Chris Swithinbank

Good friends Trio Atem make their Lon­don début on 4 April with a con­cert as part of the in­no­v­a­tive ‘Out Hear’ se­ries at Kings Place. Gavin Os­born (flute), Nina White­man (voice) and Alice Pur­ton (cello) pre­sent a pro­gramme of new music by com­posers based in the North West of Eng­land along­side the work that first brought them to­gether, Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s temA. Also in­cluded in the pro­gramme is a newly re­vised ver­sion of my …going back to the skies, which they first premièred last year. Here is the pro­gramme in full:

• Manuella Black­burn — Triple Re­tort
• Ian Vine — Moon Phase
• Hel­mut Lachen­mann — temA
• Richard Whal­ley — Prob­lems Aris­ing from Sym­pa­thy
• Chris Swith­in­bank — …going back to the skies
• Nina White­man — The mod­i­fi­ca­tion of clouds
• Michael May­hew — Vinyl Rad­i­cal and Cor­ro­sive-E:(atomic~#99)

Michael May­hew’s work comes from his se­ries of graphic scores, The Alchemy Col­lec­tion, which first premièred in the au­tumn at the Whit­worth Art Gallery in Man­ches­ter. Here are some im­ages of ‘Vinyl Rad­i­cal’ from the se­ries:

It should be a great con­cert and I’m look­ing for­ward to it im­mensely, so buy your tick­ets now!

List­ings: Venue / Face­book / Last.​fm / My­Space / Song­kick

As it’s In­ter­na­tional Women’s Day, I won­dered how well that most re­ac­tionary of mu­si­cal beasts, the or­ches­tra, would stand up to tests of gen­der equal­ity. I won­dered how many fe­male com­posers were being per­formed by Man­ches­ter’s three or­ches­tras this sea­son, and then ex­panded my re­search into con­duc­tors, soloists and rank and file player num­bers. Per­haps un­sur­pris­ingly, the num­bers don’t look great.

Let’s start with the good news. Be­tween them, Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata, The Hallé and the BBC Phil­har­monic list 193 mu­si­cians as play­ers on their web­sites. Of these, 93 are women, or 48.2%. Ac­cord­ing to a 2009 Mid-Year Pop­u­la­tion Es­ti­mate avail­able from Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil women make up 48.8% of the pop­u­la­tion in Greater Man­ches­ter, so that pro­por­tion looks spot on. It is worth not­ing how­ever that gen­der bal­ance within sec­tions of the or­ches­tra seems to vary: the strings con­tain­ing more women while brass sec­tions tend to con­tain more men. The pro­por­tion of women to men across or­ches­tras is brought down by the BBC Phil­har­monic, whose ratio is closer to 3 women to 4 men.

That’s about where the good news ends. Of 77 soloists this sea­son, just 27 are women, a lousy 35%. That looks even worse if you take singers out of the equa­tion, drop­ping to 31.8%. That means less than a third of the mu­si­cians per­form­ing con­certi in Man­ches­ter are women.

The land­scape for fe­male soloists looks a lot bet­ter than that for con­duc­tors though. That’s be­cause if you were to take Man­ches­ter or­ches­tras as your guide there aren’t any. Not a sin­gle woman is being em­ployed as a con­duc­tor by any of the Man­ches­ter or­ches­tras this year. Not one. But 34 men are.

Com­ing back to my ini­tial cu­rios­ity. How many fe­male com­posers are being per­formed by these in­sti­tu­tions? The an­swer is: two. 99 names ap­pear on pro­grammes, some mul­ti­ple times, but the other 97 are all male. The names of this ap­par­ently lucky cou­ple are Nina White­man and Sally Beamish. Nina’s Win­dows on the Neva was pre­miered by Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata in Oc­to­ber, while Sally Beamish’s The Song Gath­erer (Cello Con­certo No. 2) was per­formed by Robert Cohen with the Hallé in De­cem­ber. Of course, the his­tor­i­cal na­ture of or­ches­tral pro­gram­ming means that or­ches­tras will have a quick de­fence: ‘the ab­sence of fe­male voices is an un­avoid­able re­flec­tion of his­tor­i­cal so­ci­ety.’ Hence the fact the only music by women com­posers played this sea­son is by liv­ing com­posers. Fair enough, but 13 dif­fer­ent works by liv­ing com­posers were per­formed by these or­ches­tras. 2 com­posers out of 13 still leaves us with just 15.4% women.

So, where are the women in your local music scene? It’s not that they don’t exist, but they are being ne­glected by some of the most highly funded and pres­ti­gious mu­si­cal in­sti­tu­tions. In a re­cent ar­ti­cle for the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, Joshua Kos­man wrote, ‘music lovers ought to be hav­ing a real de­bate about just what it means for an artis­tic ed­i­fice so grand and ar­rest­ing [as the Vi­enna Phil­har­monic] to be built on a foun­da­tion of more-or-less ex­plicit sex­ual and racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.’ His crit­i­cism holds true to greater and lesser ex­tents for or­ches­tras around the word. I would urge you to do the maths, work out what your local or­ches­tra — or what­ever cul­tural in­sti­tu­tion you value — looks like de­mo­graph­i­cally and ask the dif­fi­cult ques­tions.

Sources: Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata sea­son brochure; printed BBC Phil­har­monic sea­son brochure; down­load­able cal­en­dar from The Hallé; player lists on the web­sites of all three or­ches­tras.

Brian Fer­ney­hough at the RNCM

In the last week and a half it has been in­ter­est­ing to ob­serve from a dis­tance the build-up and fall-out from the Fer­ney­hough day in Lon­don. Thank­fully, the Radio 3 broad­cast meant I could hear the music as well as the sur­round­ing re­ac­tion. Radio 4 ran an item on the Total Im­mer­sion day ap­par­ently de­signed so as to scare off un­fa­mil­iar lis­ten­ers — or is any pub­lic­ity good pub­lic­ity? — and the bl­o­gos­phere swelled with re­sponses to both the music and the ac­com­pa­ny­ing ver­bal ma­te­r­ial, ei­ther in pre-con­cert talks or pro­gramme notes. You can hear the Radio 4 item on The Ram­bler where there are also two re­views. Other re­views can be found at Com­po­si­tion Today, Bor­ing Like A Drill (who also wrote about the Today pro­gramme item), the Guardian, Tele­graph and Lon­don Evening Stan­dard. In­ter­est­ingly enough, this was the same week that Anna Nicole opened at the Royal Opera House and de­spite vast mu­si­cal dif­fer­ences — and the hype for Tur­nage’s opera has been some­thing else en­tirely — these two events seemed to stir up some sim­i­lar de­bates: about com­pre­hen­si­bil­ity, ac­ces­si­bil­ity (what that means and whether it is nec­es­sary or valu­able) and the po­si­tion of art in wider so­ci­ety. Im­por­tant de­bates to be hav­ing.

Most in­ter­est­ing from the po­si­tion of an ‘out­side’ ob­server was how much the pre­sen­ta­tion of Fer­ney­hough’s thought at the Bar­bi­can seemed to have alien­ated peo­ple. At first this didn’t sur­prise me — Fer­ney­hough has a fear­some rep­u­ta­tion in a sim­i­lar way to how ‘Darm­stadt’ still pro­vokes an un­war­ranted and out­dat­edly fear­ful re­sponse among An­glo­phone au­di­ences — but then I saw him speak­ing at the Royal North­ern Col­lege of Music on Mon­day. He came to work with some of the stu­dents, pre­sent one of his newest works, Sisy­phus Redux, in a work­shop with flautist Richard Craig and field ques­tions from the au­di­ence in an open forum. Ob­serv­ing one of the stu­dent re­hearsals on Sun­day night, I was im­pressed by how un­be­liev­ably per­cep­tive he was in re­hearsal, pulling up the play­ers for the quar­ter tones and frac­tional rhythms that so often get glossed over as ges­ture or de­tail merely pre­sent to give a sheen of com­plex­ity to the work. It would be fool­ish to fetishise the com­poser’s ears, but it is worth not­ing that he knows what he wants and it is not just about com­pro­mis­ing the per­form­ers’ com­fort. Talk­ing about the short string quar­tet move­ment Adagis­simo (which you can watch with score on YouTube), he told the vi­o­list and cel­list, whose ma­te­r­ial is a slow-mov­ing har­monic layer in con­trast to the vi­o­lins’ fast, har­mon­i­cally sta­tic, jerk­ily re­it­er­ated ges­tures, that their ma­te­r­ial was ‘Sehn­suchtsmusik like Tris­tan & Isolde and that rub­bish’, it was ‘lead­ing note har­mony’, their 1/8 tones were there to push at each other, never quite reach­ing a promised pitch. A later tri­tone be­tween the lower strings he de­scribed as ‘un­re­solved long­ing’. He seemed to be a com­poser heav­ily aware of his mu­si­cal his­tory and tra­di­tion, but not ‘geeky’ (as one com­menter on Com­po­si­tion Today per­ceived it) or de­lib­er­ately ob­fus­ca­tory.

It was a sim­i­lar story in his work­shop with Richard Craig and later the open forum chaired by Fab­rice Fitch. The work­shop was in­tensely prac­ti­cal, mov­ing through the score, ex­plain­ing no­ta­tional prac­tices and com­po­si­tional processes, re­hears­ing de­tails in the flute part, dis­cussing dif­fi­cul­ties. Sisy­phus Redux uses the idea of Sisy­phus’s daily strug­gle of rolling his rock up the moun­tain as a com­po­si­tional im­pe­tus, each line of the score rep­re­sent­ing the com­poser’s at­tempt to out­think the gods and find a novel way round the chal­lenge of get­ting the metaphor­i­cal rock up the moun­tain. These phrases are not per­cep­ti­ble to the lis­tener, the title refers sim­ply to the com­po­si­tional im­pulse. In most of the work there are two si­mul­ta­ne­ous lines (or voices or processes, if you pre­fer) and Fer­ney­hough jok­ingly ob­served ‘It turns out that it’s much harder to do two lines on one in­stru­ment than it is say on a piano. I don’t know why that is but it just ends up like that.’ There is a sym­pa­thy for the dif­fi­cul­ties the per­former faces that doesn’t re­solve it­self in avoid­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties sim­ply be­cause they’re dif­fi­cult. As he put it, ‘I’m re­ally of­fer­ing the player mul­ti­ple paths through the learn­ing process.’

In the forum there were mo­ments that might have come across as more ‘aca­d­e­mic’, i.e. using po­ten­tially un­fa­mil­iar ter­mi­nol­ogy. What Tim Ruther­ford-John­son ob­serves in Les froisse­ments d’ailes de Gabriel as an at­tempt ‘to cre­ate a mu­si­cal thread that is im­pos­si­ble to as­sim­i­late, such that barely grasped rec­ol­lec­tions and im­ages pile up in the mem­ory, like the de­tri­tus of his­tory, to be sorted through on some as-yet-un­de­ter­mined fu­ture oc­ca­sion’ seems to me to be a char­ac­ter­is­tic at­tempt on Fer­ney­hough’s part to en­gage very di­rectly with ques­tions about how the au­di­ence is lis­ten­ing. Fer­ney­hough said ‘mu­si­cal lan­guage car­ries its his­tory on its back’ so it is hardly sur­pris­ing given his his­tor­i­cal po­si­tion that he is aware of and some­times uses ter­mi­nol­ogy bor­rowed from re­search in to per­cep­tion and brain sci­ence. That’s not aca­d­e­mic or ob­scure, it’s an hon­est at­tempt to deal with the re­al­i­ties he faces as an artist in a ra­tio­nal fash­ion. How­ever, given the op­por­tu­nity, he read­ily spoke in as clear terms as pos­si­ble about the prob­lems faced by both in­ter­preters and lis­ten­ers. Given the per­sis­tent richly de­tailed sur­face of this music, how does the per­former find the ‘op­ti­mum win­dow of re­gard’ so as to po­si­tion this con­stant flow of in­for­ma­tion in re­la­tion to the wider form? This ques­tion is not some ob­scure ex­per­i­ment in cog­ni­tive sci­ence but in­stead the age-old ques­tion of how do we make this speak? How do we give peo­ple a chance to en­gage with this ma­te­r­ial?

So what hap­pened in the Lon­don talks? Were they set up with old ex­pec­ta­tions un­ques­tioned or did Fer­ney­hough feel he was talk­ing to two very dis­tinct au­di­ences and ad­just his rhetoric ac­cord­ingly? It seems a shame if the op­por­tu­nity was missed to re-eval­u­ate a com­poser more thor­oughly in front of what was pre­sum­able a large-ish au­di­ence.

Hear­ing Richard Craig’s ex­plo­sive per­for­mance of Unity Cap­sule on Mon­day af­ter­noon, I was aware that the re­la­tion­ship of parts to the whole was some­how dif­fer­ent from what I was used to. A friend re­cently said he was both­ered that in his own music he was some­how lead­ing his lis­tener by the hand too much: ‘here is this ma­te­r­ial, now here is some­thing dif­fer­ent, now here they are trans­form­ing and in­ter­act­ing, etc.’ I ex­ag­ger­ate, but it is true that there is a re­mark­able lack of this in Fer­ney­hough. To bor­row from in­for­ma­tion the­ory: there seems to be very lit­tle re­dun­dancy in the sys­tem. There is no un­nec­es­sary gram­mar couch­ing ma­te­r­ial to clar­ify it, in­stead there is a con­stant flow (of many streams) whose form is in­ef­fa­ble yet still felt. At the end of Unity Cap­sule, I would not have been able ex­plain — as is often pos­si­ble — how the work fit­ted to­gether in terms of sec­tions and ma­te­r­ial nor does it fall into that cat­e­gory that in­cludes some­thing like Georg Friedrich Haas’s long-breathed, grad­ual tran­si­tions. In­stead I felt a su­per­fi­cially in­ex­plic­a­ble co­her­ence, per­haps mea­sur­able most straight­for­wardly as the level of en­ergy vary­ing over the course of the work, which ratch­eted up quite sig­nif­i­cantly in the last third, but must be put down to a mas­ter­ful achieve­ment on the part of both com­poser and per­former in reach­ing past our self-aware lis­ten­ing ap­pa­ra­tus to con­nect with us in a dif­fer­ent way.

To­wards the end of the open forum Fer­ney­hough said, ‘I don’t like the idea that music is sep­a­rated from life.’ The de­bate that Anna Nicole pro­voked — does it bring a tra­di­tion back to gen­eral rel­e­vance — is in fact one many mu­si­cians en­gage with, but in mul­ti­fac­eted ways. The route of poly­styl­is­tic music and pop-cul­tural plot lines is one of many such en­gage­ments not an iso­lated bea­con.

As a foot­note: One nice bit of fall-out from the re­cent focus on Fer­ney­hough is that you can down­load some of his scores, in­clud­ing the pieces played at the Total Im­mer­sion day, from Edi­tion Pe­ters: http://​issuu.​com/​edi​tion​pete​rs/​docs

On Sun­day, my tape piece from last sum­mer in­spired by the light­ness and quick­ness of aural ex­pe­ri­ence in urban spaces, La leg­gerezza delle città, will be played as part of the 15th bian­nual Man­ches­ter The­atre in Sound (MAN­TIS) Fes­ti­val. This edi­tion bears the title ‘Man­ches­ter’s Sonic Meta-on­tol­ogy’ and will ex­plore Man­ches­ter’s sounds through a va­ri­ety of con­certs and in­stal­la­tion pieces. You can find it here on Face­book.

On Mon­day, my solo piano work 3 Sun­sets re­ceives its sec­ond per­for­mance by good friend Se­bas­t­ian Grand. He plays a pro­gramme of land­scape-in­spired works that also in­cludes Ligeti’s Arc-en-ciel, Takemitsu’s Rain Tree II and Cage’s In a Land­scape in a short af­ter­noon recital at the Royal Acad­emy of Music. It’s in the David Jose­fowitz Recital Hall at 2pm.