If Jurg Frey’s music is indeed ‘from another country’, that makes me a refugee. My biggest learn from this year’s excellent festival was how distant I now feel from much of the music in the tradition of the postwar avant-garde. Composers whose work I loved 10/15 years ago (Sciarrino, Billone and others, some of whom you’ve praised highly) now sound tired and stale to my ears.
At the beginning of the week you referred to cults and religion in relation to Jurg Frey’s music. At the end you’ve moved on to hairshirts and asceticism. All of this seems way off target. For me Jurg’s music is pure hedonism; it’s about taking pleasure in the sensual caresses of its fragile beauty as canons and melodic lines unfold slowly across time and space.
When I saw you after the Grizzana Ensemble concert you were perturbed and said that you were ‘all at sea’. If you’d allowed yourself to drift a little longer, you might have reached the shore of another country, one from which much of the music of the homeland feels noisy and hyperactive, over-academic and too keen to impress, rather than being a simple conduit to pleasure. But then I suspect that you will always remain a native son.
Thanks for the comments Simon. Putting to one side your inherent bias—representing a label selling Frey’s music—i find your latter remarks not only rather patronising, but actually not too far from the kind of snooty “you’re listening to it wrong” comments that one used to hear (thankfully not very much any more) associated with precisely the kind of postwar avant-garde music you now find so tired and stale. “Way off target”? Subjectivity’s a wonderful thing, is it not? i heard what i heard, and i didn’t detect anything about it that approximated to even the barest hint of hedonism or sensuality. It was fragile, yes, but that doesn’t automatically imply beauty of course, and to me it wasn’t remotely beautiful—which is not to say i found it unpleasant, not at all, but its reduced frame of reference became, over time, rather tiresome and ultimately weak. And i think this aspect, the ‘over time’ aspect, is important. i don’t believe, for me at least, that to engage with a lot of Frey’s work within a relatively small period of time is a particularly advantageous way to do it (i’m wondering if the same is true of Jakob Ullmann too, although we didn’t hear that much of his work last week). i’ve come away suspecting that certain pieces, which i felt were problematic during the week, may well speak better when heard on their own in a context that allows them to be when not in the midst of other pieces (by Frey or anyone else). Incidentally, my remark to you was that the music (not i) felt “all at sea”; the Grizzana concert was actually the point where my feelings about his work finally attained focus, which i think is clear in the way i wrote about it. But as we said during the week, it’s all part of an ongoing journey, one that may well yield new insights in future…
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If Jurg Frey’s music is indeed ‘from another country’, that makes me a refugee. My biggest learn from this year’s excellent festival was how distant I now feel from much of the music in the tradition of the postwar avant-garde. Composers whose work I loved 10/15 years ago (Sciarrino, Billone and others, some of whom you’ve praised highly) now sound tired and stale to my ears.
At the beginning of the week you referred to cults and religion in relation to Jurg Frey’s music. At the end you’ve moved on to hairshirts and asceticism. All of this seems way off target. For me Jurg’s music is pure hedonism; it’s about taking pleasure in the sensual caresses of its fragile beauty as canons and melodic lines unfold slowly across time and space.
When I saw you after the Grizzana Ensemble concert you were perturbed and said that you were ‘all at sea’. If you’d allowed yourself to drift a little longer, you might have reached the shore of another country, one from which much of the music of the homeland feels noisy and hyperactive, over-academic and too keen to impress, rather than being a simple conduit to pleasure. But then I suspect that you will always remain a native son.
Thanks for the comments Simon. Putting to one side your inherent bias—representing a label selling Frey’s music—i find your latter remarks not only rather patronising, but actually not too far from the kind of snooty “you’re listening to it wrong” comments that one used to hear (thankfully not very much any more) associated with precisely the kind of postwar avant-garde music you now find so tired and stale. “Way off target”? Subjectivity’s a wonderful thing, is it not? i heard what i heard, and i didn’t detect anything about it that approximated to even the barest hint of hedonism or sensuality. It was fragile, yes, but that doesn’t automatically imply beauty of course, and to me it wasn’t remotely beautiful—which is not to say i found it unpleasant, not at all, but its reduced frame of reference became, over time, rather tiresome and ultimately weak. And i think this aspect, the ‘over time’ aspect, is important. i don’t believe, for me at least, that to engage with a lot of Frey’s work within a relatively small period of time is a particularly advantageous way to do it (i’m wondering if the same is true of Jakob Ullmann too, although we didn’t hear that much of his work last week). i’ve come away suspecting that certain pieces, which i felt were problematic during the week, may well speak better when heard on their own in a context that allows them to be when not in the midst of other pieces (by Frey or anyone else). Incidentally, my remark to you was that the music (not i) felt “all at sea”; the Grizzana concert was actually the point where my feelings about his work finally attained focus, which i think is clear in the way i wrote about it. But as we said during the week, it’s all part of an ongoing journey, one that may well yield new insights in future…