i wrote before about the way the World New Music Days acts like a hadron collider, smashing together diverse stylistic and aesthetic ideas from around the world. One of the startling truths to emerge from this violent eclecticism is that, what makes bad music bad, wherever it comes from in the world, is strikingly consistent. Take Reflections of South Africa by Chesney Palmer, arguably the most staggeringly dreadful composition performed during the festival. Programmatically twee, it was even more cringe-inducing in its basic limitation to nothing but elementary, formulaic syntax and gestures. Whether it was the product of naivety, ignorance, laziness or plain stupidity was anyone’s guess. Whatever the reason, Palmer wasn’t merely slavish to the past but obsequiously servile, excreting music with absolutely no trace of a heart or a brain or a soul. The same could be said of A letter from grandchild for clarinet and piano by Seitaro Shibata (Japan), who in the programme note suggested his intuitive composition process (“Music came into my head. I wrote it down…”) was like the titular letter. It was impossible not to pity the imaginary child, who had evidently experienced some kind of lobotomy based on the spasmodic crashing repetitions that moronically repeated round and round. Completely unworthy of being presented in such a platform as this, it was talentless banality in extremis.
Less egregious but also problematic was Serbian composer Natasha Bogojevic‘s Dissolvenza, which adopted a tired, commercial language, like a fragmented corporate advert. The work’s demeanour was akin to neo-Respighi, its endless borrowings given some vaguely modernist trappings. Likewise the Piano Concerto from Victoria Frances Young (USA), another example of ambition thwarted due to its rudimentary language, such that the whole, despite some personal touches, sounded conventional, standard, let down further by not featuring especially idiomatic piano writing. In the same concert we were subjected to British composer Tom Irvine‘s Cardboard, a work as thrilling as its title suggests, transforming what one assumes were once feelings of anguish (following, the programme note was keen to point out, an 11-year relationship breakup) into something straight out of a musical, all plastic pain and glossy pseudo-emotion, vacuous and generic. And then there was S. Andrew Lloyd (USA), who in his organ work Étude 7 decided simply to cherry-pick its ideas from those of the 20th Century French organ school. As ersatz imitations go, it was just about plausibly Langlais- or Vierne-like, but what on earth was the point?
Thankfully, such creatively moribund dreck as this was in the minority at this year’s WNMD, with the best chamber and ensemble works demonstrating fantastic levels of ingenuity, individuality and invention. Several of these were included in the festival’s opening afternoon concert given at the Nordic House by Iceland’s flagship new music ensemble, Caput, directed as always by Guðni Franzson. Liu Huan‘s (China) BEWEGENDE WOLKEN DES GESANGS [moving clouds of song] only lived up to its name gradually, progressing from elusive, ephemeral material to more substantial ideas and the emergence of line. The sense of a messy group song took hold, only to be blasted apart, leading to nicely unpredictable group activity filled with contrast and surprises. Czech Michal Wróblewski turned Caput into something like a machine in How to Avoid a Mental Breakdown, seemingly toggling the players on and off like switches. However, their motoric integrity was challenged in the way accumulations were evidently the product of mere simultaneity rather than actual unity. It was a curious effect, one that Wróblewski slowly moved in the direction of more genuine togetherness, the players’ angular, contorted actions eventually forming part of an elaborate tutti where everyone, and everything, felt connected.
Identity by Ivan Buffa (Slovakia) was initially so intense and febrile that it felt hard to approach, let alone connect with. Yet everything subsided, entering a gentle, spacious place, whereupon what followed existed somewhere in between, either a sum or difference of those poles, causing one to reflect on the nature and relationship of these seemingly disparate musical identities. Perhaps most exciting of all was Norwegian Martyna Kosecka‘s Ourobóros, where a network of slithering and squeals occasionally seemed to reveal something tangible within or beneath. Far from resolving this tense possibility, Kosecka kept the music ambiguous, such that these sporadic clues were never allowed to gel. It’s to Kosecka’s credit that the work at no point felt frustrating, only fascinating, all the more so later when a new form of potential stability, motivic ideas over a drone, became unstable. It’s unusual for music to be so emphatic, even declamatory, while remaining elusive in terms of both purpose and content. By the end i was still trying to parse what i was hearing, only to be confronted by a lovely messy tutti, everyone sustaining while slowly sliding downwards. Unstable to the last, the piece fizzled out in a dirty cloud of air noise.
More outstanding music came from the string players of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Storgårds, in the first of two concerts they gave during WNMD. The most disarming was The Infinity Mirror II by Maciej Kabza (Poland), a work conveying what can only be described as “abstract passion”. Becoming more and more thrilling as it progressed, the unexpected culmination was that we sped up only to materialise, pianissimo, in a frozen place with tiny movement within stasis before a ferocious series of final blows. There was another evocation of machine-like activity in was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht? [why do you hide your face so anxiously?] by Portuguese composer Carlos Brito Dias. This was the improbable development from a network of glacial hanging tones, light years away from the intense driving rhythms that ensued, with everyone moving according to the central pulse. Even as this became more variegated, still the Lapland Chamber Orchestra resembled an elaborate group of automatons, evolving such that they coalesced into the long-short-short rhythm of Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen. The ending was marvellously inscrutable, either as glacial as it began or suffused with warmth.
The high point of this concert came right at the start: i en eller annen Oase [in some or other oasis] by Eric Egan (Norway). With the players spaced all around the audience, each enunciating tiny, almost accidental sounds, phrases, shapes and tones, the immediate question was to what extent, if any, they were connected or even related to each other. With closed eyes, it was as if the sounds were leaking out of the walls, like sonic memories hitherto trapped in stone. What was especially fascinating about Egan’s material was that it didn’t sound conventionally “fragile”; on the contrary, it seemed that this was its maximum possible extent, and as such, was being projected into the space as loudly as possible. It all made for a riveting, spine-tingling effect.
Several other WNMD highlights also focused on strings, specifically string quartets. In a concert exploring “small languages”, British composer Amble Skuse provided a context for a short but evocative remnant of Middle Welsh poetry. Her piece, Chapels with Splendid Glass Windows, was rich and allusive, fragmentary at first but growing in power, heralding the text that finally appeared (via voiceover) at the music’s climax. Zhu Mao (China)’s The Island, performed by the Aldubáran String Quartet on the southernmost island of Suðuroy, took inspiration from John Donne to create four short but engaging studies. The first alternated sharp accents with sustained, somewhat wan periods, with the second switching to an altogether more playful attitude, the quartet now resembling participants in a game. Hereafter the work became more intriguing, with an elusive third movement, again playful, as well as lyrical, while remaining harder to penetrate. This was extended in the final movement, its introverted music sounding like we were glimpsing something achingly private.
The Aldubáran String Quartet also performed Outside the Rain has Stopped by Dutch composer and improviser Ig Henneman. This proved to be one of the most compelling compositions heard during the entire festival. Here was a quartet that was galvanised, utmost determined, all four committed to the same goal in earnest. They attacked their material as if trying to work it out, or work through it, in real time, in a manner that was as aggressive as it was obsessive. Suddenly, they broke through into an unexpected place of stillness – literally, a solitary note slowing fading away – being the starting point for a quiet interlude. Whereupon, evidently now with increased confidence and renewed energy, the players raced beyond, a tumble of wild cascades, excited tremolos and rhythmic chords. Yet even now the music still felt obsessed, even dogged, to the extent that the quartet’s bows began to grind in the work’s closing moments. Whatever was or wasn’t resolved, the process itself was an irresistible display of rough and tumble.
Many of this year’s WNMD concerts were recorded and are available to stream; to view specific pieces mentioned above, see below:
Liu Huan – BEWEGENDE WOLKEN DES GESANGS [starts at 45:05], Ivan Buffa – Identity [54:24], Michal Wróblewski – How to Avoid a Mental Breakdown [1:23:56], Martyna Kosecka – Ourobóros [1:34:25]:
Amble Skuse – Chapels with Splendid Glass Windows [39:46}:
Maciej Kabza – The Infinity Mirror II [00:45], Carlos Brito Dias – was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht? [36:14], Eric Egan – i en eller annen Oase [49:06]:
Zhu Mao – The Island (1:04), Ig Henneman – Outside the Rain has Stopped [42:39]:
