Apartment house
Anton Lukoszevieze
next year will have been running Apartment House—the ensemble—for twenty years.
While sheer longevity is not necessarily a virtue considered on its own, anyone
who is at all familiar with their performances over that time will be aware of
the tremendous stamina, control, not to mention quality, with which they have
continued to realise the music that is their specialty. Laurence Crane pointed
out in an interview[1] recently
that in a number of European countries there simply isn’t any musical output
that could be labelled ‘experimental’ in the way that certain of the
independent trends in British music can—in the sense that any Musik that could
be described ‘Neuen’, strange or what-have-you, is gobbled up and protected by
some state- or institutionally-affiliated body. Such a situation simply cannot
afford the independence of spirit encountered in Britain—though those of us on
the breadline know just how hollow that ‘independence of spirit’ can be.
What to make, then,
of Apartment House’s recent outing at Wigmore Hall? Wigmore is hardly the
pinnacle of some hypothetical musical establishment[2],
but it is a venue heavy with background administration (their programme is printed
glossy). It is also quite a big room, and as such, when full, contains quite a
lot of people. This programme—opening with Laurence Crane, and visiting works
by Mathias Spahlinger, Christopher Fox, Peter Garland, Amon Wolman, Rytis
Mazulis and George Maciunas—wasn’t particularly opaque but wasn’t an
introductory primer either. But suffice it to say the room was full.
Laurence Crane’s Sparling 2000, which opened, could be
quintessential Crane (he has reworked the same material in different instrumentations).
The clarinet humming away to itself accompanied by a string quartet issuing
simple and subtle chromatically voice-led triads. Wistful but not quaint. But
Christopher Fox’s Memento (piano and
string quartet) was however lacking in transparency in places: muddy, wallowing,
mooing sirens; and its strikingly Webernian ending does not preclude its
slightly soggy middle. And Mathias Spahlinger’s 128 Erfüllte Augenblicke—of which only a selection was
played—landed in the room with something of a thump, despite Spahlinger’s
amazing craft and the ensemble’s subtle dexterity and skill in presentation.
What was going on?
This was a programme whose character was discernable arguably only if one knew
the subtle contexts for many of the musical statements being made—Christopher
Fox’s other piece, blank, is a
studied essay in austerity; white chalk lines drawn on an ashen background. If
one understood the context for this kind of musical statement, then one could
understand its force—but these pieces, when put together, did not shout their
aesthetic priorities at you as so much other contemporary music does; neither
did they whisper for rhetorical effect; rather they talked somewhat straightly.
They relied on a certain willingness to give benefit of the doubt; this was
acquired-taste-music.
(Amon Wolman’s
bizarre Dead End, for clarinet and
toys, sailed past this auditor. An overlong and wandering clarinet solo was
accompanied by a series of wailing and whining emergency-service children’s
toys, hurrying around the stage in their tiny way, whilst Andrew Sparling did a
commensurate job of continuing with the clarinet music regardless, gradually
turning off each toy until, after some twenty minutes, we were left with
silence. Laughter, sometimes forced laughter, seat-shifting and
head-scratching, and not a tremendous amount of listening. On my part I was
wondering whether the piece—composed as it was by an Israeli composer, clarinet
material referencing klezmer, including as it did curiously godlike
intervention by big people directing constantly whirring emergency service
vehicles who themselves kept bashing into artificially created barriers—had
anything to say about Israeli politics, but I digress.)
There were some
exceptions. Rytis Mazulis’s Canon
Mensurabilis, with its microtonal pulsation and unremitting exploration of the
material it begins and ends with, was a proper world within which to dwell. And
George Manciunas’ In Memoriam Adriano
Olivetti, with its fluxus-era stand-up-sit-down sillyness was testament to
the humour sedimented in much else that had proceeded it. But most of our
audience was here not, arguably, to enjoy the second performance in London of
Spahlinger’s Augenblicke in three
months (the first had been at King’s Place in late 2013[3]);
they were here for many reasons, not least to do with the fact that the Wigmore
Hall entitles a certain automatic caché through pricing and precedent, and also
(as Tim Parkinson pointed out to me) that this was a ‘new year’s resolution crowd’.
Except, as has been
pointed out previously, experimental and contemporary music can and does draw audiences,
even outside of the capital. One only had to witness the festival held last
year in Peckham multi-storey car park—5000 tickets sold out in a few days.
Those tickets were free, but they could quite easily have been priced and the
festival would still have been well attended (as many other such festivals
are). Experimental music does
demonstrably interest a wide range of people; but we who are most often
involved are used to it being, if not anti-establishment, then just simply
marginal, might find that large audiences of anyone-and-everyone are as wonderful
as they are unsettling.
[1] ‘An Hour
11’, interview with Ophir Ilzetzki, originally broadcast 09/02/2010 http://anechoicpictures.com/transmissions/hour/hour11.html
[2] Reviewing
the list of performances on Apartment House’s website this is the only time
they have yet performed there.
[3] That
concert, ‘Some Recent Silences’, 22 September 2013, King’s Place, had also been
performed by Apartment House with Lore Lixenburg, and curated by Tim
Rutherford-Johnson. It may well have been the UK (and almost certainly London)
premiere of that piece.
