The spectre of Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși was brought to bear on this year’s World New Music Days in Bucharest, which took as its title, ‘Columna Infinita’. Title, not theme, and the invocation of Brâncuși’s famous sculpture therefore acted more as inference than reference point. Nonetheless, both the phrase and image on the festival’s strikingly beautiful artwork were usefully tangible reminders of the essential elements of the Brâncuși – form, shape, design, substance, contour, time, direction; plus the more personal, painful aspects that directly inspired the work – all elements with parallels in music, thereby serving as a valuable frame of reference for what we heard.
This was my fourth time at the World New Music Days, and by now i’ve just about got my head around the convoluted rules, quotas and guidelines that determine what must and what merely can be selected for inclusion at the festival. Not that it matters, not really – what’s more interesting to me personally is what i’ve experienced on previous occasions: the extent to which each WNMD acts as a filtered portrait of the compositional state of the art. In that respect, while WNMD certainly reveals something about global priorities and preferences, it perhaps reveals more about those things from the particular perspective of the host nation.
As previously, the 22 concerts that comprised this year’s WNMD featured pretty much every conceivable genre. New vocal music was essentially limited to just a single event, given by Madrigal, Romania’s National Chamber Choir, toward the end of the festival. (Old vocal music was taken care of by the Psalmodia Byzantine Choir, but that’s hardly relevant here.) They were directed by Anna Ungureanu, whose approach to conducting was equal parts precision and panache. While several of the works were originally composed for children’s choirs, Madrigal proved that they contained more than just basic ideas. Among them was Anatomy of a jar by Cecilia Arditto Delsoglio (Netherlands), music that was initially miniature, melding the choir’s soft vocals with granular and percussive sounds derived from jars and other objects wielded by the singers. Later these became merged, now singing, sighing and gabbling into the jars, thereby filtering, attenuating and muting their voices in unpredictable ways.
Ode to Psyche by Italian Caterina Schembri was a tougher nut to crack; like a smooth, polished surface, pristine and flat (reinforced / exaggerated by Madrigal’s non-vibrato approach), it was hard to get at anything beneath. Whereas in the case of the Nunc Dimittis by Peter Zombola (Hungary) there was literally nothing below its surface. A cheap imitation of Whitacre / Lauridsen mush – and that’s pretty low-budget source material to begin with – it was nauseating but mercifully short.
There were two highlights, both outstanding. One of them was already familiar to me, Iris by Evelin Seppar (Estonia). In comparison to the performance i experienced at the 2024 Estonian Music Days, this felt revelatory. First, i was taken aback at how brisk the piece is, with Madrigal bringing real clarity to its undulating inner parts. The texture was full of life – movement everywhere – the voices echoing each other, as if a single line were bouncing and reflecting back on itself. Despite knowing the piece, its arrival at a rich, complex chord still felt unexpected, Ungureanu making everything seem channelled toward and flowing directly into it. With the voices continually moving the whole time, the chord quickly became an implication more than a clear accumulation, and the work’s soft coda continued this harmonic ambiguity, exquisite, strange, and utterly lovely.
Samuel Hvozdík‘s (Slovakia) Lichtmusik IV, receiving its world première (Hvozdík won the 2024 ICSM Young Composer Award, resulting in this commission) was breathtaking and highly imaginative. With a diaphanous sound – Madrigal at their most gorgeous – the work presented small phrases, harmonically suggestive, implying a larger context yet remaining mysterious as they didn’t so much connect as simply seem possibly related. Gradually, one sensed it was less a stop-start progression than a random sequence of fragments that managed to cohere while the whole remained unknown, and perhaps (likely) imaginary. Similarly, there was no way to tell how much we were hearing. i call them fragments, plural, but it seemed just a plausible that we were hearing just one tiny fragment being endlessly turned over and considered. There was something incredibly tender and loving – quietly passionate – about this treatment. The conclusion took it to extremes, practically becoming a stasis, the music now transfixed.
Electronic music was given no fewer than three concerts, two of which took place within the National University of Music’s Opera Hall, which featured an impressive multichannel setup. Equally impressive works were few and far between. FOMO by Chinese composer Jiajing Zhao was a demonstration of utterly familiar acousmatic gestures, with standard positioning and grandiloquent presentation. Everything about it was clichéd, sounding as if it dated from the mid-1990s. That was still preferable to what Anthony Marasco (USA) inflicted on us in Migration Script, eleven minutes of self-indulgent rubbish, all drifting noodle-nonsense with occasional stings. Pointless and way, way too long.
While its sense of direction was difficult to locate, Richblick by Romanian Cătălin Crețu was interesting primarily because of the way he manipulated his material. Oscillating between gentle and rough handling, Crețu went beyond merely shaping sound, being prepared at times to pulverise it. i was left in two minds about Coro: Versa est in luctum from George De Decker (Belgium). The work spoke as something akin to ‘mood’ music, floating, droning. A chorus of voices appeared later, and while they brought more assertion to the piece, it was hard not to feel the whole thing was just a bit too soft and passive to engage with fully. Bearing in mind Brian Eno’s ambient maxim of “ignorable and interesting”, Decker’s music just about managed a level of potential intrigue, not really sufficiently interesting to prevent glazing over.
Of the successes, one of the most effective was Uninhibited by Agita Reke (Latvia). Its gentle, allusive soundworld derived from a deliberately limited palette – ambient tones, granular squelch, shuffling noise accumulations – but their positioning and movement throughout the space were exquisitely handled, producing something between a sculpture and a ballet. Though only a short piece – barely six minutes’ duration – that was an important part of its charm. i wrote about German composer Clemens von Reusner’s electronic music some years ago, and his more recent work fleeting experience, composed last year, bore many of the same hallmarks i commented on then. Again the slow pace, allowing time for the sounds – many of them delicate and fragile – to speak, which often works so well in his music. That was even more the case here due to their highly evocative character, almost hypernatural, with elements that were seemingly solid, liquid and gas all present in impossible proximity, within a permanently shifting state.
The most memorable work was in part due to being unexpectedly performed live. Taiwanese composer Huichun Yang presented Touch Improv, a piece combining two unconventional friction instruments, the arbrasson and daxophone, with live electronics. She sat on stage with these and her laptop around her, and it seemed at first as if we were in for 15 minutes of pretty standard lowercase, redolent of John Hudak or the late, great Steve Roden. Yet after this patient, perfectly-judged introduction, Yang began to expand the texture – sonically locating it at the cusp of human friction and electronic creation – to striking and deeply beautiful effect, especially when, a few minutes later, deep bass registers were introduced. Strange quasi-vocal noises appeared, and the soundscape turned deliciously surreal, becoming dense, being ramped up, the whole time maintaining a quality that was decidedly animalistic. Mesmerising and wonderful.
