HCMF 2024 (Part 1)

Despite the fact that in recent years my general feeling about the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is that it’s become over-familiar and rather predictable – perhaps in need of a fresh start / reboot – my experience during the opening weekend of this year’s HCMF was genuinely unexpected: music that was either fun or serious. That’s not a binary i’ve consciously noticed before at this (or any other) festival, and it certainly made my four days the fascinating equivalent of a large expressive pendulum.

At the lighter end of its swing was Fever by Claudia Molitor, a new electroacoustic work for Marcus Blaauw’s trumpet group The Monochrome Project. The piece veered between lovely, cyclic textures and light rhythmic propulsion, the latter initiated by the electronics and (considering the title) seeming to infect the players. Its chop-and-change nature meant that Fever didn’t work as a cohesive whole, but as a series of diverse, disjunct episodes it was perfectly enjoyable. Likewise Okkyung Lee‘s Signals, a larger-scale work created and performed in collaboration with Explore Ensemble, presented in the Town Hall. The playfulness of the narrative, which at times was like being in the midst of some exotic nocturnal creature chorus, was its strongest feature, but it was let down by an over-reliance on shifting textures and a largely arbitrary sense of continuity. All the same, the spontaneity of the piece, particularly a sequence where Lee pointed to individual players, triggering them to imitate what others were doing, was very effective.

Surprisingly, similar issues plagued Streik by the usually dependable Enno Poppe, bringing together the unlikely combination of 10 drum kits. Here, the structure was abundantly clear, with new ideas being instigated by each drummer in turn, leading to ripples of agreement, imitation, variation, and counter-ideas, often becoming highly intricate and filled with stunning instances of percussive and timbral complexity. Yet longueurs had begun to creep in even before the halfway point of its hour-long duration, and while it was never exactly boring, Streik lacked the overarching sense of necessity that characterises Poppe’s best work, ending almost with the equivalent of a shrug, as if Poppe simply couldn’t think of anything else for the drummers to do.

Far more compelling was the Gran Cadenza by Unsuk Chin, performed on the opening night by Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan. Here was playfulness that dazzled both the ear and the brain. Did the two violins share the same idea, or were they individuals with only a spurious connection? Soh’s wilfulness in not answering that question only made her ebullient material more thrilling, captured in the Arditti and Sarkissjan’s wildly acrobatic performance, both them and the music practically leaping and dancing. Just occasionally they coalesced, nowhere more incredibly than, after a runaway stream of filigree, the duo suddenly locked into a on-/off-beat rhythmic pattern before going their own way. An unbelievable performance of a superbly sprightly piece.

The concert given by Finnish ensemble Defunensemble included several lighthearted works, including Kristine Tjøgersen‘s We should get to know each other, another of her works translating on-screen activity into physical action. This time it was the famous song “Jaan Pehechan Ho” from the 1965 Bollywood film Gumnaam (which i first fell in love with back in 2001, when Terry Zwigoff’s film Ghost World was released), becoming the basis for a frivolous bit of sonic silliness. The highlight of these lighter works was Antti Auvinen‘s Warp My Simone, which i witnessed at Defunensemble’s concert in Tartu earlier this year. Experiencing it a second time only reinforced how just irresistibly demented and hilarious it is, an unstoppable slew of invention, wild guttural vocals and ferocious beats broken up with instrumental mayhem.

Adjacent to this, but in a more delicate strain, was David Sappa‘s Foreshores Rising, presented on the festival’s “Shorts” day of miniature concerts. Performed by a collection of Sappa’s handmade machines, all evidently fashioned from bits of disjecta membra washed up and discovered around the titular shores, sonically the piece consisted primarily of sounds of movement and friction, mostly quite quick, thereby focusing on higher registers. But its whirrs, buzzes and clanks were arguably secondary to the sight of these things in action, a host of unlikely mixtures of materials moving, rotating, hopping (and occasionally falling over, which only added to the entertainment value) and gyrating, as if these pieces of flotsam had spontaneously come to life, arranged themselves into new forms and begun to dance.

Of all the music located at or near to the fun end of the spectrum, none could surpass, in terms of both entertainment value and compositional rigour, Lawrence Dunn‘s Double Sonata, which received its first UK performance in Bates Mill by the combination of GBSR Duo (piano and percussion) and Twenty Fingers Duo (violin and cello). Its opening movement took an initially measured kind of minimalistic rhythmic insistence and soon began to inject mischief into it. It was all cross-rhythms and rapid-fire slivers of melody being obsessively worked over, as if any of it really mattered. That in itself was an integral part of its mischievous attitude, which was played down in the following section, a scherzo-like, curious mixture of simultaneously quick and slow material in which notes were more carefully placed and positioned. What followed was a new kind of compulsive behaviour: non-stop, regular progress in the violin and cello, as if trying to figure out their own harmonic and melodic identity. The role of the piano was nicely ambiguous: helpful? irrelevant? If anything, this uncertainty was what typified the closing minutes of the work, ending in subdued clusters and indeterminuate pitches. The piece was riveting from start to end, whimsical but with more than a few elements of reflection embedded into it, silly but making sense. i wanted to listen to it all over again as soon as it had ended.

Enjoyed this article? Support 5:4 on Patreon from just $2 a month!

---