Chris Swithinbank

Notes on notes in Lon­don

I was in Lon­don on Tues­day last week to at­tend Get­ting It Right? Per­for­mance prac­tices in con­tem­po­rary music, a day of talks and dis­cus­sions on per­for­mance, com­po­si­tion and all the ways the two in­ter­act at LSO St Luke’s. Or­gan­ised by Ju­lian An­der­son and Guild­hall School of Music and Drama, the var­i­ous speak­ers in­cluded Hel­mut Lachen­mann, David Al­ber­man, Michael Finnissy, Rolf Hind and Diego Mas­son, pro­vid­ing a va­ri­ety of per­spec­tives on the chal­lenges of new music.

Keynote Speech: Hel­mut Lachen­mann

Kick­ing off the day was Hel­mut Lachen­mann, 75 this au­tumn and un­doubt­edly one of the great­est pro­po­nents of ex­tended tech­niques and new sounds. His talk com­bined tales of his own ex­pe­ri­ences as he strug­gled with play­ers who faced ‘not only tech­ni­cal but also psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems’ with his un­usual sounds and some more ide­ol­ogy-dri­ven ideas about how and why he feels com­pelled to im­ple­ment these tech­niques. He de­scribed his shun­ning of tape for man­u­script (and pen­ning the moniker of ‘musique concrète in­stru­men­tale’), be­cause sound broad­cast by loud­speak­ers was ‘not so dan­ger­ous as it could be’, ‘you have only loud­speak­ers — like a pho­to­graph — this is a hand­i­cap’. He stressed through­out how­ever that

It’s not the prob­lem to find new sounds […] The prob­lem is to find a new way of lis­ten­ing and if you can find a new way of lis­ten­ing you can do it on [sic] C major, be­cause Palest­rina once used it and later Richard Wag­ner — the same three notes.

This treat­ment of ex­tended tech­niques not as ‘ef­fects’ — which is how they are often clas­si­fied in An­glo­phone cir­cles — but as es­sen­tial el­e­ments of the music, in­di­cates the aim not for tim­bral in­flec­tion but for tim­bral com­po­si­tion, in which the types of sound (‘Klang­typen’) can be used to build mu­si­cal struc­tures; tim­bres be­come the main mu­si­cal pa­ra­me­ter in­stead of pitches, which reigned supreme in most ear­lier music. He main­tains his be­lief in the power of ten­sion and re­lease, dis­so­nance and con­so­nance, which he learnt in har­mony and coun­ter­point classes, but builds struc­tures through a very dif­fer­ent lan­guage:

It is so im­por­tant to me that: It’s [ex­tended tech­niques] not funny. It’s not ex­pres­sion­is­tic. It’s not a protest against so­ci­ety […] It is ro­man­tic, a sort of dis­so­nance […] an­other pole to come back from to our cen­tre.

He also touched on his be­lief that music can be di­vided into music as sit­u­a­tion and music as text. So, Bach and Boulez, among oth­ers, he classes as mu­si­cal texts that can be re-or­ches­trated and pre­serve their es­sen­tial el­e­ments, whereas the open­ing of Beethoven 9 or the tremo­los in Bruck­ner 4 are sit­u­a­tions, the tim­bre of which are es­sen­tial to the mu­si­cal dis­course and must be pre­served. He spoke of aim­ing in his own music for such ‘me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal sit­u­a­tions’. (I also heard him speak about this last year and wrote about it here.)

When­ever I see or hear Lachen­mann speak, I am re­minded that this is a man of hu­mour and hu­mil­ity, de­spite his fre­quent por­trayal as the dour spec­tre of the ul­tra-mod­ernist Eu­ro­pean avant-garde. He joked about the Darm­stadt Sum­mer Courses as ‘a nice zoo full of ex­otic an­i­mals,’ that he was ‘a vic­tim’ of the trend there for ti­tles that de­scribed the com­po­si­tional process (e.g. Kon­takte, Zeitmaße, not to men­tion Xe­nakis’s ST/48,1-240162 and sim­i­lar works) in his cello piece Pres­sion (which is “about” pres­sure). He cares about the sounds he writes, but the ironies of his ca­reer are not lost on him. ‘I feel a bit heroic now,’ he quipped when dis­cussing the dis­rupted per­for­mances and dis­grun­tled play­ers he has faced. You can lis­ten to his talk at the Slought Foun­da­tion from 2008 here to get a taste of what this man is like in per­son.

Play­ing Around: Per­form­ers and New Music

One of the rev­e­la­tions of the day was David Al­ber­man. Sec­ond vi­o­lin­ist of the Arditti Sring Quar­tet from 1985-1994 and cur­rently leader of the sec­ond vi­o­lins in the LSO, Al­ber­man is glo­ri­ously di­rect, blend­ing a fierce com­mit­ment to new music with a sar­cas­tic wit that is well aware of the strong op­po­si­tion such music often faces. With the Ardit­tis he premièred Lachen­mann’s Sec­ond String Quar­tet ‘Reigen seliger Geis­ter’ and has writ­ten about Lachen­mann’s ex­tended string tech­niques. His prag­matic ap­proach to per­for­mance was im­pres­sive as was the time he clearly puts into a piece. He showed a ver­sion of a Fer­ney­hough score in which he had stripped out all the rhyth­mic brack­ets and cal­cu­lated tempi for every group of notes to allow him to learn the speed of each small ges­ture (the pro­por­tions of the rhyth­mic brack­ets being es­sen­tially im­pos­si­ble to feel or cal­cu­late in per­for­mance). He stressed the im­por­tance for a per­former of mak­ing their own mu­si­cal de­ci­sions even if they di­verge slightly from a lit­eral read­ing of the score — that you should never play some­thing in a way that you think is mu­si­cally un­con­vinc­ing. This might seem ob­vi­ous, but it pre­vents the ‘Oh, it’s sup­posed to sound bad, so that’s fine’ at­ti­tude you some­times come across and re­minds per­form­ers that they bear a shared re­spon­si­bil­ity for the music with the com­poser.

Both pi­anist Rolf Hind and con­duc­tor (and some­time per­cus­sion­ist) Diego Mas­son en­joyed telling some of the more hu­mor­ous anec­dotes from their lengthy ca­reers. Hind spoke about work­ing with György Kurtág on the open­ing of …quasi una fan­ta­sia…, for piano and cham­ber en­sem­ble, a de­scend­ing C major scale marked ppppp, Largo and con Ped.:

It tran­spired that Kurtág was ac­tu­ally look­ing for what Hind con­sid­ered to be an mf, An­dante, played legato with just a lit­tle pedal and Hind won­dered whether per­haps there could be a di­ver­gence of per­ceived in­ten­sity and feel­ing, and ac­tual acousti­cally ac­cu­rate de­scrip­tions — so this music should feel very quiet and slow, but achiev­ing this does not nec­es­sar­ily re­quire it to be very quiet and slow.

Kurtág has some­thing of a rep­u­ta­tion for being per­haps not the most po­lite of com­posers to­wards per­form­ers after per­for­mances and Hind re­called the best com­pli­ment he re­ceived after a per­for­mance of …quasi una fan­ta­sia…, ‘You played the open­ing so beau­ti­fully, why do you play the rest like a pig?’ and anec­dotes in a sim­i­lar vein flowed from Diego Mas­son, who glee­fully re­mem­bered his ex­pe­ri­ences in 1960s Paris. It should per­haps be more widely known that, ac­cord­ing to Mas­son, Pierre Boulez sup­ple­mented his in­come dur­ing this pe­riod by play­ing a white piano in a Parisian strip club on a stage sur­rounded by naked women. I’m as­sum­ing he wasn’t play­ing Struc­tures Ia. Mas­son said that they would play any­where from money, whether it be mod­ern music or radio jin­gles. He painted a some­what an­ar­chic pic­ture of this time de­scrib­ing a record­ing ses­sion for Lu­ciano Berio’s La­bor­in­tus II in which the jazz im­pro­vi­sa­tions roughly at the mid­dle of the work were recorded at 4 am as all the mu­si­cians were work­ing in clubs until then and played clips from those ses­sions with Berio and Edoardo San­guinetti (the li­bret­tist) per­form­ing some of the texts. The work had to be cut in two to fit onto an LP. How was it done? Side 1 ended and Side 2 started with stu­dio sounds, the back­ground chat­ter of peo­ple shout­ing pre-take, ‘Hey, pay at­ten­tion!’ etc. Per­haps a fore­run­ner of all those DIY-feel discs where you can hear the band chat­ting or jok­ing be­fore or after songs and it was the idea of a stu­dio hand who just hap­pened to be sweep­ing up while they were dis­cussing the prob­lem.

Build­ing Beauty

The final Q&A ses­sion of the af­ter­noon touched, among other things, on what beauty is or means to com­posers and mu­si­cians today. Lachen­mann wrote about beauty as far back as 1976, but his think­ing has al­ways been in­flu­enced by Adorno and truly con­cerns the aes­thetic rather than the beau­ti­ful, crit­i­cis­ing Boulez and other avant-garde com­posers for turn­ing away from think­ing about such things. At St Luke’s it was clear that the lin­guis­tic com­pli­ca­tions of mov­ing from Ger­man to Eng­lish may have ham­pered his ideas com­ing across. ‘I like beau­ti­ness [sic] … but art is an­other thing,’ he said, but it seemed his un­der­stand­ing of ‘beauty’ per­haps equated bet­ter to ‘pret­ti­ness’ as he went on to de­scribe Ennio Mor­ri­cone and Henry Mancini as beau­ti­ful. In­stead, ‘ex­pres­sion arises from the fric­tion be­tween the struc­ture of a piece and the struc­ture of our­selves.’ How­ever, he did feel that the con­cept of beauty was help­ful in work­ing with mu­si­cians on his music, as per­suad­ing a per­former to try and play a scratch or a dis­tor­tion ‘beau­ti­fully’ chimed with their learnt prac­tice of cre­at­ing a beau­ti­ful tone. It fits with mu­si­cians’ ideas of the ideal or per­fect sound, which they aim for when prac­tis­ing and play­ing.

Due to con­tin­u­ing fall-out from the Ice­landic Ash­poca­lypse, the string quar­tet due to per­form Lachen­mann’s Third String Quar­tet, ‘Grido’, were lack­ing a cel­list and we were treated in­stead to a pub­lic mas­ter­class on the work. In some ways ‘Grido’ is the most tra­di­tional of Lachen­mann’s three quar­tets, but it nev­er­the­less poses chal­lenges to the per­former. David Al­ber­man had de­scribed it ear­lier in the day as ‘a cathe­dral made up of bricks of sound, each brick of which leads into the next’ and it is this con­nec­tion from sound to sound that is so es­sen­tial to a suc­cess­ful per­for­mance. For some it may have been slightly un­com­fort­able to watch Lachen­mann focus on one sound for min­utes on end, ask­ing the play­ers to re­peat tiny ges­tures until they pre­cisely fit­ted to­gether, but it is this painstak­ing work which makes a good per­for­mance of these pieces truly pow­er­ful and with­out which they very quickly fall down. It also dri­ves home the im­por­tance to Lachen­mann’s music of his own work with mu­si­cians. Dur­ing his time in Lon­don he was work­ing in small groups with play­ers from the LSO who are per­form­ing his 2004 work for string or­ches­tra, Dou­ble (Grido II), in June and one won­ders how his music might sur­vive once he is no longer able to be at re­hearsals to ex­plain these de­tails. One hopes that com­mit­ted play­ers, like David Al­ber­man, might be able to pass on their ex­pe­ri­ences, al­low­ing the sounds and, more im­por­tantly, the mu­si­cal­ity pos­si­ble with such sounds to pass into stan­dard per­for­mance prac­tice, but it must be a fear that the knowl­edge, if it re­mains un­doc­u­mented, might be lost. That fear is pre­sum­ably why one holds con­fer­ences on con­tem­po­rary music prac­tice — to help spread knowl­edge of how and why to play this music. Mu­si­cians who have a true fa­mil­iar­ity with this reper­toire are few and far be­tween and for every mem­ber of the En­sem­ble In­ter­con­tem­po­rain, JACK or Arditti quar­tets, there are twenty tra­di­tion­ally-minded or­ches­tral mu­si­cians. I hope and be­lieve this is chang­ing in con­ser­va­toires around the world, but only time can tell. In the mean­time, those who care about this music have to en­sure that it has every chance to speak for it­self through high-stan­dard per­for­mances and com­mu­nica­tive play­ing. This music shouldn’t be sold as dif­fi­cult or dif­fer­ent, but as ex­cit­ing and ad­ven­tur­ous. And beau­ti­ful. For that is what it is.