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| photo: Co Broerse |
It’s damn tricky being British. Or at least it can seem so if one is
present mainly (or only) in the musical world. To spell it out, our musical
culture seems at the moment to be split between, on the one hand ‘heritage’
rock acts, posh young starlets pushing out a neverending stream of
indie-tronica (with alarmingly large followings and airplay), and on the other a
world of classical music in a perpetual state of nostalgic afraidness. This of
course does not include any mention of the British avant-garde—if one can speak
of such a thing. Of course, one can, and should—but the weird thing is, given
the enormous prominence granted to British experimental visual and installation
art since the 1990s, the parallel traditions in music (i.e. those things that
occurred with and following the Scratch Orchestra) remain obscure and largely ignored.
What then, do we have? Who, exactly,
writes this experimental music? There are, to me at least, two crucial figures,
both interlinked. Both are usually forgotten about as their characters are
generous, self-effacing, violently modest. Their music does not shout about
itself. Their pieces are enigmatic—enigmas even. But they are incredibly
important for anybody coming to terms with experimental music in this country
and in general. They are John White, and Laurence Crane.[1]
I’d wanted to consider Laurence
Crane’s music for some time, but particularly since Simon Reynell and Apartment
House put out the retrospective double CD last year. Laurence’s music represented
probably my first personal experience with experimental music as such. As a percussion
student I had come across Cage (I played the First Construction in Metal, and the piece Double Music co-composed with Lou Harrison), but of course one has
to encounter music for oneself rather then just be led through it in rehearsal.
I used sometimes to have bits of piano music sent for perusal from the BMIC
(when you could do such things) after spotting it on their website; a batch one
time included some Crane pieces. In the event, I couldn’t really believe they
were complete. Triads and suspended chords, slowly moving, repeated, sustained.
Tiny shifts of voice-leading. Crochets and minims. Little melodies. Was this
it? I wasn’t sure who this person was, and more importantly how he proposed to
get away with this.
But of course Crane’s music is
completely beguiling, and, irritatingly enough to my then teenaged brain—a
busy, self-aggrandising brain, not really capable of understanding minimal
aesthetics—it stuck with me.
Crane has been at the centre of the
embarrassingly tiny world of new music in Britain for some years—though of
course, not really the centre. I’m sure there are plenty of people like the
teenaged me who feel this sort of thing doesn’t have a place, and some of these
people exert influence. It’s too close to ambient music, for starters. And it’s
too close to television music, because minimalism is everywhere there too. And
not enough happens in it. Is it incompetent? Is it boring? It’s too bare, too
direct, too slow, too ‘normal’. But then, I can think of little music less
normal than Crane.
Of course all of these things, seen
in the right light, are positive features. And if you can piss people off in
this way, and still keep your integrity (Crane is nothing but integrity—who else can hold themselves through it all with such
stoicism?), you know you’re doing something right. Crane is in some ways an
easy composer to talk about because the material he uses is archetypical—it
carries over from one work to the next. In the 1980s, he sets out the kind of
idiom within which he will work, and some of the pieces from this period remain
in some sense archetypical—this from the Kierkegaards,
a piano set of 1986.
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| mvt II from Kierkegaards, 1986 |
What do we see here?
Crane’s handwriting is crisp (an important feature of new music aesthetics in
Britain, where the musical handwriting can sometimes be as important as the notes it conveys). Its mimeographed title is almost
samizdat. The stave lines are hand drawn. The music is prosaic, it just slides
into view without much care. But it’s so slow (Michael Finnissy’s recording
assiduously emphasises this slowness). And it repeats itself so much. Again and
again. What’s going on here? The scene it paints is narrative, but only barely.
Is it an absurdist panel? But this is only a single piece, it’s not so
unsettling on its own. Is it? Two further
examples, from around the same time. From the Derridas set.
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| Selections from Derridas, 1985-6 |
Inexorably we climb to
a place of sheer oddness. But it isn’t gratuitous—Crane isn’t Zappa—and
actually, unless you pay it attention, it’ll pass you right by. It is this that
makes it uncharacteristically great, why my teenaged brain couldn’t cope with
it, and why it still unsettles. How can you take the very wallpaper our lives
are plastered with and turn it into art without really doing anything? Other
than assiduously repeating it, slowing it down—but then, only slightly.
Over the years Crane
has written quite a bit, and the pieces have gotten longer and larger. Ensemble
pieces are more common after 2000 as he received more significant commissions.
And from this date, the material is almost uniformly triadic. In earlier
pieces, like the Five Preludes for
cello and piano, we have a freer counterpoint of not-always-triadic material.
But one gets the sense that Crane has economised his approach. These are not
eclectic pieces (as he says, they are ‘one-idea pieces’).
Crane is a bit
notorious (or at least was, as I suspect most people have forgotten about this
piece) for the early ensemble set Weirdi.
Here the triadic material blasts its way fortissimo into the complacently
complacent new-music concert hall. Screaming E-flat clarinet on the seventh
degree. Shortly to be followed by sheer blank silences. And the second
selection of the set, ‘New Music Weirdo’, a gently, vaguely rocking habanera, sets
the words:
New Music Weirdo
Blue nylon trousers
New Music Weirdo
A pair of brown
glasses
New Music Weirdo
Likes Donatoni
New Music Weirdo
A strange group of
cronies
New Music Weirdo
Turns up in Brighton
New Music Weirdo
A tramp makes him
frightened
This, as it turns out,
is only the beginning – Crane goes onto tell us that, further, ‘This hall is
good / It’s made of wood / Everything sounds / Just like it should.’ (La la la
la… la la la la…) Later we meet Alexander Balenescu in Safeways, pondering the
organic broccoli and Norwegian Jarlsberg (Crane wants to tell him what a
‘wonderful vio / linist he thought he was’), before suggesting that why don’t
we ‘Get the funny police.’ Obviously the thirty-year-old Crane knew his
targets, and if one has punches to throw they oughtn’t be pulled. But the
gossip-monger in me almost wants to say ‘well, really!’
As ever with
experimental music the question arises, well, what exactly makes this music so
experimental? After all, in Crane there is no indeterminacy; there is only—merely—minimalism.
The answer of course lies in the fact that experimental music deigns not just
an approach but an affiliation; and affiliations cannot but oppose. Crane has
been picked up by the Colin Matthews-NMC cartel (such as it is) because he’s
too original to ignore,[2]
but the most prominent commissions he’s received have been, perhaps revealingly, from foreign bands. The Ives ensemble, the Maerzmusik Berliner
Festspiele, Ensemble Ereprijs, Orkest de Volharding, The Netherlands Radio Kamer Filharmonie, Cikada Ensemble. Recently, he’s been picked up by the Norwegian
ensemble Asamisimasa and their percussionist Håkon Stene. His most assiduous
advocates in the UK have been Apartment House—run by Anton Lukoszevieze, though
Lukoszevieze is Lithuanian at heart. Why don’t the Brits seem to give a shit?
(We can all speculate as to who owns the Blue Nylon Trousers)
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| Blue (nylon) sheep |
But then experimental
music has never fit comfortably within the UK classical music establishment. Ever
since the scandal that was Cardew, particularly the embarrassment of his late
Maoist phase, and his untimely murder, the whole affair has been something to
comfortably avoid. Certain things have abetted this 80s-2000s attitude in
recent years. One was the 2008 merging (and decimating) of the funding bodies
that in the end formed Sound and Music. Witness the loud squeals as paper-composers
had promptly to get into bed with all these improvisers and, worse, sound
artists. Around the same time, Café Oto started, merging and recombining as it
does so effectively the worlds of free improvisation, both acoustic and
electroacoustic varieties, minimal and avant-garde composition, noise,
avant-folk and whatever else happens to be flavourful this month. It’s no
coincidence that the launch concert for the Crane retrospective CD took place
there. By now, there has been a small resurgence of interest in Scratch music—Michael
Parsons and Hugh Shrapnel and Chris Hobbs and Michael Chant and John Tilbury
are all collaborating with younger musicians. I went to a concert a few months
ago that was almost a complete time-machine—several original Scratch members,
accompanied by younger people and members of the Vocal Constructivists, performing
some of the Nature Study Notes. The
whole thing felt uncanny and eerie, as if the 70s had never happened. Let alone
the 80s and 90s. What the hell’s going on?
Of course Laurence
Crane’s music is one such 80s-90s response to this. And it’s been there all
along. Another response was the music of Howard Skempton—an important, nay
crucial influence on Crane—as was the music of John White. White’s is perhaps
the finest and most original voice to have emerged from that 60s milieu (and
it’s too extensive to cover here—that’s for another day); but Skempton is damn
fine too, and merits some discussion.
Consider for example
some of Skempton’s late 60s-70s piano pieces—according to Crane, important
precursors for his writing he encountered whilst a student at Nottingham. Below
is the Simple Piano Piece of 1972.
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| Simple Piano Piece (1972), with analysis, and reduction. Note chromatic voice-leading patterns. |
And here are the first
few bars of the First Prelude from
September 1971.
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| First Prelude (1971), repeats added for clarity |
These pieces obviously
had a great effect on Crane, and Skempton’s originality at the time shouldn’t
be diminished. Skempton’s first important composition, Humming Song, came at a time in the late 60s when British composers
were feeling the first waves of influence from the US, where La Monte Young and
the Fluxus movement were influencing a wave of alternative responses to high
modernism. (It’s worth remembering that even Stockhausen felt this moment in
the late 60s, composing amongst other things Plus-Minus and Stimmung.)
Americans on the whole, if they felt their music wasn’t going to be ‘high’, as
the Darmstadter-allies expected it to be, felt it should at least be chic. But
it took Brits to realise that the new minimal aesthetic could be droll.
American minimalism has never been self-effacing; but British minimalism was
shot-through with this condition.
One can perhaps sense
this in how British and American composers of minimalist music approached their
voice leading. The Americans on the whole avoided like the plague remnants of
‘common practice’—perfect cadences and leading tones especially. The music,
like French impressionism, is essentially modal, without the ‘tightness’
associated with the raised leading tone. Triadic sonorities were extrapolations
of modal collections, and transitions between one triad to another involved
common-tone modal shifts. (Witness Adams’ ‘gates’ technique.) In British
minimalism—Skempton, Hobbs, Bryars, and later Nyman and Crane—it is the raised
leading-tone and chromatic voice-leading that is all important. Dominant and
tonic basses are common. The idea of a reinterpreted ‘common practice’, of folk
and classical music, is present: think of Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, or Nyman’s music for The Draughtsman’s Contract, both of
which re-set, in repetitive ways, pre-existing melodies replete with
connotations.
British minimalism
never made such a fetish of the pulse, or the arpeggio (it instead often used
more sophisticated heterophonic or layering techniques, whose origins perhaps
can be traced to the Scratch Orchestra). It was always looser; maybe even
sillier; it was more ironic; it shrugged its shoulders with greater frequency;
it did not seek to make itself out to be terribly important. It is for all
these reasons that it is usually forgotten. It never became the soundtrack to
images of city life in the way that New York (post)minimalism has. If it became
anything, it transmogrified into Brian Eno and later Nyman and the Penguin Café
Orchestra. Eventually it came full circle and now inhabits the soundtracks for
innumerable BBC4 documentaries.[3]
Minimalism, a word
that suffers as much through misapplication as it does through those dishonest
stylisms themselves, is, as one is loath to point out, better than this.
As the 2000s have
progressed, Crane’s pieces have gotten even closer to doing that thing he has
railed against—putting the material through development. But Cranian
development is not really the same as ‘normal’ development. Rather like viewing
objects from multiple angles, Crane’s pieces often return to the same material.
But in recent pieces the material comes back looking and sounding the same but nonetheless being different.
We’re not sure what to think, as it comes back.
Two recent pieces
exemplify this, and also contain curious resonances with one another. The first
is a piece for bass flute and piano and objects, Gli Anni Prog (the ‘years of prog’, the title of an Italian book
about Genesis. Given that Crane is often wont to use a very 70s-sounding
electric organ, and writes all his music on a DX7, one can understand the
resonances here.)
Gli Anni Prog performed by Manuel Zurria and Laurence Crane, 2014
With this piece, the
material (the sometimes-whole-tone-sometimes-diatonic low flute melody) comes back largely unchanged
throughout, but the feeling gets all the more strange as the piece goes on. The
piano ebow, the spoken statements. Crane can often be unsettling but it’s
rarely so abject. After seeing this piece live, I wondered just what the ‘years
of prog’ are, and what the hell the piece meant. If I’m honest (given my state
of mind at the time) I felt it amounted to a complaint about the inexorable
passing of time. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. It’s one of the most
accomplished things I’ve seen of his, and like most of his music it sticks with
you.
Hot on the heels of
this piece came Pieces About Art, a
stellar highlight of the Exaudi ‘exposure’ concert late last year. Like a few
recent pieces, this is a long-form one (the Piano
Quintet from 2011 exhibits certain structural similarities).
The piece begins with
a stark triad and begins the first movement (which to my ears feels like a long
prelude to the second movement). Slidy voice leading, slidy triadic shifts.
‘After much consideration [name redacted] has decided to refuse your request.’[4]
It all goes along very amiably until around 5mins, when we have a series of
movements towards a climax. This isn’t particularly Cranian. (But note the ending
of Gli Anni Prog, also a kind of
climax, but also a collapse.) It’s also very amusing given the tenor and bass
interjections. Shouts of ‘But luck! But luck!’; the composer’s Eureka moment, that falls
shortly back to the amiable material of the opening.
The second movement is
the heart of the piece. ‘This problem, problem, problem of writing about art.’
Given the situation outlined in the proceeding movement one is inclined to
reply ‘indeed!’ As with other vocal pieces of his (notably Some Rock Music for Alan Thomas) Crane’s sense of timing is exquisite—and
was well responded-to by the audience. Like Gli
Anni Prog, this section of the piece focuses on the odd logic of the
whole-tone scale. Fiendishly difficult to sing, it reaches from the bottom of
the bass’s register right up to the top of Juliet Fraser’s range. The
‘problem’, such as it is, requires a bottom-to-top run of it to be squeezed out
before it can even be stated, let alone tackled!
What follows is a
disquisition on the art of John Stezaker, taken from Michael Bracewell’s text
accompanying the 2011 retrospective exhibition of his work. Stezaker, in case
you’ve forgotten, is the English collagist and conceptual artist who makes
works that usually combine one or more photographs. We have a slice, and two
images joined together to make a simple more-than-the-sum-of-parts assemblage.
They are usually humorous, and sometimes rather worrying in a non-specific way.
The artistic tactic of having two things and having a slice, of having one
thing and then another thing, is eminently Cranian. Even with Crane’s voice
leading patterns, we see tiny essays in this approach.
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| John Stezaker, from Marriage series |
But Bracewell’s prose,
as it is set, rings a little ironic. To set the words (about the ‘precisely
pitched shifts of image’ etc.) Crane takes the obvious tack and has little
two-chord alternation structures. Each chord is an open fifth. Down we shift a third
and then back we go again. Everyone gets to sing a little bit. But we’re
reminded of artspeak and its complete inanity. Stezaker’s works are exciting
and odd and ambiguous—but this prose sure ain’t. And again we get the ‘problem’
material. Is there a problem, or isn’t there? (I can remember cracking up
slightly when I heard, sung entirely deadpan, the line about a ‘vertiginous and
densely atmospheric new world’. Bracewell evidently has no problem in finding
such choice locutions.)
By 12.30mins we arrive
at the ‘no problem’ section. Crane seems to have concluded along with us that apparently
there’s no problem at all. And the amiable music of the very opening seems to
have found its reconciliation. But maybe there still is a problem? But there’s
no problem! Or is there? The whole-tone material is still with us.
In the rehearsal for
this piece, a very interesting thing happened. (After having workshopped the
piece, Exaudi held an open rehearsal, with Crane.) Immediately after the ‘no
problem’ patter, we get a little slice of ‘the art of John Stezaker, the art of
John Stezaker of John Stezaker’, again sung to open fifths that shift by a
third. Crane asked James Weeks if they could sing through the proceeding few
minutes as he wanted to check something. After having done this, immediately
after arriving at this section, Crane asked the singers if they could repeat
the material (from 13.30mins) exactly 3 times. In the audience I was puzzled
but intrigued. But they try it out, and lo and behold, the release that follows
(at 13:59) was completely devastating.
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| Excpt from Pieces About Art, II, (transcription), repeated 3 times |
It’s through tiny
glimpses like this—of Crane ‘weighing’ a section of music and deciding how much
it needs, adding or subtracting—that we begin to see his technique. This is
composition at its most basic, but compelling. It is about those intangible
things, timing, balance, weight, that cannot be calibrated precisely or even
fully described; but can be felt very strongly. The amount of repetitions of
‘there is no problem in writing about art’ (14.15mins) is entirely felt, given
context. It cannot be justified rationally, it can only be sensed. But it is
completely correct.
But is there, damnit,
a problem with this art-writing business?[5]
On this point I was reminded of the Eddie Izzard routine about whether or not
Englebert Humperdinck is dead.
Is Humperdinck dead? Is there a problem with writing about art? Yes. No. Ad infinitum. It is through
this yes-no circle that Crane really shows his skill. It is through this
manoeuvre that the odd recombination effects of the Stezaker pictures are
really represented musically. Not through local patterning, but through overall
structure, weight, irony, and, damnit, a certain amount of directedness. A certain amount of development, no less! After
all we have to learn the yes, then the no, in succession, in order to finally
get the circle. And if to emphasise this circularity, right at the end, back comes the very
opening slidy voice-leading material.
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| We’ve all had conversations with children like this |
Now I should emphasise
that Cranian development doesn’t actually change
the material. The development comes merely through its placement, its
arrangement in long-term scheme, and other simple things like register, speed,
repetition, dynamics and so on. It’s a kind of development without development;
and it’s so subtle that, again, like most of his things, if you are looking the
other way it’ll go right past you.
I finish with the
recording made by Apartment House and recorded by Simon Reynell of Crane’s
wonderful 2003 piece, John White in
Berlin, one of the finest things he’s written to date. I heavily encourage you to pick up the recording on Another Timbre.
What in the end is
Crane’s music all about? I’ve avoided this question because Crane has said (see his interview in the Ashgate Companion to Experimental Music) that his music is abstract. But of course the error—or maybe even secret admission—of experimental music is that sounds are never ‘just sounds’. No matter how hard one tries, they always mean something. Given Crane’s tendency to name pieces after people—philosophers, cyclists, friends, composers, members of the Estonian parliament—one feels that Crane’s music is in some sense personable. What, he asks, is it like, being a person? What do we feel, travelling through gli anni prog?
Crane’s music, then, it seems to me, is about nothing less than the very fact of being
alive. Even the abstract pieces are replete
with this quality. It is that very being-ness, whether in the supermarket, whether pondering the organic broccoli; or
at the massage parlour; or on a walk around Copenhagen. Crane’s music is that
most curious of things—that which reflects, most quietly and inexorably, our
own peculiar condition.
Laurence Crane’s Trio for Ros and Peter will be performed alongside music by James Weeks, and a selection of
younger composers including Alex Nikiporenko, Edward Henderson, Lauren Redhead,
Nick Peters, and myself. The concert is March 14, St James Church Islington http://eightforty.co.uk/events/140315/
[1] There are a few other people too—Chris
Newman would be an important example. But he suffers from two unfortunate
conditions given the scope of this sketch: 1. living in Germany and 2. me
knowing almost nothing about his work.
[2] Though he was conspicuously missing from
the NMC songbook, the big, irritating and violently mediocre
portrait-of-the-nation box released a few years ago.
[3] Charlie Brooker’s perfect aping of BBC4
docco style with Victoria Coren’s ‘History of Corners’ is a good case in point.
Perpetuum mobile spins out almost as
a televisual reflex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrm2dj6bIU0
[4] (Though if one knows one’s stuff, given he wanted to
set a text engraved in 1968 on a metal sculpture, one can deduce who Crane had
in mind.)
[5] The line ‘you really can write about art’ reminds me
of the Gould, slightly passive-aggressive ‘So you want to write a fugue’.
