December 2010/January 2011
What you’re into if you’re into sound and music
SOUND TRAVELS Sonic culture in South Korea
JULIAN ANDERSON Sounds of wonder
DIFFERENT SPACES
New homes for classical performance
HOW TO...
Hack electronic notation
Welcome to the December issue of INTO Earlier this year Sound and Music put out a call to independent promoters and artists in collaboration with Café Oto, the east London venue that has become one of the city’s most welcoming spaces for new and experimental music since opening in 2008. The brief was for proposals that would bring international artists to the UK, either for a one-off concert or a series of events. Four grants were available to help small promoters wanting to work with overseas artists, often a costly undertaking for those on a low budget. You can prepare for the first of these events with INTO’s cover story, in which Ashley Wong visits Seoul and delves into the sonic art of South Korea. Balloon and Needle, the collective/label featured in the story, will be at Oto from 20 to 22 JanuaryLondon audiences a taste of the new Korean avant-garde, in collaboration with no.w.here. Check Published by Sound and Music www.soundandmusic.org Contact: into-magazine@soundandmusic.org
the Sound and Music News section for details of the other promoters and their events. Elsewhere in the issue, John Fallas takes a fresh look at Julian Anderson’s Heaven is Shy of Earth, following its performance in a new, extended version last month; while Phil Venables demands that classical music performance should get out of the concert hall and closer to the audience. In our How To feature, Richard Thomas reveals just a few of the ways composers can subvert and personalise notation software. INTO is taking a break until February, when we’ll be back with a new issue that looks at the year ahead in new music and sound. Frances Morgan Editor
Managing Editor: Shoël Stadlen Editor: Frances Morgan Designed by: Tatiana Woolrych Original Design: PostParis, www.artworklove.com
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Want to print your issue of INTO? Click here to download the PDF
What’s on in the UK? Click here to visit Sound and Music’s UK Listings
Cover Image: Royce Ng, John Bartley, Seung Jun Park, Reverse Engineering performance, Moonji Cultural Institute, Seoul. The opinions expressed in INTO are those of the authors and not necessarily those of INTO or Sound and Music. Copyright of all articles is held jointly by Sound and Music and the authors. Unauthorised reproduction of any item is forbidden.
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Contents
C ntents What we’re INT Pages 6–7
Sonic culture in south korea pages 20-27
NEWS Pages 8–15
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Julian anderson Pages 28-33
How to...hack electronic notation Pages 42-47
Contents
DIFFERENT SPACES pages 34-41
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What We’re into
Thomas Ankersmit, Hangar Performance, Tallin Norwegian music at HCMF
What we’re INT What we’re INTO is a small monthly round-up of some of the new music and sound that we’ve been enjoying at Sound and Music. Follow the links to see and hear our audio, video and interactive selections.
Julian Anderson and Mark Baldwin on creating The Comedy Of Change
T C fr A
Pye Corner Audio
Cage Against The Machine
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What We’re into
Jaap Blonk at Cut & Splice 2010
The Sound of Young Canberra compilation rom New Weird Australia inbflat.net
Gazelluloid experimental and avant-garde cinema
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News
NEW STREETWISE OPERA BRINGS TOGETHER MUSIC AND FILM at spitalfields winter festival
streetwise opera in rehearsal
An exciting new production by Streetwise Opera, the London-based opera company that works with homeless people alongside composers and filmmakers, will be performed at Spitalfields Winter Festival on 17 December. Fables – a Film Opera is a collaboration between composers Emily Hall, Mira Calix, Orlando Gough, Andy Mellon and Paul Sartin, and filmmakers Flat-e, Iain Finlay, Tom Marshall and Gaelle Denis. The composers and filmmakers have created four films which will be interspersed with live opera featuring 120 performers from Streetwise Opera. Fables sees the artists taking wellknown stories such as The Boy Who
Cried Wolf and Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose and re-interpreting these in film, performance and music, with magical lighting and design in the historic Shoreditch Church. Performers include members of groups and homeless centres from around the UK, all of whom have been involved in Streetwise Opera’s weekly workshops for homeless people. Following the premiere, the Film Operas will be screened at festivals and venues around the country, with productions including Nottingham and Newcastle confirmed, and more dates to be announced soon. www.streetwiseopera.org
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News
2010 British Composer awardS: young composers celebrated The winners of the 2010 British Composer Awards were announced on 30 November at Stationers’ Hall, London. This year’s winners are striking for their relative youth compared to the lists of previous years, with half the awards going to composers in their thirties.
Sonic Art: John Wynne - Installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner Watch here Choral: Sasha Siem - Psalm 140: Deliver me, O Lord
The full list of winners: Chamber: Raymond Yiu - Northwest Wind Listen here (you’ll need to scroll down the page) Community or Educational Project: Karen MacIver - A Head of Steam Vocal: Ryan Wigglesworth - Augenlieder Contemporary Jazz Composition: James Hamilton – The Causeway Suite Listen here Instrumental Solo or Duo: Cheryl Frances-Hoad – Stolen Rhythm
International Award: Unsuk Chin – Concerto for Cello and Orchestra Stage Works: Rory Boyle – Kasper Hauser Listen to a related podcast here Liturgical: Cheryl Frances-Hoad – Psalm 1: Blessed is the Man Wind Band or Brass Band: Philip Grange – Cloud Atlas Making Music Award: Kerry Andrew – Fall Orchestral: Brian Elias – Doubles www.britishcomposerawards.com
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News
NEW NORTHERN SINFONIA CONTINUES LATE MIX PROGRAMME The Northern Sinfonia and Northern Sinfonia Chorus bring new and less familiar music to Sage Gateshead with their Late Mix series, which began in October and continues through to April next year. With a range of works from Byrd and Tallis through to Thomas Adès, Late Mix concerts are adventurously programmed to design to encourage listeners to explore new musical territories. February’s concert features works by Harrison Birtwistle, Elliott Carter, Thomas Adès and Peter Maxwell Davies, with a performance in March of works by Judith Weir and Schoenberg. www.thesagegateshead.org
RARE SIGHTING OF NOISE TRIO BORBETOMAGUS Formed in 1979 and influential on a number of improvising and noise musicians, sax-led trio Borbetomagus come to the UK in December for dates at ATP and in London. The trio of Don Dietrich, Jim Sauter and Donald Miller play at London’s Luminaire on 7 December with support from saxophonist and Touch Recordings artist Thomas Ankersmit, vocalist and lap steel player Heather Leigh and psychedelic supergroup Rangda. Comprised of guitarists Richard Bishop, founder member of Sun City Girls, and Ben Chasny of Six Organs Of Admittance, with Chris Corsano on drums, Rangda bring together three key elements of the US underground in a furious live show. www.milesofsmiles.co.uk B
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News
london sinfonietta COMPOSER PORTRAIT OF BEAT FURRER AND NAOMI PINNOCK PREMIERE
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London Sinfonietta presents a composer portrait of Swiss composer Beat Furrer, a co-founder of Klangforum Wien, with a concert of his works Xenos and Nuun, for two pianos and ensemble, on 18 January. The programme also includes Words, a new work by Naomi Pinnock, who has studied with Harrison Birtwistle and Wolfgang Rihm, and was mentored by Furrer on this work. Words was commissioned as part of the Sinfonietta’s Blue Touch Paper scheme, which supports emerging composers. www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/event/portrait-beat-furrer
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News
NEW CREATIVE WALES AWARD AND NEW GLASS OPERA xxx FOR MUSIC THEATRE WALES Photography: James Bulley/Daniel Jones
Michael Rafferty
Michael Rafferty, Music Director and co-founder of Music Theatre Wales, was recently awarded a prestigious Creative Wales award by the Arts Council of Wales. Music Theatre Wales has also announced details of a new opera by Philip Glass, written especially for Music Theatre Wales, which will be performed in 2013.
One of eighteen practitioners to receive a Creative Wales award, Michael Rafferty co-founded Music Theatre Wales in 1988. Since then, the company has performed new chamber opera in Wales and worldwide, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, Philip Glass, Lynne Plowman and Nigel Osborne.
The opera, based on Franz Kafka’s The Trial, continues Music Theatre Wales’s relationship with Glass, which was established in the 1980s and recently saw the company perform the UK premiere of In the Penal Colony, a chamber opera likewise inspired by Kafka.
The award will enable Rafferty to spend more time researching new European music and developing new repertoire for the company. www.musictheatrewales.org.uk
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News
Symposia FOR 2011: JAZZ COMPOSITION AND BALTIC MUSIC Calls for papers have gone out for Leeds International Jazz Conference 2011 and Baltic Music and Musicologies, which is taking place at Canterbury Christ Church University in May 2011. Leeds International Jazz conference is a yearly event focussing on jazz education, composition, performance and research. After last year’s focus on improvisation, composition is the theme of 2011’s conference from 7 to 8 April, with keynote speakers Mike Gibbs and Tony Whyton. For suggestions of topics for papers and workshops, visit www.lcm.ac.uk/research-conference/leedsinternational-jazz-conference.htm . The deadline for submissions is 10 January. Baltic Music and Musicologies is a new conference on music of the Baltic region, in association with Sounds New and the Institute of Musical Research, which takes place from 26 to 28 May to coincide with the Sounds New Festival from 20 to 29 May, which also has a Baltic focus. Suggested topics for papers, proposals for which should be submitted by 7 January, include music, politics and identity, and compositional practice of Baltic composers, such as Pärt, Barkauskas, Ciurlionis, Rautavaara, Sallinen and Nørgård. Email eva.mantzourani@canterbury.ac.uk for more information about submitting a proposal.
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News
NEW NEW RELEASES FROM FATCAT COMPOSITION IMPRINT
130701, the classical and orchestral imprint of FatCat Records, has a number of key releases over the next few months. American pianist Dustin O’Halloran’s debut album for FatCat, Lumiere, expands on his previous solo piano recordings with nine tracks that also feature strings, from solo violin to string quartet. O’Halloran has also worked as a film composer, writing music for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and William Olsen’s An American Affair. Dusseldorf-based composer Volker Bertelmann, best known for his compositions for prepared piano, releases his third recording for the imprint under the name Hauschka. Entitled Foreign Landscapes, the new album features a 12-piece string and wind ensemble from San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra. www.fat-cat.co.uk
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BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH IN BARBICAN’S TOTAL IMMERSION SERIES The Barbican and BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion series continues with a focus on Brian Ferneyhough in February 2011. A day of concerts on 26 February will explore different aspects of Ferneyhough’s work, starting with an introductory talk by Tom Service before a filmed performance of Time and Motion Study II. The final concert of the day includes the UK premiere of Plötzlichkeit and the 1969 vocal work Missa Brevis. www.barbican.org.uk
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sound and music news
NEW SOUND AND MUSIC WEBSITE GOES LIVE
After a period of redevelopment, the new Sound and Music website is now live, with a number of new features and a brand new design. Along with UK listings and details of the current and upcoming Sound and Music events programme, the new site features an extensive Artist Toolkit, a resource for artists of all kinds and at all levels. Designed to give artists the necessary information to develop and support themselves, the Artist Toolkit includes fact-sheets about everything from promoting your work to managing freelance budgets. Some new series have been added, covering music scenes from cities around the world (Places) and sound and film (Sound on Film), and there’s a new monthly podcast, New Departures. www.soundandmusic.org
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sound and music news
award for NEW RESEARCH AND EDUCATION PROJECT A substantial grant from the Esmée Fairbairn foundation has been awarded to Sound and Music to fund a series of national symposia and associated research projects in 2011 and 2012, taking place in London, Cambridge, Birmingham and Manchester, to explore how composition is delivered in schools. The project is being run in collaboration with BCMG, with support from Britten Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata, Cambridge University, Manchester Metropolitan University and Birmingham City University. It will address some of the issues raised in the 2009 Ofsted report ‘Making More of Music’, which highlighted weaknesses in current secondary school music provision. This new project aims to address these issues through interaction between pupils, teachers and professional composers and performer, and will also involve the movers and shakers of the formal education sector in a bid to bring about significant change in the way composition is taught in schools.
CHARLOTTE BRAY IS ‘NEW STAR’ OF TURNAGE CONCERT Charlotte Bray’s year as apprentice composer in residence at BCMG culminated in the premiere of her violin concerto Caught in Treetops on 14 November in Birmingham, as part of a concert celebrating the 50th birthday of Mark-Anthony Turnage. The concert was reviewed in the Times, with Hilary Finch describing Bray as the ‘star’ of the concert and Caught in Treetops as “beautifully imagined”.
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NEW SEAN CLANCY IS NEW BCMG/EMBEDDED COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE
The new apprentice composer in residence for Sound and Music and BCMG’s Embedded scheme has been announced. Dublin-born Seán Clancy, who is a PhD student at the Birmingham Conservatoire, will undertake a 12-month placement with BCMG, culminating in a new composition that
will be performed in 2011. Seán Clancy is a founder member of the Irish Composers’ Collective, and has had his work performed internationally and at numerous festivals, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and RTE. www.seanlclancy.wordpress.com
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PROGRAMME ANNOUNCED FOR CAFE OTO RESIDENCY The artists and promoters selected for Sound and Music’s series of events in collaboration with London venue Café Oto have announced dates and details for four events, taking place from January to April 2010. In January, South Korean collective Balloon and Needle (featured in this issue’s cover story) will present performances, screenings and workshops on the new Korean avant-garde, followed by Lost Sounds in February, which brings together German artist Rolf Julius and Japanese artist Miki Yui for a unique collaborative concert and exhibition at Oto and Soundfjord. Two key figures from the tradition of musique concrète, Michel Chion and Ghédalia Tazartès, are in discussion and concert in March, and in April legendary Japanese noise artist Keiji Haino has a rare two-night residency. Sound and Music’s initiative with Oto has provided grants for these event organisers and promoters in order to allow them to take curatorial risks and develop ambitious ideas, and create performance platforms for international artists who rarely visit the UK. Based in Dalston, East London, Café Oto has programmed a large and eclectic series of events since opening in 2008, with artists from the worlds of jazz, folk, improvisation and noise performing to growing audiences. www.cafeoto.co.uk
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south Korea
Sound travels: South Korea’s sonic culture
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Ashley Wong visited Seoul to take part in the Sound@Media Festival, and discovered a lively culture of sound and music, both live and online. She introduces some of the people and projects working with music and sound in South Korea, and asks: is there a South Korean sound practice? Upon first impressions, Seoul is a vast city with large wide streets that are impossible to navigate without a car, which makes it, as any metropolis, a particularly noisy place to live. The air is dry and cool as the autumn weather creeps in late; unusual weather patterns have brought unforeseen amounts of rain in the past year and the Han River, which runs through the city, is uncommonly swollen. The city, with its mix of industry and skyscrapers, is perhaps slightly dirtier and more chaotic than Japan, but much more organised and safer than China. Signs of gentrification are noted by the trendy coffee shops that pop up around the city – there is a modern obsession with black, mild filtered coffee in Korea. Influenced by Japanese design,
south korea
many of the cafes are decorated with homemade miniature furniture or vintage pieces. Seoul, with a population of 10 million, makes up for nearly a quarter of the entire population of South Korea. Celebrated as a modern designdriven capital, I was excited to be invited to present the film Sound in Context (2009) as part of Sound@ Media. I wanted to ask of this highly developed Asian city: what can we understand as sound practice in South Korea? In most places around the world, cultural communities, as we understand the definition in Europe and North America, are much smaller in terms of diversity of practices, number of artists and infrastructures for supporting work. Sound occupies a small corner within the arts field, which occupies another small fraction of a larger social political space. So when it comes down to it, communities for sound are small no matter where you go, but especially small beyond Western countries, which have mostly been the source of influence of contemporary cultural practices and discourses in sound.
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Each city and region or locale has its own take on culture that takes particular influences from abroad. What is borrowed and integrated into local cultural thought is often influenced by geopolitics, trade and historical alliances. One can only gain a small sense of the complexities of the flows of culture through a short visit to a city – especially with limited knowledge of the history and cultural specificities of the place. As a result, this is a purely observational perspective from the various encounters and discoveries of my time in Seoul. Situated adjacent to the northern part of China and hanging over Japan, Korea’s main cultural partners (due to geographic vicinity) are Japan, Taiwan and China. As a modernized society, Korea has lesser political, economic and cultural affinities to South East Asia than to US and Europe. There is a strong hip-hop culture, which is largely a result of the cultural proximity to Japan and Japan’s close political and economic affiliation to America. As with most other East Asian societies, Korea also has its unique star system of celebrities and pop singers. The local popular culture has great influence regionally: Korean soap operas, for instance, are particularly popular across China. Korean culture, however, has little
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moonji cultural institute
balloon and needle release
seoul sound
sound map
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visibility beyond the continent, besides within immigrant and overseas-born communities abroad. Successful Korean artists abroad such as Berlin-based artist installation and multi-disciplinary artist, Haegue Yan, have gained notoriety internationally and as a result locally, though their work perhaps has greater relevance in an outside context. There are artists in Korea who seek to find a place in communities abroad. Label and group Balloon and Needle successfully embed themselves within a wider discourse and community of noise and improvisation in Japan and Europe. They bring together local artists in collaboration with Japanese ones like Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide and Austrian artists like Klaus Filip, facilitating a mixture of practices and sounds. Balloon and Needle position themselves uniquely as representing Korean sound, but in conversation with those abroad. However, an interesting reflection of the Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance is that the common language of communication between Korean and Japanese artists/musicians is English. In many ways, Balloon and Needle represent a gateway for cultural dialogue in sound and experimental music between Korea and the outside world. As expressed by founder Hong Chulki, there is much more infrastructure for the support
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Sound and art in South Korea TEXTURE/FRAGILE SuperColorSuper RecandPlay Tacit Group REVERSE ENGINEERING
ByungJun Kwon (now at STEIM) Swann Che SFX Seoul Festival Festival Bom
screening of sound in context
BYUNG JUN KWON ARTIST’S TALK
CHOI JOONYONG, PARK SEUNGJUN AND DYDSU
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Balloon and Needle position themselves uniquely as representing Korean sound, but in conversation with those abroad of international cultural exchanges in Europe than locally. Exchanges abroad are more plentiful as the many cultural institutes support and promote cultural exchange in Europe. In fact, Balloon and Needle will be bringing a group of artists from Korea for a residency at Café Oto in January supported by Sound and Music. As the community is larger in Europe, the main audiences for this kind of work is abroad, and it is likely artists working in the field will seek opportunities elsewhere. However, with a limited number of artists and audiences, how does one develop
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a local community and discourse in sound? Sound@Media (www.som.saii. or.kr)is a year-long programme of sound produced by the Moonji Cultural Institute, Saii in Seoul. Moonji began as an independent publisher for Korean literature, publishing a range of subjects from sciences and education to philosophy and social theory. Saii is the branch organisation for the development of cultural projects. As described by project manager Jiyeon Kim, ‘Saii’ in Korean means ‘gap’ or the space in-between – in a positive sense, rather than a meaning of distance. Formed in 2008, the organisation hosts workshops and education programmes as its main source of income, alongside a range of creative programmes including events, talks, performances and projects. Saii’s starting point is literature, including areas of philosophy and cultural theory, and it has developed programmes that explore the relationship between literature to sound and media art. Following last years’ programme, Text@Media, which brought together writers and media artists, Sound@ Media explores practices of sound through online and off-line activities. The project provides a platform for local engagement with sound, yet at the same time, places it in dialogue with discourses abroad. Through the translation of texts and invitation of artists and curators such as Lina
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Dzuverovic (Electra), Steve Goodman (Kode 9) and Robert Henke, Sound@Media as an online platform creates an international discourse with translated writings from local writers and critics in its features section and commissioned articles. In addition to the featured articles, there is an online campaign to create a sound map of Seoul, in which visitors to the site can upload their sounds or field recordings of the city and map them online. The project takes influence from the many sound maps that have been created in cities around the world, but also integrates an element of the local culture into the project to engage Korean audience with sound and the project. There is also YOU.MIX.POEMS, an online application produced in collaboration with a media artist that allows users to mix poems of Shim Bosun and Kim Soyeon. The popularity and influence of these poets meant that Korean audiences were keen to participate in the project – resulting in some intersections of sound, media art, and literature in a Korean context. The fact that the projects are in Korean does not lessen the value of the work, despite its lack of intelligibility to an English audience. Though influence is taken from cultural practices abroad, there is a lack of translation that flows outward. What matters more is its influence locally and in dialogue with the people en-
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Sound is able to operate between boundaries and to challenge modes of production and distribution gaging in the work. As Moonji publish their books solely in Korean and these are rarely translated to English, this might be where many potentially enriching ideas are hiding. Work that does not participate in the global language or cultural context will remain invisible, except to those who strive to understand. In South Korea, or any other place that has a less developed discourse and infrastructure for the arts, sound and culture, one is free from particular hang-ups over genre, discipline and formalised practices of an established cultural system. With fewer artists developing well-defined practices in each area of work, there tends to be more overlap, mixing and confusing of areas of work. As a result, there is more opportunity to invent the system and to disregard any rules and structures of practice. As an emergent practice, sound is able to operate between boundaries and to challenge modes of production and distribution. It is within the gaps or spaces-in-between where culture can emerge that can function on a local and global level. It is one matter to understand the flow of culture according to geopolitics, migration and the global economy,
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but it is also important to find and value those informal relationships where sound and culture can develop meaning beyond dominant discourses and continue to blur, mix and complicate. Ashley Wong is an artist, cultural producer and researcher based in London UK. She has produced projects and events in Canada, Hong Kong and UK. She is founder of independent arts platform LOUDSPKR and co-founder of international research collective DOXA. She works as a freelance producer for Sound and Music. www.loudspkr.org
south Korea
Listening post
Seoul sound map
YOU.MIX. POEMS
Hong Chulki, Amplified WC
Hong Chulki live in Lausanne, 2010
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julian Anderson
SOUNDS OF WONDER
As Julian Anderson’s Heaven is Shy of Earth is premiered in a new version, John Fallas listens to this and other recent works by Anderson, and finds in them a unique perspective on nature, religion, Emily Dickinson...and John Cage. It’s not a new piece, but it’s a big one, and it just got bigger. Julian Anderson has added a new, 10-minute third movement to his Heaven is Shy of Earth for solo mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra, first heard in a five-movement version at the 2006 BBC Proms. Audiences at the Barbican Centre and listeners to BBC Radio 3 heard the result on Friday 26 November. It’s a major statement, a summation of Anderson’s musical concerns of the last decade. As in several other choral works from that period, it sets religious texts in a context which inflects their meaning away from denominational Christianity. And it is the latest in an even longer line of works by Anderson that celebrate the natural world. Taken together, these two facts place it in a tradition of large-scale choral-orchestral works in which its two most notable predecessors are Janáček’s Glagolitic
Mass and Martinů’s Field Mass. But it also takes a cue from a rather different corner of twentieth-century music, bringing to light ‘unexpected affiliations’ akin to those I investigated in the music of Kurt Schwertsik and Martin Butler in previous INTO articles. The work’s basic structure is that of the Ordinary of the Mass, but into the familiar Latin texts Anderson inserts two poems by the nineteenth-century American recluse Emily Dickinson. Her visionary apprehension of nature (“Blue is Blue – the World through – / Amber – Amber – Dew – Dew –”) tilts the whole structure away from heaven, as it were, and towards the idea of nature itself as sacrosanct. But Anderson also found a sympathetic expression of the same idea in a remark by John Cage. Speaking of his Roaratorio, Cage commented that: “It’s not in the church, it’s out there in the world…or
Julian Anderson
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Joyous complexity and the most direct simplicity seem to exist as part of the same spectrum rather, the world has become a church.” Cage is not a new presence in Anderson’s music. ‘Beautiful Valley of Eden’, the second of his Four American Choruses on Gospel Hymn Texts (2002–3), consists of four voice parts whose moment-to-moment coordination is unpredictable (each section of the choir sets its own tempo), although each part in itself is both self-sufficient and completely diatonic. The image Anderson had in mind as he composed was of four separate choirs singing hymns on different mountaintops, but the technical cue came from Cage’s Apartment House 1776, in which four soloists sing music from four different religious traditions. Around the same time, Anderson was also inspired by Cage’s unrealised idea for a piece, Atlas Borealis, which would feature ten ‘thunderclaps’ modelled on the ten long compound words (which incorporate the words for ‘thunder’ in different languages) in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This is the origin of the four thunderclaps, modelled on spectrogram analysis of actual storms and recreated orchestrally, which punctuate the formal progress of Anderson’s single-movement Symphony (2003). Such evocations of natural sound feature in Heaven is Shy of Earth, too, but perhaps the most immediately evident connection between its orchestration and that of Anderson’s earlier works from
Symphony onwards is the use of certain instruments tuned a quarter-tone below standard pitch. This usually involves one flute and one clarinet doubling on these tuned-down instruments, and it allows Anderson to use quarter-tones in very fast music without requiring any of the orchestral musicians to read or finger quartersharps or quarter-flats. Where necessary, material is split in ‘hocket’ fashion between the tuned-down flute/clarinet and other instruments tuned to normal concert pitch. There is also an electronic keyboard tuned down a quarter-tone, which supplies the extra pitches to the normally-tuned piano or harp. In Symphony and in Book of Hours (2004) for ensemble and electronics, the use of these quarter-tones is confined to specific sections, and serves a largely structural function. It is in the short orchestral work Eden (2005) that the potential of these tunings both to inform a melodic style based on folk music and to build quasi-spectral chords based on natural resonance begins to be central, and this style continues into the first, fifth and sixth movements of Heaven is Shy of Earth. As in Messiaen and Bártok, the sense is of the world outside the concert hall as indeed an ‘Eden’, something like a state of grace before which the music stands in homage. The melodic aspect is central to all of
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Anderson’s music. Eden grows from its opening viola and cello melodies (the performance direction, come una musica virginale, is in fact borrowed from Brian Ferneyhough’s Funérailles: another unexpected affiliation!) into chains of hockets ecstatically tumbling through the orchestra like bells. Heaven is Shy of Earth, despite the complexity of its orchestral writing, is even more organically related to the simple, modal flugelhorn melody which threads through its orchestral introduction. Joyous complexity and the most direct simplicity seem to exist as part of the same spectrum, rather than in opposition to one another. Both are rooted in an idea of music as a communal enterprise, and this idea of music is also felt in Anderson’s writing for choir. The texts of the Four American Choruses seem to preecho the intimate, charmed language and sensibility of the Emily Dickinson poems used in Heaven is Shy of Earth, and they serve a similar function – a non-religiouslyspecific sense of innocence and wonder. If the choral and orchestral elements of Heaven is Shy of Earth both develop aspects of its most immediate predecessors, then the solo mezzo-soprano (Angelika Kirchschlager at the 2006 Proms premiere, Susan Bickley in last week’s Barbican performance) stands out as separate. This is the first occurrence of a solo voice in Anderson’s music since the
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ecstatic Shir Hashirim (2001) for soprano and chamber orchestra. Solo voices had occasionally emerged from the choir in the Four American Choruses – most notably in the fourth, ‘At the fountain’– and the style of the mezzo in Heaven frequently recalls their gentle, bluesy lyricism. Elsewhere, she is alert with a kind of visionary ecstasy. Sometimes she sings the same text as the chorus (either the Mass texts or the Dickinson poems), and in these cases her more individual, melodic manner, while audibly different from the chorus’s more corporate/communal style, may be heard as complementing rather than opposing it. But in the two movements where the Mass texts are interrupted by Dickinson poems (the ‘Gloria’ and ‘Sanctus’), there is a sense that the soloist is aligned with – and perhaps even personifies – Dickinson herself. That the soloist should embody an individual consciousness at the heart of the work makes good sense in terms of Anderson’s future trajectory: he is currently working on a full-length opera based on Sophocles’ three Theban plays, and the solo female voice will be literally central to that work, since the second act will focus on Antigone to the exclusion of all other female characters. But the mezzosoprano’s dramatic presence in Heaven is Shy of Earth also leads, in ‘Gloria (with Bird)’, the new movement premiered last week, to what seems to be something quite new in Anderson’s treatment of a religious text.
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the soloist’s Against Dickinsonian interjections, the choir in this movement represent for the most part the more conven tional religious sentiments of the Latin text. Unusually, rather than using the Dickinsonian context to neutralise what we might call the ‘ideological’ content of the Mass into a simple expression of communal spirituality, Anderson emphasises the potential of their collective adoration to spill over into hyste ria. The final section of the movement dramatises the conflict between this hysteria and the soloist’s vision of a bird flying free. And yethere also in the orchestra are loving recreations of the sounds of bells, and of the wind: all of nature distantly resounds, and the orchestra enacts the outdoor world that the soloist and the chorus, in their different ways, celebrate.
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Dec 10/jan 11
DIFFERENT SPACES
What happens when classical music is taken out of the concert hall and into Soho pubs and Berlin nightspots? Phil Venables says a change of scene is what’s needed to keep live music fresh. Berghain is the best nightclub in the world. On a Sunday morning at 4am, in a disused power station on the east side of Berlin, you can queue for hours and, if you’re lucky enough to get in, it’s like nowhere else on earth. You can listen to world-class minimal techno, dance like crazy, take drugs, get drunk, have sex in public and even, would you believe it, smoke a cigarette indoors. But on Monday night I came here to see countertenor Andreas Scholl sing Dowland, Purcell and Haydn, with interludes of recorded Shostakovich over the towering speakers. When I arrived I was struck dumb: 500 people, most of them in their twenties, queuing to get in. It felt like 4am on a Sunday.
Different differ the NIGHT SHIFT AT THE ROUNDHOUSE
035
Dec 10/jan 11
DIFFERENT SPACES
ifferent spaces, rent faces?
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Dec 10/jan 11
DIFFERENT SPACES
Yellow Lounge, the promoters of this event and many others like it, regularly present unadulterated classical music to throngs of young people in the places where those very people usually hang out. They know that finding new audiences is vital for classical music to prosper, and they don’t expect the uninitiated to wander into concert halls. Let’s be honest, they aren’t exactly welcoming places. Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t a problem. Classical music in the UK is painfully inaccessible across social, ethnic and economic demographics, and we are doing little about itvRecent research by the University of Sheffield suggests that people on the street haven’t a clue what a symphony or a concerto is, but they can tell a watercolour from a still life. Even urbane 20-somethings planning time out with friends might consider a play at the Donmar, an exhibition at the Tate Modern or a gig at Ronnie Scott’s, but rarely a concert in the Royal Festival Hall. And that’s in London: you’re screwed if you live in Bradford, Dundee or Sunderland.1 Statistics back this up. The Arts Council’s annual Taking Part survey indicated 60.3% adults (30 million people) engaged in the arts at least three times in the past twelve months, down from 62.5% in 2006, of which 15% is classical music, opera and ballet. You might think this doesn’t seem bad, and
indeed a different Arts Council survey with more relaxed criteria produced conflicting results showing audience figures rising recently to about 17%. But these figures hide the demographic imbalance: our concert halls are packed with old, white, middleclass people whereas ethnic minorities, young people or those on low incomes are conspicuously absent. The Arts Council’s “box ticking” approach (to quote Jeremy Hunt) has not worked. But if we take a public subsidy for our work, we have a moral responsibility to be as inclusive as we can. We know that music can provide enjoyment, enlightenment, health, achievement, self-esteem, a sense of citizenship, shared experience, escape, solace, inspiration, skills, community cohesion, productivity, compassion and empathy and – music to George Osborne’s ears – investment.2 Why wouldn’t we share that around? So, a revolution! Let musicians out of their concert halls! Let them speak out, dress down, loosen up! In a recent Guardian interview, Jonathan Harvey said, “Nobody should be deprived of classical music, least of all by silly conventions.” Absolutely! These conventions have nothing to do with the music, but merely alienate swathes of society. Harvey caused a stir. The torrent of responses was starkly divided, some of those vehemently against smacked of snobbishness, which belied their authors’ lack of understanding of
1/ www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat
2/ A selection of items identified by the Culture and Sport Evidence Programme. www.culture.gov.uk
Andreas
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Dec 10/jan 11
DIFFERENT SPACES
ndreas Scholl at the Yellow lounge
Classical music in the UK is painfully inaccessible, and we are doing little about it
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Dec 10/jan 11
young people. They implied that the austere conventions of classical performance somehow enabled a meaningful listening experience. What rubbish! Acoustic singersongwriter nights in pubs, poetry readings in bars, performance art shows in cabaret venues and experimental jazz nights in warehouses show young people sitting riveted, silent, capable of full attention without any tedious ritual. So what are we doing about it in the UK? Events as successful as Yellow Lounge are sadly few and far between. But one such is the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s Night Shift seies, which is most successful when at the Roundhouse in Camden (normally a pop and rock venue). Earlier this year they performed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with Vladimir Jurowski, using mild amplification to help the period fiddles fill the back of the hall. 1,200 people were ‘permitted’ to go to the bar, walk around, chat during the performances. 80% were under 35 and 33% were students: most had rarely or never attended a classical concert. The players (albeit still wearing black concert dress!) talked about the music without condescension and with genuine enthusiasm. The crowd was silent, still, captivated. Another organization working magic like this is The Little Proms.
DIFFERENT SPACES
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Dec 10/jan 11
DIFFERENT SPACES
‘We’d like to make it as easy to go to a classical concert as it is to go to an indie or rock gig’ – Little Proms
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Dec 10/jan 11
azlitt at The
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of classical repertoire to the wider world. And then there’s embarrassing events like the Serenata Festival, peddling Katherine Jenkins et al, which, like so many ‘crossover’ events, don’t help foster audiences for classical music any more than Strictly Come Dancing fosters an audience for ballet. So, composers, performers, promoters: next time you put on a concert, think again about where and how you present it. Don’t shut up the bar after the concert like they do in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Don’t wear clothes that you last wore to a funeral. Don’t ambivalently enter and exit the stage without at least talking to the crowd that has paid money to see you – yes, you – perform. Bring your music to pubs, clubs, bars, pop music venues, youth clubs, shopping malls. A serious, appreciative listening experience can be achieved without banal traditions in boring venues. We all, young or old, want to meet people, find a community of like minds and expand our horizons through attentive, inspiring, collective experiences. Life outside the concert hall can be infinitely more exciting. Embrace it; others will follow.
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Although the repertoire they cover could be a bit meatier, The Little Proms puts on magnificently unpretentious and well-attended concerts in a pub in London on the first Sunday of every month – all for free. They say, “We’d like to make it as easy to go to a classical concert as it is to go to an indie/ rock gig”, and it seems they have followers. David Cameron would be delighted: hoodies have been spotted there hugging and dancing to the music. Other initiatives appear to do the right thing but in reality achieve less when it comes to broadening access. ENO and Punchdrunk’s 2010 production of The Duchess of Malfi took place in a deserted building in London’s docklands, but the audience was predominantly a regular ENO audience, a little irked at having travelled all the way from Notting Hill during tube disruptions. Of course, ENO had laudable artistic aims behind this production (as I wrote in June’s INTO), but they couldn’t really stake a claim to ‘outreach’: leaving the opera house and taking your audience with you doesn’t count. Contemporary music has naturally been more daring when it comes to getting out on the streets. Projects like Twisted Lounge, Shunt, Café Oto and Latitude Festival really help, but none of them addresses the core problem, head on, of opening up the heart
DIFFERENT SPACES
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Dec 10/jan 11
DIFFERENT SPACES
Listening post
little proms
Yellow Lounge live videos
The Night Shift
Performances at Shunt
Reverie at Little Proms
042 30
Dec 10/jan 11
HOW TO hack electronic notation
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Electronic typesetting programs are now very popular ways for composers and copyists to create scores. Programs such as Sibelius and Finale have become ‘industry standards’ in notation and it can be much faster to listen back to your work on sampled instruments, create parts from scores and to input material via MIDI keyboard, computer keyboard and mouse input than with handwritten material. However, they have their limitations – some with workarounds, some without. Graphic works, or those with unconventional performance directions, can be very difficult or even impossible to input. Being able to make a work such as Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise would be impossible, and works with different uses of staves or time-space notation can be difficult to execute. It can also be challenging to make your music stand out on the page and become your own, as so many composers use the same software and often take the path of least resistance while doing so. Here are a number of ways which computer notation can be used to get around these limitations, or even open up new ways of composing. Some of these ways require a degree of computer programming experience and some do not – they all have their own strengths and weaknesses.
HOW TO hack electronic notation
All the programs listed below will work on Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows (XP onwards). Some will also work on Linux and Unix. Lilypond and OpenMusic are also free.
Plugins
Both Sibelius and Finale, although both closed-source programs, have allowed users to write their own ‘plugins’, small computer programs which can perform a particular task, be it to deal with a typesetting issue, or generating musical material. The documentation and a number of approved plugins for Sibelius are available here: Sibelius have their own programming language, ManuScript which has a PDF manual. Finale also have a development kit, which is aimed more at computer programmers; the plugins are written in C++.
Lilypond
A quite different alternative to mainstream notation programs is Lilypond, an engraving program that can produce scores which look more similar to traditionally engraved scores. The most notable difference, however, is its input method: instead of using a graphical interface, the score image is ‘compiled’ from a text file, similar to more traditional computer programming methods. This can make input of material very fast, compared to graphical methods. Although this may appear difficult at first, once you get used to it material can be repeated, copied, transposed, moved,
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Dec 10/jan 11
inverted and so on by processing material. Advanced programming techniques can be used. There are also graphical editing programs for Lilypond if the text input doesn’t suit you.
Computer-aided composition
Composers working in the field of algorithmic composition have used computers to calculate material within compositions for some time – one of the more recent and simple ways of doing this is through IRCAM’s OpenMusic . It’s a graphical programming language, similar to Max/MSP and Pure Data but focussed on score creation. Objects such as random value generators can process
lilypond
HOW TO hack electronic notation
pitches and rhythms. OpenMusic can also send and receive MIDI data from other programs, such as Digital Audio Workstations or other notation software. There are some useful examples in the Algorithmic Composer blog.
Graphical output
If you really want to mess around with layout – twist, bend and distort notation, add images etc – there are a number of ways you can do this, most of which are easier outside of any of these notation packages. The easiest way is to first export your score material as an image. Then, as you have an image file, there are a wide range of desktop publishing and image manipulation programs you can use to alter your
SCORE BY JUKKA-PEKKA KERVINEN
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Dec 10/jan 11
score. Handwritten/physical material can be added by scanning or photographing. Here are some examples on the New York Miniaturist Ensemble site.
Examples
Adam de la Cour does a great deal of work working with graphic scores, a lot have as much influence from comics as they do from traditional notation. An example here is Sock!, created using the free Comiclife software. He has also done work which includes creating scores as pieces of art in themselves: Cube, displayed at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) has instructions inscribed onto faces of metal cubes using sketches which were then turned in to
HOW TO hack electronic notation
programs for a CNC milling machine to create a three dimensional score. Aaron Cassidy’s work, on the other hand, involves very specific notation for performers focusing in the score on individual physical actions involved in playing, rather than the sonic result. For example, hand positions, breath and pressure could all have separate staves for the same performer. This style of score, for example Being Itself a Catastrophe, the Diagram Must Not Create a Catastrophe (or, Third Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) (2009) was created in Finale. He says: “As with all my work since around 2005, I’ve been particularly precise about spacing (overriding all of the Finale defaults, using my bar 1-15
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Dec 10/jan 11
In contrast, Aaron has been developing notation based on combining the information of multiple staves into one in his Second String Quartet (2010): “This one was quite a big leap for me, notationally (emerging out of an attempt to take my multi-stave, multi-parametric tablature notation from earlier works and condense all the relevant x/y/z axis motion onto a single stave, hence the colours). “The score was made primarily using Adobe InDesign. The background layer of all the metrical information and the basic staff layout was generated first in Finale (again with the same precision about bar widths and such) and then exported as a pdf. The bow and finger movement information itself was all done with InDesign. I made an initial set of templates for all of the possible hand positions, finger spacings, bow pressures, etc, plus templates (swatches, in Adobe lingo) for all of the possible transitions between states, and then those were copied and pasted and stretched and distorted in a variety of ways. “The nice thing about the Adobe Create Suite is that all of its various software subcomponents are interlocked, so that a change in one program will be automatically updated in another. So, to take a simple example, if I changed a rhythm in Finale and then resaved the exported pdf, InDesign notices the change and updates the background ‘layer’ image in the score.”
HOW TO hack electronic notation
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