Max Brand's Höllenmaschine

Some men are fossils from the day they are born,  but not Max Brand (1896-1980).  Here he is, in his 80's demonstrating his synthesizer, which he built in his 60's to create music out of abstract electronic sound, for which he wrote several abstract, electronic pieces,starting in his 60's.  The machine  was assembled and exhibited in Vienna, where it still exists, and is still played.  Electronic music would have come naturally to Brand, given his fascination with modernity and mechanical processes. His best-known work, the opera Maschinist Hopkins (1927), of which I'll write more later, typifies the spirit of the age, influenced by Futurism, jazz, film and experimental art.

Brand didn't invent electronic music, though, as it was well in gestation even in the 1920's with Edgard Varèse who was experimenting with new sounds  in the 1920's and whose Poème électronique was the sensation of the World Fair in 1958, influencing Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen  and a host of composers since.  Below a clip from a 2009 performance of Brand's Ilian IV (1974) played on Brand's own machine.

Varèse 360˚ South Bank (1) London Sinfonietta

Queues for returns at a “new” music concert? David Atherton conducted the London Sinfonietta in the first concert of the Edgard Varèse 360˚ weekend at the South Bank. Judging by the crowds at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Varèse could have filled the RFH. Eighty years ago, Varèse really was shockingly avant garde but now he’s permeated modern culture and reaches a wider audience. No Varèse, no IRCAM, no experimental music or art. Musical archaeology come alive!

Ionisation was surprising in 1933 because it’s orchestrated solely for percussion instruments. The concept, though, is ancient. Much non-western music is percussion based, so the seeds for Ionisation were sown decades before, when non-western music first became known in Europe. It connects, too, the “primitive” that fascinated modern art.

Ions are tiny particles that build up to form larger units. Ionisation foresees fragmentation, the idea of cells of sound multiplying into complex structures. Atherton emphasized the point further by following Ionisation with Density 21.5 for solo flute. Michael Cox showed how a single melodic instrument can develop many different simple motifs. Dances for Burgess fits well with this group, because it’s relatively delicate. Chou Wen-chung, who worked closely with Varèse, noted that it was sketched during work on the much more ambitious Déserts. As Chou says, “This whiff of a dance is like a wildflower, swaying in the wake of a desert storm”

John Tomlinson is a much greater artist than the sort of fans who simply chase celebrity for the sake of celebrity will ever realize. Those who admire his Minotaur, though, will appreciate why he sang Varèse‘s Ecuatorial. He doesn’t need the money, he does it because the voice part is interesting. The whole piece is a work of intertwined contrasts. Sometimes Tomlinson sings, sometimes intones speech, veering towards abstract chant. His dark bass adds ballast to the two cellos Theremin (Jonathan Golove, Natasha Fanny). Their surreal, ethereal wails represent an alternative to conventional instruments, and bridge the gap between acoustic and electronic music. Ecuatorial refers to the lost tribes of the Maya, so a performance links mysterious past with the incomprehensible present, which is “primitive” in its own way.

Exaudi is a wonderful ensemble, equally adept in medieval polyphony as in ultra contemporary music. In Études pour Espace, they intone the different moods of the fragmented texts, weaving words with orchestration.

Varèse’s music is theatrical, so enhancing it with visuals is very much in keeping with his ideas about connecting the senses. Déserts was thus the triumph of the evening. .The Queen Elizabeth Hall became a giant 4 dimensional theatre, visual projections covering walls and ceiling. This highlighted the flow between physical and non-physical music. We’re so used to electronic music now that the shock value has long worn off. Experiencing Déserts like this is a reminder that multimedia is a very old idea indeed. Like many artists of his time, Varèse believed there was a connection between different art forms. The video started with images vaguely suggesting sand particles thrown up in a sandstorm. Yet again, the concept of small particles making up a larger whole.

There’s LOTS MORE on Varèse on this site, use the search facility and labels. There’s even a full download of the 1921 silent film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The film’s being shown at the South Bank with a newly composed soundtrack, but you can watch it here wihile listening to recordings by Varèse himself. (I picked multiple Nocturnales because that fits amazingly well.

George Antheil - Ballet mécanique Prom 33

George Antheil's Ballet mécanique is a spectacle. So get to Prom 33 on Sunday 9th August - this is music to watch as well as hear. Ballet mécanique is an icon. It was so visionary that it's only been in the last few years that the technology has existed to create it in "pure" performance. This involves 16 - sixteen - player pianos, propellers, sirens, percussion, xylophones, alarm bells etc and two normal pianos. It's "mechanical ballet" where machines take on the role of dancers, pushing the Rite of Spring to the nth conclusion, which is perhaps another reason it's on with Stravinsky's Les Noces.

The idea of Ballet mécanique is to depict perpetual motion, a new kind of experience of time and action. Think of Marcel Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase, where each part of the woman's body keeps vibrating.

The Proms version will probably be the one Antheil wrote in 1953 for only four pianos, but should still be impressive. It's not something that gets played too often, so do not miss the opportunity. The pianists involved include John Constable and Rolf Hind.

Alfredo Casella, whose orchestration of Balakirev's Islamey so astounded Stravinsky, featured in Prom 30 (Listen to it on rebroadcast -- it's amazing! ) was one of the Italian Futurists who wanted to create a whole new concept of aesthetics that embraced machines and urban processes, speed and energy. Look up Tomasso Marinetti, the great artist and theorist. Visit the exhibition currently on at the Tate Modern on Futurist Painting (runs to 20th September) The concept had much wider currency, influencing music and film. Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a fairy tale romance on Futurist themes. Techno Petroushka !

This is the Ferdnard Léger film made to go with the music. It's very interesting as Léger was such an influential artist. As music, though, the version by Ensemble Modern is the one to go for. Here's Part 2 of the film, followed by a clip of the premiere of the all mechanical 16 pianola version in 2006. Enjoy !

Xenakis Total Immersion

Of the three Total Immersion Days at the Barbican this year, this was the most demanding as it connected with the on-going Le Corbusier exhibitions at the Barbican and RIBA. Yet for that very reason, Xenakis Day was the most satisfying because it meant “thinking outside the box”, architecture people connecting to music, music people connecting to architecture.

Xenakis didn’t give up architecture for music. Both architecture and music were, for him, different aspects of creative expression. Just as architecture is a way of enclosing space, music is a way of ordering sound.

The day (12 hours!) began with Mark Kidel’s film Something Rich and Strange. It was made in 1991, and Xenakis himself features. As in all good film, some of the most revealing moments are impromptu. Xenakis and his wife visit his old school. She’s thrilled. Until that time, Xenakis had been a political exile : Greece was a part of his life she’d not known. He’s more sanguine. “It’s all in the past”, he says. He was pragmatic, a man who sought solutions.

Hence Anastenaria, from 1953, when Xenakis was still working full time with Le Corbusier. The first part, Procession aux eaux claires refers to ancient Thracian mysteries. The male voices represent the Anasthenarides, priests, who lead the populace to sacred waters. The music evokes chant but made abstract, angular layers of sound building up to density. The second part, Sacrifice, employs slow glissandi which will become one of the composer’s trademark.

But it’s the third section, Metastaseis, where the interface with architecture is most apparent. Diagrams for the score resemble diagrams for the building. It was used to “introduce” audiences to Varèse’s Poème Électronique as they entered the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The Pavilion went even beyond Le Corbusier’s ideas about free form buildings. It was conceived as a unit of three surfaces, curved, rather than flat, which enclosed the space within in a womb-like embrace. Xenakis was less poetic, describing the concept as “cow’s stomachs”. The surfaces weren’t even solid but composed of small panels individually pieced together. What shocking sci-fi it must have seemed to people used to buildings as rectangular boxes !

Metastaseis grows from simple sustained pitch, from straight line to curve, long arcing glissando stretching and bending, like the planes of the Philips Pavilion..It’s a relatively straightforward miniature, though, so Tracées, from 1987, opened the evening concert where Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Tracées employs ninety-five musicians, yet is tightly constructed. Brabbins understands why, conducting with discipline. Here, the woodwinds imitate glissandi, although they aren’t designed for such things. Without good performers of this calibre, these sections would collapse into mush. Congratulations are due to the musicians involved – this took expertise and Brabbins let them do it without fuss.

In the Marc Kindel film, Xenakis stands in his old school and recites from memory, apparently spontaneously, Ariel’s song from The Tempest, “Full fathom five, thy father lies….”. Perhaps he had been meditating on the poem, for he set it in 1994 for the BBC Singers as Sea-Nymphs. They’ve performed this often, and with Stephen Betteridge conducting, it was nicely polished. Less polish, though, would have been preferable in Nuits, which Xenakis dedicated to political prisoners from antiquity to the present. It’s a horrific protest, written from personal experience. The words are tortured like the prisoners are, yet when they can, fragments leap out like vocal glissandi, before subsiding into the complex polyphony, intensified by non verbal sounds like whistles and low hums. Exaudi, which has performed Nuits several times in the past few years, has a more acute feel for the tense anguish of the piece.

It was good to separate Sea Nymphs from Nuits with Mists for solo piano, for it made a bracing interlude, throwing the different techniques into high relief. In the programme notes, Ivan Hewett describes the mathematical theories behind the work. I can’t explain them nearly so well, but simply enjoyed the clean, uncluttered lines and clusters of notes which Rolf Hind played with rapid-fire tempi.

In Troorkh, Xenakis explores “extreme glissando”. Hewett’s notes describe it so well that they’re worth quoting. Xenakis, he says “treats the trombone as a kind of superhuman Homeric bard, recounting some tempestuous tale in wordless song”. The technical and physical demands are such that even Christian Lindberg, for whose skills the piece was written, collapses visibly from exertion after each of the two most demanding passages. It is an elegaic piece, as expressive as Greek tragedy. The trombone is supported by a group of brass, written with character. The trombone in the orchestra cannot possibly hope to match the virtuosity of the solo part, but responds in simpler mode. The tuba part is expressive : it can’t match the trombone’s stretching slides, but its tone is darker and profound.

Antikhthon again demands a huge orchestra. One of its characteristics is a long, shrill chord, like an air raid siren, or perhaps the drone of an aircraft taking off. It doesn’t matter, the effect is eerie, menacing, out of this world. If the chord is mega-glissando, it’s balanced with clouds of densely layered pointillist sound. There’s so much disparate activity it’s hard to make individuals out clearly, like finding a single insect in a swarm of locusts. Pithoprakta springs to mind, though this is later and more sophisticated. . Like the multiple panels on the planes of the Philips Pavilion, the different units function together. Sometimes the cloud clears, to reveal details, like the first violin (Andrew Haveron) tapping staccato on wood, before the orchestra wells up again. Brabbins’s strategy of keeping textures clean and clear paid off well. Like good architecture, an elegant structure doesn’t need fussy curlicues.

This was a magnificent concert, and would be quite an event at the Proms. Like the South Bank Xenakis series some years ago, audience numbers were healthy. Total Immersion Days aren’t just about blockbusters, though. Not all Xenakis is mind bendingly difficult.

Earlier in the day there was a special concert of Xenakis’s works for percussion ensemble. Sanforta, a specialist percussion ensemble played Okho for three djembas. In Africa, these drums really can “speak” as they’re played with much improvisation. Notated music is never going to be quite so fluid. Catherine Ring, still in her final year at the Guildhall, impressed as soloist in Rebonds, cheered along by the Guildhall Percussion Ensemble who performed Persephona. It was good to hear these musicians and these pieces because they reveal how Xenakis’s more elaborate works grew from “simple”, direct roots.

Please look at this link for more detail, and more photos

READ my piece on Xenakis's designs for Varese Poeme electronique

http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/liveevents09/XenakisDay.html

Architecture as music Kowloon Walled City

In 1965, my friend went to a talk by Xenakis. Yesterday we went together to the big Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican. First weekend - queues for tickets, packed with earnest looking students and a few familiar faces, not that architects are as high profile as rock stars.

The Poème Électronique room is particularly good because you can see the whole film in its original black and white starkness - clips of Godzilla, ancient art, Belsen, Madonnas. Profound and found objects, thrown together. Sit where you can see both the film and the colour overlay on the other side of the room. At the Philips Pavilion both were shown together : at the Barbican, use your imagination to put them together and in the context of the undulating, walls not made of solid concrete but shards attached to a metal frame, hanging in the air, defying gravity rather than solidly ignoring it.

So, a few random and non-technical thoughts. Mandelbrot patterns are supposed to show how all creation evolves in a systematic sequence even though it may look infinitely chaotic. One striking thing about the patterns in Le Corbusier's work is the way simple grids multiply themselves, becoming ever more complex. It's really not so different from so much new music. Which is why for me new music is as organic as nature, cells dividing and expanding in sequence. And why I don't buy rigid tonality versus atonality doctrines which inflict labels on what is beyond classification. Time to reverse dogma and simply listen.

Architecture is a way of "enclosing space" even when they integrate light, air and landscape. Xenakis described the three planes of the Philips Pavilion as a "cow's stomach", an inner space where ideas are digested. Music too is a way of enclosing sound in structure, creating sculptures with sound. More on this soon after Xenakis Immersion Day on March 7.



Architecture isn't just buildings. The exhibition featured a lot on Le Corbusier's thing for urban space. Cities don't usually grow by planning. except when there's a disaster like the Lisbon Earthquake, or the upheavals in Paris in the 19th century. In the third world there are/were lots of urban environments which defy any principle of urban order - people just build where and how they can. The "traditional" Third World city is a maze-like warren of random structures. Electricity is "borrowed", sewers connect to water supply. There used to be a place in Hong Kong called the Kowloon Walled City which was a vertical burrow of conjoined structures where you never had to reach street level, if you knew how to navigate corridors, illegal bridges etc.

Note in the photo above, extensive gardens were created by the government - not the city inhabitants - to counteract the claustrophobia of the Walled City. (the photo enlarges if you click on it). The gardens acted as a kind of cordon sanitaire around the conurbation. Previously, it had been surrounded by multi storey building, only separated by a narrow city street. Had fires broken out or plague or cholera, it would have easily spread to the rest of the area. Moreover, since the Hong Kong government had no legal jurisdiction, triads ruled : the Walled City was a crime hotspot. Surrounding it with public gardens meant that police surveillance was possible. When the Triads ventured out, they could be stopped. In theory, anyway. The gardens weren't about aesthetic design, but served a grim, practical purpose. Town planners with their drawing boards sometimes don't understand.

Eventually the Chinese and Hong Kong governments made a deal to end the historic anomaly that allowed the Walled City to exist, and the whole place was razed.

So back to my beef with the Barbican. Originally the idea was that the mini-Metropolis should reflect the warren that was medieval London. The ancestors of my friend who heard Xenakis in 1965 lived under what is now the Barbican Hall. The difference is that, in a medieval village people knew their way around because they didn't travel far, and adapted to the higgeldy-piggledy maze by habit, not optimum convenience. People don't build warrens for fun, they just come about piecemeal. Ordinary people don't have big budgets they just improvise. "Traditional" cities aren't a "model" for anything.

The Barbican's systems are utterly counter intuitive to logic and rational movement. Even the lifts (elevators) when they condescend to appear, don't all go to the same floors. And when you get in them they decide for themselves where they are going to go, complete with sado-mechanist voice machinery. The Barbican was not designed for the disabled, elderly, children, or anyone who wants to get from point A to B without going round the block ten times. here's no natural flow of movement. And the feng shui is hopelessly stagnant. The Barbican complex is a structure that actively hates people.

Le Corbusier, Xenakis and Varèse Philips Pavilion

Think back to the Brave New World of 1958, after grim years of war and austerity. Philips, the then technology giant, wanted to dazzle the postwar world with the ultimate in artistic modernity. Thus Poème Électronique was conceived. It was an amazingly ambitious, visionary venture : it’s hard to imagine what an impact it made on audiences then who weren’t used to techno anything, far less an extravaganza of electronic music and visual effects in a building that looked like something from a sci-fi movie

Le Corbusier wanted to create a Gesammstkunstwerk. As an architect he understood how people experience space and fill it with sight and sound : Poème Électronique is a concept that juumps straight off the theoretical draftboard into reality. That's why he threatened to quit altogether if Philips wanted to drop Edgard Varèse. The whole point, for Le Corbusier, was that Varèse, neglected and frustrated, represented the new frontier, mixing technology with art.

Looking back on 20th century modernism , that's a trend that keeps recurring from the Italian Futurists to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique. But the Philips Pavilion was a multi-dimensional experience on a huge scale, where vistors and space were part of what was happening. Thousands filed through the Pavilion, herded almost like animals, through corridors in which they were bombarded with bizarre sounds, flickers of images blasted so quickly they hardly had time to absorb them. In 1958, before most people even had TV, this was amazing. No way would a multinational today even dare consider something so adventurous.

There's plenty to read, even diagram by diagram plans of how the pavilion was built. Here is a clip of what folks in 1958 saw :

What a succession of images! And how strange they must have seemed to people who still watched movies in black and white. And how shockingly prescient - multiple Hiroshimas, right in the middle of the Cold War.

A lot of fuss is made over who did what and when in the development of the Philips Pavilion project. But such nitpicking misses the point. Architects, unlike composers, can't work on in isolation. Moreover, Poème Électronique was a fusion, not merely a series of events. As Xenakis himself said, there was an alternative son et lumiére installation Philips wanted to use, but it just didn't work in quite the same way.

Although Varèse didn't see the pavilion before he wrote the music, he understood the concept of sound being created as part of an environment. This idea – which dates from the Middle Ages – is very much live today. Think Stockhausen's sculptures in sound like Cosmic Pulses (Proms 2008) or "architectural" music built for specific spaces. Think Simon Bainbridge, Magnus Lindberg, Luigi Nono, where performance space is part of the experience. The images were projected onto the fluid lines of the building, the sounds adapting to the acoustic.

Furthermore, although Xenakis only wrote a short prelude before Poème Électronique, he designed the structure of the pavilion on principles that relate mathematics, architecture and music. In 1955, he'd written Metastasis, distinctive for its glissandi that shoot upwards and outwards like arches. He said "If glissandi are long and sufficiently interlaced, we obtain sonic spaces of continuous evolution. It is possible to produce ruled surfaces by drawing the glissandi as straight lines. ... my inspiration (for the Philips Pavilion) was pinpointed by the experiment with Metastasis". He goes on to show, via diagrams, the causal chain of ideas which led him to formulate the architecture from his earlier piece of music. The music grew from architecture and vice versa. It's way of thinking in pliable shapes.

This is why Poème Électronique is still significant after 50 years. Varèse never had the facilities which IRCAM, computers and modern electronics gave those who came after. But like a wild and woolly John the Baptist, he showed the way (See a wonderful 1920's arty shot of him by clicking on his name in the labels list on right). Conceptually, Le Corbusier, Xenakis and Varèse are still in the vanguard, their achievement still not fully understood. Follow the labels list on tight - lots on the architecture and music interface, Xenakis etc.

Tristan Murail Terre d'ombre

Terre d'ombre is a shade of brown frequently used in oil painting because it adds a warm "burnt umber" glow. The colour, for most people, connects to nature, the soil, growth, fertility. Murail's choice of this name for this piece refers to his father, a painter, and to Messiaen for whom colour was inextricably connected to music. "Spectralists" (to use a horrible blanket term) extend the concept so that visual connotations are as valid to the musical whole as any other reference. Just as painters extend the depth of colour by adding density, composers can "paint" by intensifying sound.

Murail's Terre d'ombre, though, also references Scriabin's Prometheus, the Poem of Fire. Scriabin was probably clinically synaesthetic, unlike Messiaen who would have liked to have been, so again the reference is to the concept of colour in music.

Perhaps too much can be made of Murail's fondness for quotation. In many ways it's a good thing because it helps access since it gives those new to the music something to relate to. But it's also misleading because it underplays the originality of the work. God forbid that the anti atonality fundamentalists get hold of Murail and use him to beat up on modern music. These extremists, who don't usually actually listen, are crazy enough, so it's a real threat.

Here Murail uses a massive orchestra, no less than 12 cellos, 8 double basses, a swathe of violas and a panoply of dark brass. Cue the idea of "ombre", earth tones, depth of shading. He uses a large orchestra because that in itself allows a wider range of sound, getting round the problem of fine tuning or de-tuning instruments and working out modulations and micro tones which only the most sophisticated musicians can play. Electronic projection is still an important feature, but it doesn't act like a soloists in a concerto, like the piano part in Scriabin. Rather it works with the orchestra, extending its range. This is a much bigger piece than Gondwana, and more sophisticated.

Terre d'ombre also refers to the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, bringing light to mankind. Murail's treatment is no way as profound and passionate as Luigi Nono's Prometeo (see links to that amazing piece in the subject list on right, below). Nontheless the dark, throbbing resonances do evoke a sense of primeval struggle. Poeme d'Extase it isn't. Note that even fifteen years before this, Murail was quoting passages from Scriabin in Gondwana, with its slowly building mountains of sound, themselves reminsicent of Messiaen's shifting tectonic plates.

Terre d'ombre is a spectacular piece, perfect for large scale auditoriums like the Royal Albert Hall, where its dark richness will wow the audience. The piece is only five years old, and Proms planning has a run in of several years. It is an ideal Proms piece and would be a huge hit. Much fuss has been made of the fact French music doesn't get Proms coverage "because of Boulez" which is a laugh, since even Boulez and Birtwistle were relegated to the "ghetto" of late night slots in recent years. So much modern French music, specifically Maurice Ohana and Dutilleux, is chamber music, not suited to the Proms ambience. Besides, why shouldn't the BBC favour British composers, even if they choose Thea Musgrave et al year after year?

Murail himself uses the metaphor of cooking to explain what he does. With his FM and computer generated calculations, he's working out the "chemistry". Boulez is more like an intuitive cook who just "knows" by instinct and experience. FM allows precise perfection. Boulez doesn't do much electronic/computer enhancement but without him, there would have been no IRCAM, no Ensemble Intercontemporain, no springboard for so many French (and British and German) composers. And in this Murail Immersion day, let's not forget, we heard Hugues Dufourt. (see the link below or use the subject list at right)

Photo of the paint pigment is from www.iconofile.com

Tristan Murail …amaris et dulcibus aquis…

…amaris et dulcibus aquis… takes as its starting point the “Medieval Michelin”, as Murail calls it, the travel guide for pilgrims crossing northern Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostella. Travelling in the Middle Ages was dangerous and uncomfortable so just making the effort was a sign of devotion. At each stage in the pilgrimage there were shrines to worship at, and bells. The cathedral bells of Santiago de Compostella were a wonder of the age. Imagine their sound, ringing out over the countryside in a world less overloaded with rubbish noise than ours!

Bells are ideal, too, for expressing the concept of spectralism. The moment a bell is struck, it sounds a particular pitch, but the sound vibrates, extending the palette, untuned, “spectrally” like a ghost.

Thus …amaris et dulcibus aquis… encapsulates many ideas central to Murail’s work. Technically the vocal parts are not “that” difficult, though at times they veer towards overtone singing. The vowels curl o a i u er as if the piece was haunted by Stockhausen’s Stimmung. Two synthesizers extend the tones.

Bells peal in carillon, creating complex patterns from simple repetition. The music replicates a kind of numerical pattern clearly focussed on the final destination. A long early section describes the four routes from which travellers begin the pilgrimage. It’s repeated twice as if it is being committed to memory – this was an age before printing, when communication was oral. There’s a strong directional thrust, the line …Una via exinde usque ad Sanctum Jacobum efficitur firmly enunciated. There is a purpose to this journey, it’s not just early tourism.

Then the 13 stages of the pilgrimage are individually enumerated, like in a chant : Pampiloniam, Biscartum, Stellam….culminating yet again in a firm Sanctus Jacobus Compostelle. Later the rhythmic discipline of bells is evoked. Each line in the next chant section starts with the same word, Deinde, entered with sharp attack, like the discipline of bells played in unison. Indeed, it comes over like "ding ding", especially as the synthesizers carry the voice part into deeper resonance. The earlier references to the four starting points return, so the music creates an effect of events happening on different levels and in different sequences : concepts of time, memory, reiteration, extending the spectrum of sound.

The sonorities are bell like, too, the darkest male voices like huge brass gongs, the highest female voices sharp and clear. The synthesizers create a kind of circular reverberation, like the sound inside a bell, perhaps, mysterious and profound. A climax builds up where sounds burst in full glory: have we reached the fabled sanctuary of St James ? Then, just as bells fade back into silence, the music evaporates.

There’s no recording as yet, but this is such an interesting piece that it’s worth getting the score from the publishers, Éditions Henry Lemoine (link below). BBC Radio 3 has a two hour broadcast of the day’s proceedings on its Listen Again Facility. Although it’s padded out at least it’s Murail himself talking about his work. …amaris et dulcibus aquiis… comes in just after 60 minutes, after Time and Again and Gondwana.

The photograph shows ancient bells in the cathedral courtyard at Santiago de Compostella. It’s by Greg Gladman, used on Creative Commons conditions, so don’t reuse without proper credit.

Score for …amaris et dulcibus aquis…
http://www.tristanmurail.com/en/oeuvre-fiche.php?cotage=27535

Tristan Murail Total Immersion

This is why I pay taxes. Each year the BBC sponsors a series at the Barbican in London for “total immersion” in a particular composer. It’s intense: whole days of music, talks, extra activities. In fact so intense that this year they’ve divided it into three separate days. Stockhausen Day was described earlier (follow the subject link on the right). Next month it’s Xenakis, and on Feb 7^th it was my favourite, Tristan Murail. Anyone who still thinks that Messiaen had no influence (and there are some) is totally deluded.

Messiaen taught people to find themselves, said Murail to Julian Anderson. In the evening, Pascal Rophé conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two early Murail works.

Gondwana was the land mass formed when the continents we know were once joined together. Very loosely, this describes Murail’s Gondwana (1980) when densely textured blocks of sound gradually evolve. The concept is Messianique, recalling Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, even The Quartet for the End of Time. Murail also references Sibelius’s Leminkäinnen in Tuonela, from the Kalevala saga, grounding the piece in tradition even though the harmonies were derived from frequency modulation (FM).

Time and Again (1985) was commissioned by Simon Rattle, with whom Murail played ondes Martenot on the famous CBSO recording of Turangalíla. Themes from Turangalíla pop up joyously, but the real tribute is in the way Murail unites Messiaen’s wayward exuberance with electronic techniques made possible by Murail’s use of FM and synthesized sound. If Turangalíla bothers some with its “cinematic” wildness, Murail makes it a virtue. Time and Again moves back and forth, as Murail says “replete with flashback, premonitions, loops…as if the listener were inside some sort of time machine”.

Murail’s more recent work is even more inventive. So much so, that I’ll write about ...amaris et dulcibus aquis….(1994/5 rev 2004) and Terre d’ombre (2003/4) in much greater depth later. Come back to this blog for more.

Murail’s “greatest hits”, Winter Fragments (2000) and Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978), were played by students of the Guildhall School of Music in the afternoon, joined by Rolf Hind in Territoires de l’oubli (1977), a thundering turbulence for piano. Plus the Hugues Dufourt Hommage á Charles Négre which is described below. But there’s only so much I can write at one go. So “watch this space”, as they say.

Prom 45 Varèse Harvey IRCAM Messiaen

I just had a message from someone (not Mark) saying "Just up on Mark's blog Boulezian is a WONDER
FUL review of last night's fantastic Prom". Read it even if you don't care about the composers. This is what music writing can be like. Pass it on !

Whoever devised this Prom should get a medal, too, as it was a masterpiece of intelligent programming. The very idea of electronic music terrifies most people, but it's really no more than using new means to expand the palette of possibilities in sound. Varèse was a fascinating visionary who imagined things beyond the technology of his time. He wrote for ondes martenot 17 years before Messiaen did, and used "found sound" like sirens. Boulez was his first big champion. Five years after Varèse's death, Boulez created IRCAM, giving composers the means to take music into an altogether new dimension. Indeed, IRCAM musicians are creating things that expand the very concept of music as multi-dimensional sound in space. Varèse was a rough-hewn John the Baptist heralding what was to come. Déserts and Poème eléctronique are well known enough I don't need to describe them. Read Mark's review and listen to the BBC broadcast of this Prom. The editorial filler is extremely well informed and accessible. There are little odds and ends I'd tweak but it's a wonderful introduction. Listen and understand how electro-acoustic music can be a natural evolution, opening new horizons. In fact, tape it "for study purposes" as there is a lot to take on board on one hearing.

The broadcast was almost compensation for not being there live. I didn't go because I didn't like Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala, an earlier part of the series to which the new piece, Speakings, belongs. This proves why it's not smart to dismiss what's strange and new. I will have to listen again and buy the recording ! Speakings is beautiful, ethereal. It's a good introduction to this kind of music because it's about "how" speech evolves, what communication is, why music "happens". Lots of tentative questing sounds, reaching out into space and silence. I suspect this sense of sound physically searching out through the auditorium would have been quite palpable in live performance. When the sounds connect, there's a spark, like electricity, and gradually the connections build up. There's another unexpected connection, to Elliott Carter's Caténaires, heard on the First Night, also about reaching out and finding links. Speakings is based on baby noises, the way babies learn to speak. Electro-acoustic music, or whatever you call it, is a whole new language we haven't yet come to terms with.

This isn't"difficult" either. Technology is used in the service of creating something expressive, not for its own sake. Mortuos plango, vivos voco is an earlier Harvey piece where his son's singing voice mixes with the tolling of bells in a cathedral. The Latin inscription refers to the bell mourning the dead while calling the living to prayer - past and present together. Hearing this with Messiaen's final, unfinished quartet and Tombeau de Messiaen, Harvey's early homage to his teacher, makes further connections, such as to Messiaen's ideas of time existing on many levels. In fact, listening to Messiaen's unfinished Concert á quatre on the BBC's listen again facility was a good idea because, having heard Harvey's open-ended, non-static music, it didn't matter so much that Messiaen never completed it. Instead, it hovers, tantalising us with what might have been. The old man was right. You're not dead just because your body packs in. Nor is Varèse. His spirit lives on in IRCAM.