As with his vocal works, Michael Finnissy‘s chamber music is represented on four Metier discs, comprising around twenty pieces composed across three decades, from 1977 to 2007. This is only a miniscule proportion of Finnissy’s vast quantity of chamber music, but it nonetheless provides a valuable demonstration of various aspects of his compositional language. Above all, his omnipresent engagement with existing musical materials, which while often manifested in Finnissy’s music to varying degrees of convolution and obfuscation, could hardly be more overwhelmingly obvious in Metier’s 2013 CD featuring two works for piano quintet. Read more
Michael Finnissy at 70: A Metier Retrospective – Part 2. Chamber music
New releases: Morton Feldman, Jonty Harrison, Chaya Czernowin
It’s been good to get back to the plethora of new releases that have have found their way to my door in recent weeks and months. While i don’t like to make spurious connections between disparate pieces of music, i’ve been fascinated at the way various composers explore the interplay between what we might call the ‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’. In Morton Feldman‘s 1976 ‘Beckett trilogy’—comprising Orchestra for orchestra, Elemental Procedures for soprano, mixed choir and orchestra and Routine Investigations for six players, released together on a CD from Wergo titled Beckett Material—this interplay manifests itself, as it so often does in his work, in the implications of a tension between the aurally deliberate and coincidental. In Orchestra, for example, we hear a collection of seemingly disjointed bursts of material, brief slivers of ideas, as though Feldman had extracted a load of ‘salient points’ from a host of sources and strung them together. The result is music that constantly seems significant yet what it signifies is moot, continually reconfigured by context. In tandem with this is one’s perception of what constitutes a ‘connection’ between ideas, prompting a continual reappraisal of whether imitation and continuity are actually taking place or are imagined by-products of Feldman’s placement of materials. This extends even to something as simple as a melody; a recurring idea in all three pieces involves the irregular cycling of a small group of pitches that at first appear melodic but soon seem either arbitrary or subject to a more unpredictable type of permutation. Read more
New releases: NEOS box sets – Donaueschinger Musiktage 2014, Darmstadt Aural Documents Box 3: Ensembles
What with the increase in listeners turning away from physical releases in favour of digital downloads, and in light of yet another (admittedly somewhat spurious) article this week offhandedly proclaiming the imminent death of the album, the efforts of German label NEOS to put out large, lavish box sets are both absurd and marvellous in their optimistic enthusiasm. No other label does contemporary music like NEOS; in terms of quality and quantity, they are leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, with an immense breadth of scope that’s doggedly committed to some of the most risk-taking, experimental music-making going on anywhere.
It’s NEOS who are responsible for issuing annual accounts of the goings-on at the Donaueschinger Musiktage (this year’s begins in a little over a week). The 2014 festival is represented, as usual, with a box set of four discs, though on this occasion the fourth disc is a DVD. The set features twelve large-scale compositions (many of them world premières), running to nearly seven hours of music, affording one the rare opportunity really to immerse oneself in a festival; for once, the cliché that it’s the next best thing to actually being there is entirely true. It would take a dissertation to discuss them all, but there are several that stand out more than the rest, such as Friedrich Cerha‘s Nacht for orchestra, seemingly split down the middle with its first half occupied with complex textures moving from high to low registers. The second half is sparer and more melodic, and has something of the searching freedom that typified the free atonal period; it’s really very lovely, with a later sense of poised tension released in a last-minute burst. For the first 90 seconds of Hanspeter Kyburz‘s Ibant obscuri, barely anything happens; but then, suddenly, it lurches out of the shadows, and the sheer size of his large orchestra makes itself intimidatingly felt in loud shrieks and thrusting accents (i’m not doing justice to it, it sounds literally massive). A bit like Cerha, its latter half has a melodic urge, seeking expression amidst a chaos of wonderfully unpredictable turbulence (including something akin to a wobble-board duet). The final few minutes are thrilling, ending in dazed repetitions of a single low note. Read more
Tags: Ben Johnston, Brian Ferneyhough, Charles Ives, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Eduardo Moguillansky, Enno Poppe, Frederic Rzewski, Friedrich Cerha, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, Hanspeter Kyburz, Herbert Brün, Horatiu Radulescu, Iannis Xenakis, Jean-Claude Eloy, Jennifer Walshe, Johannes Fritsch, Julián Carrillo, Liza Lim, Mark Barden, Ondřej Adámek, Peter Ablinger, Richard Barrett, Robin Hoffmann, Rolf Riehm, Salvatore Sciarrino, Simon Steen-Andersen, Stefan Prins, Thomas Lauck, Wieland Hoban
New releases: symphonies by Paul von Klenau, Peter Maxwell Davies, Andrzej Panufnik, Xiaogang Ye & Per Nørgård
It’s high time i got back to appraising some of the more interesting new releases. No fewer than three contemporary pieces bearing the title ‘symphony’ were performed at this year’s Proms, and coincidentally quite a few of the CDs i’ve been sent have also featured 20th and 21st century symphonies. What constitutes a ‘symphony’ these days is a good question, one that these six albums don’t so much answer as offer an assortment of interpretations of what it might mean. Read more
New digital EP: Studies, vol. 1
It’s been a while since my last CD release, so i’m especially pleased to announce that, a few days ago, i brought out a new EP, the first in an ongoing series. Those of you familiar with my earlier electronic work will know that there’s been a tendency to embrace extremes. My last two discs, Night Liminal and Dither • Pother • Roil exemplify that pretty strongly. For the last couple of years, my electronic music has turned away from this mode of expression, focusing instead on a more indirect, allusive type of utterance, which has its roots in one of my earliest electronic pieces, Triptych, May/July 2009, as well as the Simulated Music cycle.
This has resulted in a growing collection of Studies, pieces that primarily explore my interest in structuring sound materials from an initially visual perspective, many of which i regard as something that might be called ‘Op Music’, a sonic equivalent of Op Art. Diverse in character, some highly abstract, others moving through clear progressions and processes of evolution and development, these Studies are all entirely synthetic, sculpted from raw electronic sounds without use of existing sound materials. As in much of my earlier work, the juxtaposition of pitch and noise and the reappraisal of what defines each (and their boundaries) continue to be recurring features of these pieces.
i’ll be making a selection of these Studies available in an ongoing series of digital-only EPs, the first of which, vol. 1, is now available, from my Bandcamp site (which includes lossless) as well as iTunes and Google Play. For those of you who like to try before you buy, the EP can be streamed via Spotify (embed below).
The accompanying artwork is by the Polish generative artist Tomasz Sulej, whose work i find inspiring and very beautiful, and which makes a perfect analogue for the soundworld of the Studies.
Further volumes of these pieces will be released during the months ahead.
Tags: Simon Cummings
Michael Finnissy at 70: A Metier Retrospective – Part 1. Vocal music
Composers habitually form relationships with performers and ensembles, but less often with record labels. And while various labels have put out one or two releases featuring the music of Michael Finnissy, only one, Metier, part of the multi-faceted Divine Art Recordings Group, has shown substantial long-term commitment to his output. To date, Metier has devoted no fewer than 12 albums to Finnissy, comprising a whopping 18 hours of his music, the earliest, Folklore, released in 1998, the most recent, Singular Voices, earlier this year. So to continue my celebrations of Finnissy’s 70th birthday, over the next few months i’m going to take a look back at this diverse collection of discs, beginning with those featuring his vocal music.
Tags: Michael Finnissy
New releases: Stefan Fraunberger, Michael Moser, Morton Feldman, John Wall
Easily the most sonically remarkable new release to have passed through the jukebox in the last month or so is Quellgeister #2 ‘Wurmloch’ by the Austrian sound artist Stefan Fraunberger. This ongoing series of works (#1 came out two years ago, #3 is in progress) focuses on what Fraunberger summarises as “semi-ruined organs discovered in deserted Saxon churches in Transylvania”. Precisely what he does with these dilapidated organs isn’t entirely clear, but the result is that of a Frankenstein-like in extremis battle to resurrect the instrument and enable it, for one final time, to speak. Aural narratives really don’t come more stunningly heroic than this. Having wheezed into life, the organ’s reanimated corpse unleashes barrages of chords that constantly sound unnaturally forced, only sustaining as long as its innards are being ‘squeezed’ (try singing a note for far too long and you’ll get the idea). Weird tangential pitches and upper harmonics regularly bleach these chords, even occasionally suggesting there’s a melody trying to escape from beyond the grave; elsewhere the struggle (for both man and machine) becomes so intense that vast dissonant slabs of compressed noise erupt. On the one hand, it’s shambolic and desperate, but there’s an uncanny beauty both to Fraunberger’s seemingly absurd actions and to the, frankly, amazing results. Read more
