympathetic setting of Diapason Gallery and incant the daybreak, performing pieces of their own composition and those by Wandelweiser composers such as Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro.

Saturday, February 13th
Düsseldorf
KaiserWellen, Lichtstraße 52
Performances and readings from Craig Shepard's Zu Fuss
Sandra Schimag, speaker - Antoine Beuger, flute - Jürg Frey, clarinet - Marcus Kaiser, cello - Tobias Liebezeit, percussion
In the 2005 sound project On Foot, Craig Shepard walked 250 miles across Switzerland. Every day he composed a new piece, wrote it down and performed it on the pocket trumpet at 6 p.m. All concerts took place out-of-doors in public spaces such as squares, harbors, intersections, sidewalks, and mountain-tops. The performance features pieces and readings from the book.

February 26, 27, 28
Austin
New Music Co-op at Ceremony Hall (with Greg Stuart and Michael Pisaro as guests)
Works by Pisaro, Keller, Malfatti, Weller, Hennies, Bridges, Fariss, Wolff

***

Let me know if I've missed something, and I'm likely to add it to the list. I've only included events between now and the end of February--the line has to be drawn somewhere. I have more information about most of these events, but didn't want to make the post overly long. Just send me a note if you have trouble finding any information that you need.

A number of days have gone by since my last post, and I've been hoping to write something substantial. But as it happens, some much-needed work has been keeping me very busy. If you'd like to read something like, say, an interview with a young and fascinating composer, complete with a score and sound excerpt, you could do no better than the inaugural post of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's 10 for '10 series on The Rambler. Included in that post is an interview with Evan Johnson, a complete score, and a sound excerpt from Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum), that will be performed by ELISION on February 8th at King's Place in London. Oh, and if you can make it to that concert, do. (See my earlier post for background or the rambler's recent plug for the relevant info.)

ELISION's November 20th performance of Richard Barrett's Opening of the Mouth is currently available on BBC's Hear and Now. It's the final broadcast of Huddersfield 2009, available through Saturday. Scroll directly to the 16:30 mark to start listening to the material about the piece. Following an interview with Barrett, the performance starts at 19:54.

Graham McKenzie, the director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, has made the point that he does not like to assign themes to festivals, but prefers to watch patterns emerge during the event itself. For me, one of major patterns I saw on all sorts of levels was community and dialogue--from the institutional level--between organizations like the festival and the university--to the interactions between musicians--improvisers in particular--onstage. So much is made possible when independent, forward-thinking people work together within the context of an event.

Alvin Curran has been exploring various ways of involving local communities in his pieces, from the Maritime Rites installations and performances to the community bands of Oh the Brass on the Grass, Alas. His piece, OH MAN OH MANKIND OH YEAH was called "A Community Sing," which included the Huddersfield Choral Society, the University Choir, instrumentalists from the university, and vocalise, "the Festival's new vocal group for young people." Curran writes,

The work is about singing, transforming ponderous mass into weightless matter, singing invisibly together, singing in reckless conflict and sweet harmony, singing with you... so join in at the end if you like!

The performances were all quite strong, but the kids stole the show. They were having so much fun up there on stage, and they were totally engaged in their various noisemaking activities.

Curran, along with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, is also a member of Musica Elettronica Viva, which has been in existence since 1966. As they themselves put it,

Part myth, part reality, part dream, Musica Elettronica Viva in its 23rd year continues to resist retirement and greatly enjoys its one gig a year.

In the name of the collectivity, the group abandoned both written scores and leadership and replaced them with improvisation and critical listening. Rehearsals and concerts were begun at the appropriate time by a kind of spontaneous combustion and continued until total exhaustion set in.

In a totally enjoyable conversation and Q&A session after their performance, the friendship of these three Americans expatriates in Rome was obvious. Rzewski responded at some length to one question, and Teitelbaum then said, "I completely disagree with Frederic." In their performance, they were at many times so remarkably in sync that I might have thought it was a piece that had been composed and rehearsed. But learning more about the background of the group and the (in)frequency of their performances made it clear that it wasn't. These are long-standing friendships that play out in music as well as in life. They made the point in the conversation afterwards that they have used fewer and fewer instructions as they have continued to work together.

Quite similarly (though to a very different effect), on the day of fORCH's performance, Richard Barrett said in an interview with Graham McKenzie that over the last few years,

the amount of notated material has gradually gone down until for today's performance there's very little left... this collective of people has developed its own musical personality and become its own composer, so to speak.

Barrett wrote in the program notes that "The framework ... is intended not to enclose improvisatory spontaneity, but to create a point of departure for it." The players, who that night included Phil Minton and Ute Wassermann (voices), FURT (Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, electronics), Anne La Berge (flute, electronics), John Butcher (saxophones), Aleks Kolkowski (viola, musical saw), and Rhodri Davies (harp), are overwhelmingly creative in the sounds they find and explore in their instruments. FURT plays an interesting role, sewing together, splitting apart, amplifying, distorting, and otherwise manipulating the sounds produced by the rest of the group. Their performance at the hcmf and the material I have heard on their myspace page are like nothing else. I'll hold off on writing more about the individual members' other involvements for some future entries. What they are doing is too interesting to squeeze into an already-long post.

Another partnership is crucial to all of the events that I've written about in these last five posts, as well as the many others that I did not cover, and that is the partnership between the University of Huddersfield (including CeReNeM) and the hcmf. The mutual benefit is substantial. That is not just for the obvious practical reasons of venues for the festival, exposure for the university, etc. All of that would be trivial if it were not for the fact that both the festival and the faculty and students involved with new music have a similar and complementary orientation towards... (It's dangerous to try to codify this too much, but I'll make a first stab) ... highly creative work that lies well outside of the mainstream. The students and faculty that I've had a chance to get to know have a huge diversity of interests and approaches, but they have quite a lot to say to one other. It was great to see that in the three masterclasses I attended, the nine pieces were remarkably different from one another, but Liza Lim, Jonathan Harvey, and Rebecca Saunders had really insightful things to say to the students about each of them. The programming of the whole festival was similarly vibrant, free of aesthetic branding, and rich with opportunities for thought and discussion. What more can I say? If it continues to be this strong, and on this schedule, I'll be missing many more Thanksgivings. Something really special is happening in Huddersfield.

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.

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.