A weekend in Huddersfield
I was able to attend two days (19 - 20 November) of concerts at Huddersfield's legendary contemporary music festival, which continues until next weekend. Amongst many other wonderful encounters it was great to shake hands with Richard Steinitz, who I remember personally sent me a £30 travel bursary to attend the festival for the first time, just after I left school in 1986, and then later on booked the (Cambridge) New Music Players for several concerts. Richard said that he has recently been compiling some of the many interviews he carried out with composers over the years, including with Iannis Xenakis on the occasion when the composer brought over and demonstrated the UPIC computer (which I saw last weekend in the instruments' collection of the Musée de la Musique in Paris).
The festival is different now. As board member Mick Peake remarked, those iconic composers are no more. The focus of the festival is on the younger generation. Furthermore there is an interest in and encouragement of experimental and playful composition. The festival now shapes and curates musical experimentation, rather than reflecting big hitters of the avant-garde scene. But it also impressively attains numerous international links and collaborations that help to ensure its future, for example with Lithuania and Ireland just this weekend.
The concert by Exaudi, with their director James Weeks, was testament to Weeks's extraordinary choir's virtuosity. Mikel Uquiza's HOWL (2022) conveyed a raw energy through ululations, chords, growls, body and animal sounds in a series of scenes. Chiyoko Szlavnics Whorl Whirling Wings (2022) beautifully evoked dream-like worlds in textures interweaving subtle electronics. Lorenzo Pagliel's Marean flusso deriva (2022) opened with purring chord changes and built to a climax of intensity and complexity before tapering away.
Philip Venables' poignant and moving Answer Machine Tape 1987 (2022) was performed by Zubin Kanga with a video projection. Messages from friends left on an answering machine belonging to David Wojnarowicz in 1987, following the death of his partner Peter from AIDS, were arranged into a poetic sequence. They are accompanied by piano, sometimes with lyrical material, and sometimes with more intense, complex and climactic writing.
The first(?) visit to the festival by Ensemble Intercontemporain included intriguing pieces delivered expertly. Thomas Simaku Soliloquy VII (2019) for solo clarinet is a finely crafted and expressive composition making use of grand piano resonances. We heard Lisa Streich's OFELIA (2022) and HIMMEL (2021). These are studies in detuned tonal harmonies. In her talk Streich said they were somewhat like hearing an amateur choir voice a familiar chord in a completely new and spectacular way. Franck Bédrossian Le Lieu et la formule (2019) is a virtuoso ensemble piece that draws out the precision and extrovert capacities of this ensemble. The piece teams with textural changes, punchy pizzicatos and a memorable solo for contrabass clarinet. The ensemble members are required to speak texts from Rimbaud. There is a philosophical underpinning narrative to this work which is that the contrasts of the piece reflect the cities that the poet moved through; simultaneously a secret progression through 'Illuminations'. (Reminds me of Stockhausen's Freitag's ambition to sustain simultaneous systems and layers of action).
At 10.30pm there was a typically memorable late-night concert. The Monochrome Project is an ensemble of eight trumpets, led by Marco Blaauw. This is the kind of event that makes Huddersfield editions stick in the mind. Firstly, Raven Chacon For the Company in the Morning (2022). This piece is based on the idea of the trumpet as a signal instrument. It begins with a high signal on a treble voice. There are striking chords occasionally, but this is largely a study on a single note in which the ideas evolve rhythmically and spatially as they are passed from instrument to instrument. The composer explained in an illuminating talk with Robert Worby on Sunday morning that it is both inspired by and a protest against the former culture of hunting in England, and uses actual signal motifs from a historical manual. Then, Juste Janulyte - Unanime (2020). This is a piece for the eight trumpets, beginning and largely staying in muted trumpet low register - so from the outset to the end a soothingly beautiful play of trumpet polyphonies, constantly sustained with notes moving in and out of the foreground. A beguiling composition with great sense of shape and control.
One of the highlights of the London Sinfonietta's concert was Janulyte's Sleeping Patterns (2022). This piece is about the cyclical flow of sleep; a musical metaphor for body rhythms in nature. It is from the same workshop as Unanime: a long, flowing, shimmering, vibrating, sensuous and polyphonic chord, beautifully conceived and orchestrated. This composer creates music which is 'monothematic' and yet complex: music which sort of does the same thing but in a way that is compelling and offers something new each time. Maybe reaching an archetype.
On Sunday the Red Note Ensemble performed music by Irish composers. Ann Cleare's fine Dysmorphia II (2010) was reminiscent to me of work by James Dillon. With squeaks, moans, rustles, pops and pizzicatos this music occupied the febrile edge of exploration with occasional passages of violent intensity. Nick Roth's Flocking III (2013) included the composer in the ensemble; the work began with an expressive almost Beethovenian melancholy on the strings, then it got jazzy. I'm intrigued by the relationship of the players as a collective to the generation and development of ideas. The offer of a free brochure to festival goers is very democratic, but its extremely constrained word limits mean you don't always get much context with which to understand the plethora of different concerts and premieres. Una Monaghan Notwithstanding (2022) began with a very cool spatialised mixed turntables effect. There was a plangent, lyrical and folky Gaelic harp atmosphere in this piece.
As part of Creative Ireland's launch of a new CD of contemporary music from Ireland, Lina Andonovska, solo flute and piccolo, performed, with tremendous verve, three contrasting works by Ian Wilson, Judith Ring and Nick Roth. All three were vivid, elegant and beautifully designed in their different ways, and expertly delivered by Andonovska.
At 4pm the Riot Ensemble appeared in St Paul's Hall, and they were on top form. They performed Anna Korsun's Plexus (2014) which was texturally highly varied with knocking, rubbing, striking, and howling sounds. A clear sense of shape, with pulse layering and collisions. Korsun's Spleen (2019) followed - an impressively diaphonous, gyrating, gliding and varying study in changing pitch centres. Heloise Tunstall-Behrens Tricomes (2022) was catchy, fragmented, funky with tonal traces, and provokingly enjoyable. Lisa Streich's Francesca (2016-19) was spectacular in terms of materials and means of production (including clapper, motorised brushing of piano strings, whip).
General thoughts. A number of works used spoken texts, which interrupts one kind of focused music listening and changes it to another broader form of aesthetic appreciation in which questions of musical structure (raised by Robert Worby) can be displaced. When composers write issues-based pieces, a problem is raised if they do this without transforming it much through musical operations, thus mixing questions of social/historical importance with aesthetic value. These are all extraordinary ensembles. For me, some of the compositions performed underused their talents and capabilities.