As i’ve indicated previously, the non-partisan diversity of HCMF is impressively broad these days, and one of the concerts that best exemplified this took place in Bates Mill Photographic Studio on Saturday morning, in the company of Laura Cannell. To describe her as a composer and performer of folk music …
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ConcertsPremières
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Having heard Thomas Lehn’s live rendition of Bogusław Schaeffer’s 1964 Symphony last thing on Thursday night, it couldn’t have been more perfect to have started Friday in the company of four more Polish electronic works, dating from around a decade later. Eugeniusz Rudnik‘s Ready Made (1977) took a collage approach to found sounds, …
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ConcertsPremières
HCMF 2017: Explore Ensemble, Polwechsel + John Butcher + Klaus Lang, Thomas Lehn
by 5:4One of last year’s exciting new discoveries at HCMF was the London-based Explore Ensemble, whose performance of Gérard Grisey’s Talea on ‘shorts’ day was easily among its most memorable events. Fittingly, this year Explore was invited back to give a full concert, which only reinforced that first impression from 2016. The …
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Yesterday at HCMF was decidedly mixed. Contemporary music-making aiming to be radical, at the cutting edge, obviously involves risk. That risk in turn requires a considerable amount of trust: from commissioners and investors, stumping up the cash; from performers, committing to learn and perfect the material; from concert organisers, providing …
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A few days ago, in relation to the (non-)performance at HCMF of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, i considered the question of what noise might be the opposite of, as a means to help defining what noise can actually be. But noise doesn’t have to be regarded as an opposite, …
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i’m taking a short breather from this week’s concerts and reviews from the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to announce the launch of 5:4 on Patreon. It was in January 2008, almost ten years ago, that I started this blog, devoted to the most interesting, innovative and impressive contemporary and avant-garde music of our time. It all began …
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i’ve been starting to wonder in recent years whether HCMF’s annual ‘Shorts’ day – on Monday, filled with free concerts lasting either 20 or 40 minutes – is actually one of the festival’s main highlights, rivalling the flagship events on the two weekends. It’s certainly an opportunity for musical experiences …
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For the first twenty minutes of the concert given by the Polish Radio Choir in Huddersfield Town Hall yesterday, i was forming the view that, though what we’d heard seemed at odds with his description, Dai Fujikura had nonetheless composed not only two of his best ever works, but better than …
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ConcertsPremières
HCMF 2017: The Otheroom, Ensemble Modern + Arditti Quartet, zeitkratzer perform Kraftwerk
by 5:4Yesterday at HCMF was unusual, personally speaking, as for the most part it involved hearing music not for the first time. In the evening at St Paul’s Hall, Ensemble Modern and the Arditti Quartet gave the first UK performances of Carola Bauckholt‘s Laufwerk, Christopher Trapani‘s PolychROME and Brian Ferneyhough‘s 45-minute …
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Here we go again (deep breath)… The opening concert of the 40th edition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival immediately gave one pause for thought. What it wasn’t was a conventional wallop, a smack around the ears to wake us up out of our complacency, such as the one given …
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CD/Digital releases
HCMF revisited: Aaron Cassidy – The wreck of former boundaries; Liza Lim – How Forests Think
by 5:4Later today i’ll be jumping in the car to begin my annual pilgrimage to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and it seems appropriate to conclude this week’s revisiting of previous years with mention of a recent CD featuring two larger-scale works that both received their first UK performances at last …
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One of the awkward aspects of attending the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival arises from the fact that, when choosing which concerts to attend, there’s an unavoidable fear that one will inevitably miss something fantastically memorable and/or stunningly ground-breaking. The next piece in my HCMF revisitings is a case in point, …
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Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, an album that established a manifesto, an aesthetic, an ideology and an archetype for ambient music. This is something i’m intending to celebrate and explore on 5:4 throughout 2018, but beyond this, i’m delighted …
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Scottish composer James Dillon is a regular fixture at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the last few years have included several of his larger-scale works. Of these, the performance of his Piano Concerto ‘Andromeda’ at HCMF 2014 was one of the most striking, and has remained vividly in mind …
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Some make their journeys alone. Others get together, as couples or in small gatherings. They connect and they divide. This may seem unpredictable. But you can guess which paths they will take. In the end, most of them follow their forebears. It’s gravity, apparently. While some composers persist in providing …
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In just five days’ time, this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival gets going. That’s a big deal anyway, but this is its 40th edition, so there’s even more cause than usual for celebration. As a warm-up, i’m going to spend this week revisiting a few of the more memorable pieces …
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If you were to take Jakob Ullmann’s solo III for organ, Stefan Fraunberger’s Quellgeister series and Monty Adkins’ recent Shadows and Reflections and use them as the basis for a new composition, the result would probably closely resemble one of the most (if not the most) stunning releases i’ve heard so …
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Some Wandelweiser news. First, the label has set up a couple of juicy pre-order deals for their next round of releases, featuring works by Cyril Bondi, Hermann Meier, Eva-Maria Houben and Michael Winter: three CDs for €30, or all six for €50 (that’s £26 and £44 in real money). The deals are …
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An interesting aspect of what i’ve been calling ‘steady statism‘ is the relationship it has with the idea of stasis. What is a musical stasis? Considering that music unfolds in time, isn’t it an oxymoronic idea? Furthermore, is such a hypothetical stasis intentional (objective) or perceptional (subjective) – or both? …
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CD/Digital releases
Haunted but undaunted, fading yet indefatigable: The Caretaker – Everywhere at the end of time – Stages 2 & 3
by 5:4Appropriately enough, considering this evening is Hallowe’en, i began today being haunted by ghosts. To explain: in the early hours, not sufficiently drowsy to return to sleep yet too somnolent even to begin contemplating getting out of bed, i grabbed my headphones and groped blearily on my device for something …