Several events that i’d had high hopes for at this year’s World New Music Days turned out to be disappointingly underwhelming. Among them was the concert given by Danish choir ARS NOVA which, overall, featured surprisingly unadventurous repertoire, mostly standard text settings with almost nothing really exploring the voice as an instrument with much broader potential. That didn’t stop me enjoying O Vis Aeternitatis by Irish composer Rhona Clarke, which established a nice balance between conventional word treatment and an unpredictable shaping of phrases. It created an effective tension that added to the music’s expressive power, particularly in the intense closing doxology, which despite its textual familiarity was very powerful. i’d been intrigued by the prospect of Scottish composer James Robertson‘s memorial to George Floyd, I CAN’T BREATHE, yet while it just about avoided seeming exploitative, it was nonetheless far too much on the nose, less a reflection on Floyd’s murder than, by the end, a depiction of it. The piece projected an implication that its emotional content should be a foregone conclusion, rather than being something actively articulated and ultimately earned by the music. i found myself remembering Gunnar Karel Másson’s exploration of the same words in his excellent cycle Songs of Violence, and wishing Robertson had captured something of that work’s understated but overwhelming emotional weight and authenticity.
The one truly imaginative new work in ARS NOVA’s concert was Tidlig solopgang [early sunrise] by Mette Nielsen (Denmark). Nielsen cheerfully played with sound to the extent that her music felt almost tactile, as if it had been composed not simply for voices but specifically for mouths. Furthermore, this whimsical approach was matched by her approach to harmony, made more exciting by being continually ratcheted up by semitones in a later sequence. They chose to end their concert with Kaija Saariaho‘s 2001 Tag des Jahrs, a strange choice that only begged the question why it was the only work in the concert to include electronics. All the same, it was a superb performance of an engrossing piece, creating an interesting relationship between immediacy and directness from the voices while the electronics opened up a less well-defined fantastical space of what one might call “radiant speech”, sounding grounded and floating simultaneously.
Organ music at WNMD was also dismally conservative, despite there being two concerts devoted to the instrument, highly unusual for a contemporary music festival. Only two works stood out as being more than just dull or derivative. Procession with Bells by Latvian Indra Riše, performed by Hans Hellsten in Tórshavn’s glittering Hoyvíkar Kirkja, was a bouncy, engagingly motivic toccata. The church’s dry acoustic aided the clarity of its perpetually hopping rhythms (though some slight reverb would have been nice) in what was above all a gleeful essay in exuberance. The most striking organ piece came from Samuel Hvozdík (Slovakia), who for Magma subsequently won the 2024 ISCM Young Composer Award. Again performed by Hans Hellsten, this time in the more austere interior of Fuglafjarðar Kirkja, Magma lived up to its primordial title, opening as a landscape of tight clusters, where pitch was less important than register, slowly moving through these dense formations, occasionally arriving on a single tone. While there were admittedly times when it felt as if Hvozdík might have been merely exploiting the organ’s potential for vast cacophony at the expense of a necessary, compelling narrative, the effect was undeniably impressive.
Fixed media electronic music was surprisingly absent from most of this year’s festival. Aside from the previously-discussed installations, there was just a single concert, comprising six works. That fact in itself was disappointing, but the presentation also left something to be desired, with the volume set far too low for the music to be able to properly speak, in the process losing a lot of its subtlety, nuance and detail. In spite of this, Apophatic Spectralism X by Greek composer Dimitris Bakas was an intriguing dive into a soundworld of vaguely articulated words, vowels, singing tones and whispers, located at the periphery of muted piano tones. The only piece in the concert to take an energetic approach to sound was Jubilant Phantoms by Canadian Bekah Simms (whose Bestiaries was one of my Best Albums of 2022). While it would have been far nicer to experience it, as intended, with a live accordionist (just as Bakas’ piece would have greatly benefitted from a live soprano), we were nonetheless able to experience the work’s beautifully vivid sense of heightened verisimilitude, caught between real and hyperreal instruments, articulating by turns aggressive chordal bursts and mellifluous aftermaths of filigree.
Some of the very best music performed at WNMD were works for instrumental ensembles. The smallest of them, OHNE TITEL for percussion quartet by Manuel Zwerger (Austria), was also one of the most beguiling (and, in hindsight, one of the few pieces to actually benefit from using this non-title). Performed by percussionists from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, it was impossible to tell whether we were hearing a heterogeneous texture resulting from four individuals undertaking the same behavioural actions in their own unique ways, or an actual quartet creating an individuated but homogeneous four-part unity. This wasn’t simply due to the similarity of their range of actions, but also due to the way that their respective parts fit so snugly together. Despite the material limitations – very rhythmic, with a restricted gestural palette, expanded by just three tubular bell pitches – it was as fascinatingly hard to resolve as it was entertaining to watch.
It was in the Varpið concert hall, in the town of Klaksvík on the north-east island of Borðoy, that the two most impressive ensemble works were performed by Aldubáran Chamber Ensemble. Chiaroscuro by Canadian Jordan Nobles, lived up to its name, dispersing the players around the audience on upper and lower floors, conjuring up a dreamy driftscape, very beautiful and very measured, low-key but definitely not passive. Especially interesting was the way it played with notions of structure and harmonic progression, at times appearing to manifest both, but overall suggesting they were either figments or accidents resulting from less deliberately-ordered activity. Either way, there was a lovely sense of (real or imagined) group cohesion, moving together but semi-individually, along the way also challenging our perception of their possible connectedness. It was a boldly loose-weave piece, displaying ambient and mobile-like compositional elements, at once gentle yet vital.
Best of all – the most stunning and memorable piece i heard throughout the festival – was MEET-II by Qiqi Liu (China), played by Aldubáran in the same concert. Conducted by Bernharður Wilkinson, both its narrative and its realisation were fantastic to experience. The texture filled out from sparse to full, becoming complex and then discovering speed, like Nobles showing an interesting mixture of individuality within a tangible group mentality. Whereupon it became structurally playful, burbling, surging, becoming slightly obsessive for a while, yet just when it became so Liu broke it up, making everything vague with vestiges and strands playing out in what now, somehow, suddenly felt like a void. As the players continued – still undeniably a group, despite the scant material – they rediscovered play, growing into climactic ebullience. A lot of music made a strong impression during WNMD, but MEET-II went so much further, a dazzling demonstration of ingenuity and invention.
At the start of this survey, i spoke about the need to appreciate something of the broader context of a music festival in order to have a more meaningful engagement with and understanding of what’s happening within it. It’s a caution that i felt keenly during this festival, largely due to the fact that this was a double sophomore experience: my second time in the Faroe Islands, my second time at the World New Music Days. Both are entities that can seem rather daunting, the Faroes for their remoteness and unique musical life and modes of expression, WMND for its wildly eclectic bringing together of a vast range of compositional attitudes and aesthetics. i’ve little doubt it’s the most thought-provoking of any of the festivals i’ve attended, and while the Faroese-filtered portrait it painted of the state of global contemporary music most definitely left me with mixed feelings, it nonetheless suggested a great deal to be confident and optimistic about. At its best, it’s a wonderful world.
Many of this year’s WNMD concerts were recorded and are available to stream; to view specific pieces mentioned above, see below:
Mette Nielsen – Tidlig solopgang [starts at 6:30], Rhona Clarke – O Vis Aeternitatis [20:24], Kaija Saariaho – Tag des Jahrs [48:58]:
Dimitris Bakas – Apophatic Spectralism X:
Bekah Simms – Jubilant Phantoms (also available from Bandcamp):
Jordan Nobles – Chiaroscuro [00:27]; Qiqi Liu – MEET-II [39:05]:
