The Rambler

My hat goes off to Tim Rutherford-Johnson and The Rambler – easily one of the best new music blogs on the web – for his 2010 initiatives.

Focussed, at this point, around Invisibility, the ELISION concert at King’s Place next Monday (if you’re in London, please go – this is not to be missed), Johnson has initiated a series of composer interviews (read the one with Evan Johnson here) and round-table discussions (involving ELISION director Daryl Buckley, trombonist Ben Marks and composers Evan Johnson, Richard Barrett and Tim McCormack).

This strikes me as the perfect way of blurring the frequently- (and annoyingly-) insurmountable boundaries between the practice of ‘informal’ musical commentary and the engaging in real discourse about the meaning and purpose of what we do. TRJ has succeeded in creating a space where these discussions can take place publicly, rather than being restricted to an ivory tower or (more often) a pub.

How strange that the idea of a bunch of musicians talking to one another about music on the web should seem somehow revolutionary…

HCMF 2009

Since relocating to Europe from Australia, one of the more profound experiences I’ve had (things like Paris weddings and the constellation of transcontinental bureaucratic trivialities notwithstanding) has been the 2009 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. I’d say the boat has well and truly sailed in terms of the relevance of doing any kind of blow-by-blow account of what actually happened at the Festival, but I don’t think I can escape without saying something.

This was my first experience of a contemporary music festival that exists in such a concentrated form. All of my previous festival experiences have been of either the two-days-of-frantic-activity variety, or else the one-month-of-sporadic-activity variety. In Huddersfield, though, not only is it ten days of multiple events, but it is situated in a small town with nothing much else going on. Unlike major-city festivals such as Berlin’s Ultraschall, there is nothing else to distract you from the music-making. Additionally, the size of the town lends a social air that is, perhaps, impossible in more ‘accessible’ circumstances. For ten days, there is nothing to do but listen to and discuss the music.

The Festival has a strange physiognomy. Each year, at possibly the most stupidly climatically untoward time of year, a small (although not as small as one might expect) band of deeply committed new-music enthusiasts converges on West Yorkshire to attend it. Started by Richard Steinitz in 1978, the Festival was initially intended as a way to bring ‘culture’ to Yorkshire (and, more generally, the North of England). With little more than a shoestring budget Steinitz managed, in his twenty-three years as Festival director – through a combination of determination, sweet contacts and sheer force of personality – to bring the avant-garde’s most important luminaries (Boulez, Berio, Cage, Ligeti, Messiaen… the list goes on) to Huddersfield, quickly building it into undoubtedly the most important new music festival in the United Kingdom.

One of the more remarkable things about the experience of a Festival such as Huddersfield’s is the degree to which it reinforces the sense of this being a living tradition – a highly instanced series of performances which, by virtue of their context, interrogate a broader cultural tradition, asking questions, rather than declaring answers. Such living tradition – such dialogue – is not something that submits cheerily to ‘over-programming’. Sometimes it’s necessary to simply allow the dialogue to develop on its own, which is precisely the curatorial strategy that HCMF 2009 adopted.

One thing which stood constantly in the background was HCMF’s recently formalised relationship with the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM). While this relationship was occasionally ‘marketed’ (such as through the talk with HCMF director Graeme McKenzie, CeReNeM Director Professor Liza Lim and inaugural recipient of the CeReNeM/HCMF scholarship Lefteris Papadimitriou), generally this manifested through the subtle presence of CeReNeM composers and performers. But the relationship has deeper implications than this. It was never really explicitly stressed, but the HCMF/CeReNeM partnership imparts a sense of potential development, of continuing ramifications beyond the temporal limits of the Festival proper. CeReNeM is able to provide not only a focal point for continuing musical discourse, feeding into the Festival, but is also able to function as a kind of custodian of the HCMF’s history and legacy. This is probably most visible through the newly formed Festival archive – a massive collection of scores, concert programmes, etc donated by Steinitz – housed in the library at the University of Huddersfield.

One criticism that I was surprised to hear people make was that the Festival this year was quite mainstream, that it didn’t focus enough on new works by young composers. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really find this problematic. While Jonathan Harvey is obviously a ‘big name’, the other featured composers sit (at least slightly, and some more than others) apart from the establishment. For me, Musica Elletronica Viva was (by far) the featured item with the least relevance to this context (one concert-goer going so far as to jokingly describe it as being like Last of the summer wine). I actually quite enjoyed it, but it was the almost voyeuristic thrill of staring back through time at a performance practice and aesthetic grounded in another era, rather than the thrill of being a part of something new.

A final thought: Having only arrived recently in the Northern Hemisphere, with my sense of cultural cringe firmly intact, I was very surprised at the impact of Australian musicians at this Festival. ELISION presented three concerts – more than any other individual or ensemble, with the exception of Phillip Tomas’s daily Pisaro performances, and by halfway through the Festival their virtuosity, commitment, and sheer awesomeness was the talk of the town. Similarly, composer Liza Lim had five works performed throughout the course of the week – the same number as ‘featured’ composer James Dillon. Genevieve Lacey presented an almost wholly Australian programme of solo recorder works, and Quatuor Diotima performed the premiere of a new work by Matthew Shlomowitz. Vienna-based Australian Tamara Friebel and I presented works in a symposium with Jonathan Harvey. The stonkingly arse-kicking Köln-based ensemble MusikFabrik contains a number of Australian members. It seemed like, wherever one looked, Australian musicians were prominently placed, in the best of all possible contexts.

This phenomenon was both heart-warming and heart-rending. Most Australian artists realise that, as a nation, we punch above our weight in terms of the quality of what we produce, but it’s tragic that the cream of Australia’s remarkable crop is able to find genuine recognition on a global stage, but unfortunately has trouble paying the bills back home. Even more tragic is that this probably doesn’t come as news to anyone…


Rambler’s best concerts of 2009

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has posted his list of the five best concerts of 2009. Awesome list. Opening of the mouth was certainly about the finest thing I saw all year, too, but it’s a shame TR-J was unable to stay for ELISION’s Braxton excursion a couple of nights later.

Radio silence

I must apologise for what has been a few months of non-posting. Since my last post, the following things have happened:

1. moved to Huddersfield
2. went to Paris for 3 weeks
3. back to Huddersfield contemporary music festival
4. witnessed the invention of the poetry of the future
5. went back to Paris
6. got married
7. returned to Manchester
8. it snowed
9. threw some snowballs at H
10. broke my arm

So, as you can see, I’ve been busy (and I’m typing all of this left-handed). On the cards for the next seven days is:

1. Christmas
2. Go to London
3. Move to Berlin for the foreseeable future
4. New Year

Once all of that’s out of the way, I hope to be posting far more frequently again – there’s a lot to talk about, particularly with reference to the HCMF – but until then, have a Merry Annual Gift Day, and a Happy New Year.

Prizes

The last few weeks have seen the announcement of some of the most important prizes in Australian Contemporary Music.

Firstly, as mentioned earlier, was the Australian Classical Music Awards. A full list of winners can be found here, and it was both nice to see awards going to, in some cases, the ‘right’ people (Southern Cross Soloists, George Lentz), rather than the politically expedient people.

A method other than performance activity, though, needs to be come up with in order to determine the ‘work of the year’ prizes. For instance, it’s utterly unsurprising that the work of Lyn Williams was more performed than any other vocal work of 2008. It would be nice for all of the winners of those prizes, surely, to be able to claim that the prize had been won on merit, rather than statistics.

The second is the Ian Potter Composer Fellowships. These have, for over a decade, been one of the great bastions of composer support in this country, and provide an established composer with $80,000 over two years, and an emerging one with $20,000. This is the last year that this prize is being offered for composition (they’re moving on to an as-yet-undisclosed other artform as of 2011), and so of course every man and his dog entered (including moi, naturally…).

I was expecting to be writing here that the recipients were utterly undeserving, to rail against the triumph of mediocrity. I was prepared to attribute it to the questionable politics of the jury (cue rant about postmodernist hegemony, or some-such). Or perhaps chalk it up to karmic necessity after their having got it so absolutely right last time around.

But it turns out the prizes went to Gordon Kerry and Iain Grandage. Now, I’m not really familiar with any of Grandage’s music, although his name has been one that crops up increasingly frequently of late, and I’m sure that such a grant will allow us all a better opportunity to engage with his work. Gordon Kerry, on the other hand, is right up there, in my opinion, with a small handful of composers who are so deserving of, and yet so infrequently receive, such honours that it’s almost criminal.

The jury also made an exceptional grant of $8,000 to Damien Ricketson. Good on them.

Not bad for a jury that knows absolutely nothing about contemporary music.

(Resonate coverage to be found here).

The third is the announcement of finalists for the Paul Lowin prizes. List of finalists can found here.

It’s a great shame that Carl Vine’s Symphony No 7 looks like the most serious contender for the orchestral prize. While it’s a work that clearly demonstrates a formidable orchestral technique, and an obviously musical mind, I just kinda feel that the piece would have been more interesting had it been written by Carl Vine, rather than cobbled together out of clearly recognisable trinkets nicked, sans context, from Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams and, especially, Stravinsky (like, seriously, it could be re-branded as a concerto for Petroushka and orchestra…). Bitchy sniping aside, though, the two performances I’ve heard of it now (on radio) have been bloody good, and anybody that thinks that either WASO or ASO can’t play need to start paying closer attention…

On the other hand, the Song Cycle category has three very strong contenders indeed, and my preferences there tend more towards stylistic predilections, rather than actual opinion, and it seems a shame not to be able to recognise three such worthy candidates equally.

(Also, does anybody find it weird that the press release doesn’t mention the pieces by name?)

R.I.P. Leon Kirchner

Influential American composer Leon Kirchner has died at the age of 90.

Obituaries have appeared in the New York Times and on NewMusicBox. But more touching, I think, is Jeremy Denk’s heartfelt farewell.

Golden Fur in Sydney

Here is a really weird review by Rachel Orzech of the concert Golden Fur did for New Music Network in Sydney last weekend, containing music by Liza Lim, Kate Neal, Alvin Lucier, Jaap Blonk and Marco Fusinato. It’s weird in the sense that Orzech seems fairly confident in her assertions of what the ‘average listener’ would like to have been done differently, but doesn’t criticise the musicianship in any way whatsoever. In my experience, the ‘average listener’ at a concert of this sort of repertoire is there to, er, listen. Maybe they know what a pure wave oscillator is, and maybe they don’t, but ultimately this is utterly irrelevant to the success or otherwise of the work.

In the case of the Marco Fusinato piece, while it might be both interesting and informative to see the artworks that constitue the score, having these visible during the performance of the work would, I think, prove overly limiting in terms of how the audience is then invited to interact with the sounds themselves. The audience would effectively be encouraged to listen for a 1:1 relationship between image and sound, which is never a constructive way to listen to a performance, regardless of the work.

I don’t know. Maybe things like emphasising concert structure, or explaining how a piece works are actually important. But they can’t possibly be remotely so important as the sounds themselves. And, as I said at the start, I just find Orzech’s almost myopic focus on issues such as lack of eye contact or explanatory verbiage really… weird.

Golden Fur is something to experience with your ears and your mind. Everything else is sundry. And I wish I’d been there.

Quiver

Aaaaaaaaages ago, on the 31st of July, there was a concert at the Richmond Uniting Church given by Quiver, a newly formed contemporary music ensemble. Anthony Lyons has reviewed the concert for Resonate magazine, but it (undeservedly) completely slipped SoundisGrammar’s mind.

I don’t have too much to add to the linked review, except to say that one of the great strengths of the concert was its extreme diversity. The composers on the program are all from utterly different worlds, and rather than seeming like a disconnected mess like many such concerts are, the superb musicianship of Quiver was able to not only transcend these differences, but capitalise on them. The differences between the works were sometimes exaggerated, sometimes elided, commonalities were found, illuminated and explored, discrepancies were collided. In short, the program resulted in a sensational play of resonance between remarkably different sounding bodies.

Luke Paulding’s work, her sparkling flesh in a saecular ecstasy, is also deserving of comment. I didn’t, perhaps, like it quite so much as Anthony Lyons did. I wasn’t convinced by it architecturally, and thought that some of the sounds (or rather, their mode of production) seemed to err towards calculated sensationalism, rather than sonic or semantic meaning. But this was a very, very strong work, of the sort that I would have sold my soul several times over to have been writing music this interesting when I was in my early twenties (or even now, in my late twenties…), and it seems clear to me that …saecular ecstasy heralds the arrival of what promises to be major new voice in the Australian compositional landscape.

Copyright infringement is bad II

Gapers Block has created a list of seven crimes for which you will receive a more lenient sentence than illegally downloading music from the internet, in a humorous take on the rather extreme sentences handed out in the recent RIAA piracy cases. Read it here.

Book review: Sounding postmodernism

David Bennett’s Sounding postmodernism (published by the Australian Music Centre) is an attempt to look at Australian composition through the lens of a modern/postmodern dichotomy. Despite the understanding of these particular terms being highly contestable in a musical context (both are very highly politicised, and the claiming of these terms by particular aesthetic/ideological camps renders them almost useless in terms of their actual meaning), this should have been a really interesting contribution to the Australian discussion.

Unfortunately, every time I picked this book up to read it, I started to get really pissed off.

Bennett’s book, rather than surveying a landscape, seems to be an articulate but thinly veiled attempt to propagate the myth that ‘modernism’ is evil and crushes your freedom of expression, while ‘postmodernism’ is free and you can do what you want. I respectfully disagree with this viewpoint (or, rather, I think that talking about a ‘modernist hegemony’ is meaningless, given the extreme variety of different approaches that the book categorises as ‘modernist’ – indeed, it seems to me that the modernists are simply the ones who the ‘postmodernists’ felt were repressing them), that shouldn’t have been a barrier to an interesting publication. As it is, though, Bennett aims to provide a context, rather than an analysis, and to this end quote frequently and selectively from musicians like John Adams and Phillip Glass, without offering much in the way of the countering view. This gives the reader very little option but to accept what Bennett writes wholesale.

I’m too young to remember the ‘modernist hegemony’, and as such am not prepared to challenge the veracity of Bennett’s claims, but he’s done a terribly shabby job of actually proving his point, lending the book a propagandist air, rather than one of scholarly dissection. I’m sure that this is because that is the way that many of Bennett’s interviewees perceived the aesthetico-political status quo at the time they became practitioners, and that’s all well and good, but Bennett’s rhetorical mode gives the sheen of academia to what is essentially a collection of unverified opinion and hearsay.

Furthermore, Bennett seems to take the view (or want his interviewees to take the view) that there is still an institutionalised modernist hegemony, actively repressing freedom of expression.

This is the particular thread of the book that really pissed me off, as it’s laughably inaccurate. One need only point, on one hand, to the chairmanship of Graeme Koehne (and now Matthew Hindson) of the Music Board of the Australia Council, Carl Vine’s directorship of Musica Viva (which has seen a parade of featured composers including Matthew Hindson, Graeme Koehne, Carl Vine, Richard Mills, Ross Edwards and Peter Sculthorpe), and the concentration of major performing and recording opportunities such as the ABC Classics CD series of Australian Orchestral works performed by the TSO with Richard Mills (which has included composers such as Graeme Koehne, Richard Mills, Anne Boyd, Ross Edwards and Brenton Broadstock).

Contrast this with the de-funding of the ELISION ensemble, the exodus of many of the country’s finest contemporary performers and composers (Richard Haynes, Liza Lim, Peter Veale, Carl Rosman, Mark Knoop, the list goes on and on), the rapid growth in Melbourne of a DIY underground contemporary music scene, the continual lack of funding for experimental music (which routinely attracts bigger audiences than many ‘important’ Australian composers) and the sheer impossibility of receiving new-work funding for anything outside the ‘postmodernist hegemony’, and I think the actual picture becomes relatively clear.
For many composers I know, building a career in this country has been a constant struggle absolutely every step of the way against a politically-powerful compositional ‘ruling class’ which is actively antagonistic to anything that might have a dissonance in it (much of this ‘class’ receives a shout-out in the paragraph above, although there are some genuine and remarkable individuals there, too, who I hope won’t be too offended by the proximity).

While obviously well-grounded in twentieth-century critical theory, Bennett doesn’t seem to really know anything about the music he discusses. Any of it. In his discussions of Boulez, for instance, he seems happy to let other people speak for him. I wasn’t left with the impression that he’d heard even a single note of Boulez, and the quoting-from-others approach in this context doesn’t even have the advantage of scholarly rigour, given that no dissenting view is provided, and the quotes are not interrogated.

The interviews that account for a significant portion of the book are rather problematic, too. A series of questions was posed to a wide selection of composers of varying artistic practice across Australia about their relationship with the term ‘postmodernism’ and their attitudes to compositional work. My understanding is that much of this work was undertaken by Dr Linda Kouvaras, to whom props are due, as these are a very interesting series of questions. Transcripts are available on Resonate magazine of the interviews with David Chisholm and David Chesworth.

Unfortunately, many of the interview subjects seem not to really have any idea what ‘postmodernism’ is, or that they’ve even thought about any problems that might relate to mode of musical expression, as relates the nature of the tradition or of audience reception. Frankly, many of these interviews are just embarrassing, and the fact that in most cases the subjects are not aware of the collossal gap between the question being asked and their capacity to respond is even more sad.

With a few notable exceptions, those that write most eloquently on their relationship with postmodernism are those that identify themselves as being more broadly sympathetic to the modernist project, a result that runs the risk of giving the impression that anybody who has actually thought about the issues here doesn’t buy into the postmodern politics.

I’m being, perhaps, overly harsh here, but I can’t help but feel terribly betrayed. This book should have been a great opportunity to further intelligent, articulate discourse on contemporary music in Australia. But, sadly it’s just another propaganda leaflet, aimed at furthering an aesthetic programme of questionable value and taste.

[P.S. Although the praise from the back cover of the book (from Peter Tregear and Susan McClary) is readable on the book's Amazon page, I can't find any other reviews of this on the interwebz (yet). If anybody knows of one, or wishes to offer a dissenting view, I'd be very pleased if you could get in touch so that I can either link to or include other views here in the interests of balance.]

[EDIT 18 Jan 2010] I highly, highly recommend that people interested in further reviews of this book make the effort to access Michael Hooper’s excellent review in Cambridge University Press’s TEMPO journal. Unfortunately, this is not available through online databases, but for those not averse to libraries, the bibliographic details for this can be found here, or in Dr Paul Watt’s comment, below. MH draws some rather different conclusions from my own, although I pretty much agree with him point-for-point on the details. He also discusses in more than cursory detail all of the elements of the books that I didn’t.