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Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (21–29 Nov) and London Contemporary Music Festival (11-17 Dec)
La Monte Young via Stockhausen
In case you didn’t know, underneath Madame Tussauds there’s an enormous room full of ventilation ducts called the Ambika
gallery—which, a few weeks ago I found myself in listening to a scena from Dienstag aus Licht. Quite possibly the only bit of Licht that has been mounted in London in the past few years—aside from the Welt-parlament from Mittwoch,
which when it was done in the Albert Hall a while back appeared to be a
large and loveably psychedelic English garden party. Anyway, on stage on this
occasion were Lore Lixenberg, bedecked in Virgin Mary purple (the scene was the
Pieta), and above her flugelhornist
Marco Blaauw in a black shell suit, with ‘MICHAEL’ written up his sleeve. All underlaid
by the most wonderful, unintentionally kitschy 80s DX7-esque synth
accompaniment. I suppose it’s a shame
David Lynch never got Stockhausen to write soundtracks his films, it’ve
worked great.
Amidst this Blaauw’s flugelhorn would ski, in stock Stockhausenian fashion, between stupidly low pedal tones and stupidly high
altissimo. Karlheinz evidently liked his mountain-ranges. But it occurred to me
that there could be few other musicians who would be capable—scratch that:
allowed!—to perform both Stockhausen and La Monte Young in two different
festivals in the space of a month. From memory (naturally), in both cases. The idea that a
single musician could somehow shoulder the gargantuan weight of these ‘titans’
and their verlags is something to contemplate. Indeed, such is the weight of
Stockhausen’s verlag that one of the sound diffusion people was minded to
inform me that I was sitting on a dais two feet too high for the performance,
and would have to relocate myself in case of reproach by the Stockhausenpolizei.
One of the highlights of Huddersfield Contemporary Music
Festival a couple weeks previous had been the performance, led by Blaauw and
Ben Neill, of a section from La Monte Young’s Four Dreams of China. Namely, The
Melodic Version of the Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from
the Four Dreams of China. For all the
people who are not LMY fanboys out there, this was in fact the Fourth Dream of China, not as you might
think the Second Dream, as it is the Third Dream which is in fact the First Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown
Transformer; but despite this being the revised Melodic Version (1984) of the Fourth
Dream, this was not one of the Twelve
Subsequent Dreams of China, or as they are now called simply, The Subsequent Dreams of China.
Documentation of a recent performance of the same piece by the Theatre of Eternal Music Ensemble in Warsaw this year
The performance, which was given by the Theatre of Eternal
Music Brass Ensemble (they were playing trumpets with harmon mutes), was about
an hour of purply lit, incense-bathed droney medicine. (What is it with
purple?) Audience members were helpfully supplied with what I can only describe
as a slab of programme notes—which actually I found terribly useful, as there
are essays by Young and Ben Neill and Charles Curtis dating back to the 80s. This sort of material, I am reliably informed, is snowed
on to visitors at the Dream House in New York—though of course I’ve not been to
the Dream House and neither have I seen any Young live, along with pretty much
all of the audience.
One of the striking parts of the essay-booklet/slab is an
article by Ben Neill from 1991—‘Performance Practice as Social Sculpture’. This terming, taken from Beuys, was astute, and not only in discussion of
La Monte Young. Of him, Neill says: ‘Young insists on having his music
performed in situations where he can personally interact with the musicians
extensively during the rehearsal process, thereby asserting greater influence
over the evolution of his music’s performance practice than other composers.’
Beuys suggests that ‘social sculpture’ is a second sort of
art, not ‘the traditional art, which is unable to change anything in society’,
but rather ‘another kind of art, which is related to everybody’s needs and the
problems in society. This kind of art has to be worked out from the beginning:
it has to start from the moulding power of thought as a sculptural means.’
One could take this relatively straightforwardly as some
kind of definition of conceptualism—ie, that the art object resides greatly in
the thought-concept, as opposed to its physical manifestation. But Beuys’
words are apt, and double-sided. The ‘moulding power of thought’. Indeed, that
is what was plain to see in this performance—a group of people exercising
group-doing, group-thinking. There are rules. ‘The nature of the rules’, writes
Neill ‘is such that each performer, in addition to his/her individual
responsibility … must know what every other performer is playing at all times
and be ready to adjust accordingly to prevent proscribed combinations or
progressions’.
Most musicians tend to hide behind their professionalism
when faced with issues of this kind. Orchestral musicians, in the midst of
acres of incompetent drudgery, tend to cling to rather received (or, shall we
say, ‘philharmonic’) ideas concerning, say, ‘good violin writing’. Their
ownership over what ‘good violin writing’ is gives them the requisite
professional as well as personal ownership over ‘goodness’, as well as distance
from any incompetence or ignorant ‘badness’. Obviously what ‘good violin
writing’ is differs according to training
and taste—but it’s arguable that at least some notion of ‘good violin writing’
is always present, albeit in differing forms, whether you’re Pinchas Zuckerman,
or Irvine Arditti, or Clemens Merkel.
With La Monte Young there is (like Partch) an attempt to do
away with this. This is not ‘philharmonic’ music. There is harmony—harmony
only. There is harmony among the tones. There will be harmony amongst musicians. As Charles Curtis puts it: ‘We
endeavour to play together not as a group of twelve instruments but as a single
instrument with twelve separate resonating bodies. If we could act too as a
single interpreter, as an interpretive unity, all musicians being, as one says
“of one mind”, this would be nice.’
It’s easy to overemphasise all this—as I’m doing. It’s much
too easy to point, with the hope of deflating, Young’s rather quaint boasts
about his own significance (and in his defence, most are others’ words, and
most are arguably true), or the more religiose elements of Just Intonation. Nevertheless,
for Young, musicians aren’t really individuals. Or if they are, they don’t get
to be individuals in the way that individuals usually experience individuality.
They’re individuals in his terms. The right sort of individuals. They are to be
watched by the right sort of audience. They are to be heard by auditors
enacting the right sort of listening. This isn’t ‘ethical’ music so much music for
‘personal and moral improvement’. Young would have done well as a Victorian.
‘The first beatnik I’d ever seen’ — Henry Flynt on meeting La Monte Young in 1960
Like Stockhausen, Young’s music is there to tell us that
actually we know nothing very much about individuality. That our ideas,
whatever they might be, concerning individuality, are actually pretty shallow.
A revised notion of the individual has been uncovered and is being presented by
the author in conjunction with a universe of infinite assistance. In both
cases, the aim is not (or not only) to ‘play’ some unitary instrument, via the
performers (the performers being rather corrugated, bits of steel and social
sculpture), but to play the universe itself. The universe plays the universe. For Young and Stockhausen, the
universe of their music isn’t ‘their’ universe, it’s the universe.
Whether one gets on board with this is evidently moot. But I
would hope that one could hear and appreciate such music without being or
becoming a proselyte or apparatchik. Andrew Clements’ recent review of LCMF’s
opera night was one displaying a thoroughly card-carryingly Stockhausenian
bent. Everything else on display that evening was music of lessers—small music,
made by mortals and pussies. I do not subscribe to this position.
Jürg Frey via
Jürg Frey interviewed by Tim Parkinson
I recall someone (Christian Wolff?) once saying Wandelweiser
was at root knock-off La Monte Young. It’s Young one can perform without having
to involve oneself in the logistical and social faff of actually performing
Young. Certainly it adopts similar characteristics—extended duration, limited
means, discipline, self-control. But most Wandelweiser is different inasmuch
as it doesn’t represent an exercise in concerted thought-moulding. And while it
might interest itself in notions, previously disparaged by the classical
avant-garde, as beauty, perfection, tenderness, harmony, it’s rarely religiose.
It attempts to find ‘openings’, it is interested in the topic of ‘openness’
(even if it might not actually be especially open). It doesn’t adorn itself
with compulsorily distributed interpretive slabs of documentary essay. It is
interested in individual personhood; it is interested in friendship. In
general, while this interest may be vain or silly (especially given its
interest in other impositions), nevertheless, it is interested in modesty.
Jürg Frey—who this year was composer in residence at
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival—is, of these characteristics,
exemplary. While it is arguably impossible for any artist to actually be modest
(as Joe Kudirka pointed out to me, every composer deep down knows themselves to
be the best composer in the world), there are differences associated with the value ascribed to modesty. Modesty might
well be avoided, affording as it does the danger of becoming the modest person
who ‘has a great deal to be modest about.’ But being an Atlee (about whom this
was said), as opposed to being a Churchill (who said it) has its advantages. It
presents its own subtle and attractive methodology of social artmaking.
Graham McKenzie should be applauded for his inviting Frey to
the festival—but whenever he mentioned Frey’s music, or described it, I
wondered just what music he’d really been hearing. In particular he emphasised
timbre and ‘sound’ in Frey’s pieces—as if these were pieces that presented
exquisitely wrought sonic architecture or even sound design. This was puzzling.
Frey’s pieces are quiet, but that doesn’t make them automatically ‘about’ their
quiet timbre. Frey is interested in listening, but he’s not really interested
in sounds, in the way that most auricular people seem to be interested in
sounds, or sonic textures—exotic sounds, sounds which themselves are
delicacies. Frey isn’t primarily interested in sounds that draw attention to
themselves—and as Wandelweisery wisps of quiet have attracted more attention as
the 2000s have gone on, Frey has moved away from them. His pieces are quite
‘loud’ these days, by Wandelweiserian standards.
Frey is more interested in rather traditional things, such
as harmony, melody (or buried melody), continuity, and perhaps above all, musicianship.
He is interested in how ensembles—how people—come
to play together. His concern with verticalities (much of his music is assiduously
chordal) presents some combination of the diligence of a Helvetian collector
with a musician’s fascination with ‘togetherness’. Frey’s music is the music of
a social antiquarian. He collects chords, and collects people to play them
together.
Like Christian Wolff, Frey’s music can make a delicate
sound, but that’s not its reason for being. It is music made for musicians who
are, to put it positively, enjoying their own refined musicality. The picture
of refined musicality that it presents is one that is often studiously plain.
This differs from a more default Wandelweiserian ‘delicacy’—Wandelweiser
approaches aesthetics rather like branding, as much as in its musical substance
as its physical packaging of records and scores. This is shibui music, music for those who like plain white walls, and plain
cardboard boxes. Music in the white cube, for the white cube. It is music for
those who wish to meditate but do not hold subscriptions with the shrubbery and
incense of meditation. It is La Monte Young without the purple. But with Wolff
and Frey there is a further shrugging off of over-wrought delicacy; too much
delicacy—too much silence, too much whispering—is excessive, and this is music
which is not about excess.
Ultimately Frey’s music is not about ‘sound’, but about playing. The attempt is to try to make a
music for players which is genuinely musical, not narcissistic and not a series
of etudes. Wolff’s Exercises parrot the lingo of the etude,
but aren’t. The same is true of Frey’s WEN
series, or Circular Music pieces. The aim is to try and obtain some
‘higher’ musical that is located not in the universe but in and amongst the
players. I think Frey’s latest pieces really grasp this—a sense of play, of
discontinuity and curiosity. String
Quartet no. 3, which was premiered by the Bozzini Quartet, is thoroughly
romantic. It is a kind of completely nineteenth-century cabinet of musical
curiosities refracted through the language of the twenty-first’s white cube.
These pieces’ cardboard plainness also belies the kind of play familiar to
minor bureaucrats or lexicographers or philologists—this is music which
encapsulates the play of the pencil-pusher. String
Quartet no. 2 presents itself as a kind of ‘beautiful expanse of
delicacy’—this is how it no doubt is received by most of its listeners—but
really it is a series of chords whose continuity and dis-continuity is
constantly being played with. These tiny movements of voice-leading—or not leading—turn the piece into
something which is playing with this movement on a microscopic level, or behind
the curtain of the radiantly delicate surface.
I wondered just how much Frey’s music benefitted from all
the exposure afforded it at Huddersfield. Certainly there were intense
emotional moments. But his music is also engineered to provide respite in the
context of a usually wider programme. Rarely does Frey write concert-length
pieces; these are pieces that expect to find themselves in the company of
pieces by other composers, even using these other musics as a foil to their
different, uniquely personal organisational principles. His pieces are often of
such privacy for their performers (I felt this especially when Philip Thomas
played Frey’s piano music) that pushing them all out in a big concert feels
like showing a crowd round one’s bedroom. Frey is a composer who benefits from
audiences and performers thinking him distant, a fragile enigma. His music,
like his personality, is sometimes naïve, but also an object of fascination at
a distance. Overexposure can damage this fragility. It can come across as
bloodless, or precious, or monotonous, or boring. One needs a serving of
something indelicate, just here and there, to fully appreciate fragile
delicacy.
Other thoughts on operas: Ryan Trecartin—George Lewis—Ezra Pound
Ryan Trecartin/Lizzie Fitch — Center Jenny (2013)
Though, clearly, there’s hardly want of indelicacy.
(Actually this Christmas, watching telly for the first time in ages, I was
genuinely—genuinely—alarmed by just
how much gambling is on the box. But I digress…) At LCMF, on the same evening
mentioned above, Ryan Trecartin’s video opera Center Jenny was about as indelicate as anything could really get.
This was quite something—and while it’s watchable online, having the piece
force itself with all its shrillness into a real room certainly gives it an industrial-strength zhuzh. It’s one of the few music-theatre-video pieces I’ve
seen that owes, and acknowledges (as far as I could tell) a real debt to Robert
Ashley; the idea that one could write music theatre without knowing what Ashley
made and contributed seems a bit stupid to me.
But while Ashley’s operas could be nocturnal and sardonic,
caustic, none of them has the kind of acidic glare—and misogyny—of this piece.
In it, Trecartin (working with Lizzie Fitch) imagines a kind of hellish,
claustrophobic future dominated by, apparently, sorority girls. It is a side of
US, specifically Los Angeles culture which is familiar from TV but still
completely alien even in its naturally occurring form (or on MTV, My Sweet Sixteen, etc). To have it
presented with all dials turned up to eleven, hyperactively edited: the first
minute of exposure hits one trucklike. But as the piece progresses one sees a
more intricately constructed scenario, where characters represent archetypes—or
cut-outs—whose intersecting scenes drift and merge. These are characters who
could never have internal lives because they are projections; all are
psychologically vacant, but only as vacant as Trecartin seems to suggest all
such people are. Trecartin seems to want to present a post-capitalist dystopia
as metaphor for present totality; but in truth the piece cannot escape its own
bounds in amongst art-world snobbishness.
Trecartin owes something to Matthew Barney—another American
filmmaker who presents MTV-age dystopias, giant sexual allegories, bright
colours, dirt and shit. This piece coincided with Barney’s own River of Fundament (finished in 2013),
but one can’t help but notice the druidic, ritual circle of toilets that
surround the writhing girlies during one of their set-ups.
Trecartin is perhaps the worst sort of antifeminist—the
antifeminist who believes himself a feminist saviour; the sort who thinks he is
presenting a grand synthetic portrait of the feminine; the feminine that grows
out of the corruptions of patriarchy and whose corruptions can be exaggerated, ad absurdum, for artistic effect. But in
truth, the premise upon all this is based on a plain misogynistic
attitude—perhaps even fearful attitude—towards girls. It’s at root all still thoroughly
male-gazey—even though it admits as much with the silent extra camera-men
circling around like vultures.
Texturally, Trecartin’s work is attractive, but its misogyny I found impossible to extricate. But the piece, patronising as it is,
does not constitute a tragedy. George Lewis’ opera Afterword, presented a HCMF, truly did. This was a piece put
together on a subject of some import—the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians, the Chicago association of avant-garde and jazz musicians.
Lewis has pedigree, musically speaking—though these days, he is known
somewhat more as an academic (he literally wrote the book on the AACM). But no
matter—this would lend treatment of this important part of American music
history a certain sensitivity. Wouldn’t it?
What we were presented with was a vast—nearly
two-hour—expanse of mid-century dissonant counterpoint, with tam-tams,
snare-drum rolls, crashing exposition and crunching scenes of committee
meetings. All conducted in the most classical, warblingly established operatic
voice (the three singers were rather stunning in their ability, but what they
were being asked to sing was bafflingly terrible). There was no attempt—no
apparent attempt—at differentiation from moment to moment. Every sentence was
as apparently dramatic as every other. Characters talked to one another in
announcements and proclamations, in every scene, wherever it occurred. There
was seemingly no emotional shading, no attempt at word painting, or even
rudimentary characterisation (apart from the most crunchingly obvious—martial snare-drums
when a character announces his grandfather’s martial past).
So much had been invested in this piece—time, generosity,
resources, hopes, musicality, physical effort—and the final result was so
embarrassing, so much like a car-crash, that one’s only hope was to become
fascinated as one might with a car-crash. The whole thing was a complete mess.
What had happened here? How had someone with, apparently, great musical and
personal sensitivity managed to produce something so crude? I still don’t know—but
someone ought to appoint or chair an inquiry.
While Lewis’ opera was a surprise—not a great one—I was also
greatly surprised by hearing Ezra Pound’s opera La Testament de Villon. Pound is not someone with whom I
sympathise—and musically (according to William Carlos Williams) he was
tone-deaf. Whatever the truth of that, I find it difficult to believe after
hearing this piece. This was music which reached back to fourteenth-century
polyphony, and had an originality of form and approach which must have been
completely unknown in the early 1920s. This is music of fluidity and
continuity, of two or three bare polyphonic parts which run in parallel,
without cadence. The medievalism is rich and strange, even in a situation today
where such medieval music is more familiar. In the 1920s this must have sounded
like music from outer-space.
The 1926 original version of the piece—the most
idiosyncratic version—has been only recently edited, and this performance was
the UK premiere. The performance also sounded quite different—with a different,
reduced instrumentation—from the Hughes and De Leeuw recordings. One aria was
accompanied by violin and two double basses; most others by violin alone. A
stunning prologue for crumhorn was the opening material. Friends of mine
weren’t so keen on the piece—especially overshadowed as it was in an overlong
programme—but I think it was a significant accomplishment, and the ensemble
(led by Chris Stark) and singers should be really commended.
The revised 1931 version of the piece, recorded live by the ASKO Ensemble and Reinbert de Leeuw in 1980
HCMF was curated by
Graham McKenzie. LCMF was curated by Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Sam Mackay, Lucy
Railton and Aisha Orazbayeva. Marco Blaauw’s most recent CD is Angels, on Wergo. Jürg Frey’s String Quartet no. 3 is on Edition Wandelweiser. Frey's piano music, played by Philip Thomas, is on Another Timbre. Ryan
Trecartin is represented by Andrea Rosen. Ezra Pound’s opera was edited by
Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, recordings available on Other Minds.
