A couple of days ago marked the eighth anniversary of the death of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. To mark the event, & also begin a new occasional series on 5:4, i’d like to take a brief look back at one of the more enigmatic works of Ligeti’s career. Poème symphonique was composed in 1962, & is as much a piece of performance art as a musical composition. The performance specification is relatively straightforward: 100 mechanical metronomes are required, operated by 10 players, each metronome fully wound & set to its own tempo; all 100 are then released & allowed to tick freely until their mechanisms wind down. & that’s it, except your problems begin immediately, procuring & assembling 100 metronomes at one time & place being the most obvious. Not entirely surprisingly, the first performance triggered a fair amount of controversy, being as it was part of an official reception at the closing event of the 1963 Gaudeamus Courses and Concerts of New Music, in Hilversum, the Netherlands, an event involving local dignitaries & which was to be televised the following day. During the performance, protests broke out, & the broadcast never took place. Read more
In the last few years i’ve written about a number of pieces that languished ignored & unplayed for decades, & earlier this year another such work received its first UK performance, which was also—as far as anyone can tell—only the second time it had been heard. That fact is somewhat surprising considering that the work in question was Mégalithes, by the renowned French composer Gérard Grisey, whose work has long enjoyed an enthusiastic following throughout Europe, in part due to his innovative approach to sound, which became known as spectral music. Mégalithes predates those developments, however, composed in 1969 when Grisey was just 23 years old. The combination of that striking title & its scoring for 15 brass instruments (4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 6 horns & tuba, distributed around the performance space) suggests not so much a composition as a granite-hewn edifice. Yet Grisey’s motivation was neither hard nor impersonal; described as an “oeuvre composée à la mémoire des victimes du Biafra”, Mégalithes commemorates the million-plus innocent victims massacred in the 
Having recently examined the more interesting 
It’s back! This afternoon (at precisely 2pm, following a brief period of something not entirely unlike hype) the Proms 2014 season was revealed. Having pored over the details, what it promises in the way of new music is characterised as much by safety as it is by generosity. Discounting the concessions to jazz & pop as well as the sextet of ‘London premières’—not premières in any meaningful sense of the word—there are 22 works hitherto unheard on these shores, nine of which are first performances. But overall, it has to be said some of the choices demonstrate strikingly narrow-minded thinking, including many composers whose work has been featured at the Proms numerous times already. Furthermore, the durations afforded to new music are noticeably shorter than in recent seasons; no contemporary piece this year will ask more than half an hour of your time. 
Today is the final day of Lent, so it’s time to draw my series focussing on music by women composers to a close. As it’s Easter Eve, the time associated with the great 
i was surprised to realise recently that, apart from 
Back to the Lent Series, & a work by the Japanese composer Misato Mochizuki. Mochizuki’s compositional outlook encompasses both east & west, perhaps a by-product of periods of study in Tokyo & Paris (at IRCAM, where she studied with Tristan Murail). For the last five years, Mochizuki has taught at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, but her work continues to be performed regularly in France. She’s a bit of an unknown quantity in the UK, but that situation may improve with the release a few days ago of Follow
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