The Ultima Festival of contemporary music in Oslo featured a rare opportunity to hear works of spectral music, writes Michael Dervan
The Ultima Festival, Oslo's annual celebration of contemporary music, is, like virtually any other event of its kind, a two-way showcase. It brings to Norway a range of music and musicians that might otherwise pass the country by, and it offers foreign visitors a concentrated exposure to what's happening among Norwegian composers and performers.
The 11-day festival concentrated its flagship events at either end of the programme. A specially commissioned clarinet concerto by leading Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino was placed near the start, and the composer had no less than three concerts devoted entirely to his music, as well as a range of pieces featured in other programmes.
The closing event was a complete performance of Les Espaces acoustiques, a 90-minute, six-movement cycle written between 1974 and 1985 by Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), one of the composers most closely associated with the increasingly influential body of concerns and techniques embodied under the description spectral music. The name, by the way, as with many another musical tag (including minimalism and sonata form), was coined after the event (in 1979, in this case), and not by the people with whom the techniques originated.
Spectral music takes as its starting-point the fact that all musical sounds can be analysed into simpler component sounds. The spectrum of an individual musical note provides the detail of what those component notes actually are. Strange as it may seem, the major difference between the tone colour of a note on the piano and a note on the flute is simply the difference between the strengths of those components. In fact, all musical sound can be analysed as a combination of pure sine-waves, those test tones you sometimes hear outside of broadcast hours on radio and television.
What the spectralists chose to do was to use spectral analysis as the basis for creating pieces of music, taking the characteristics and proportions of particular sounds, slices of a moment in time, and extrapolating this vertical information in various ways into the horizontal dimension of time.
There's a clear sense, then, in which spectral music is a music of transformation. But issues of transformation are manifest in other ways, too, since the resulting pieces often concern themselves with complex mutations of colour, and, in the case of Les Espaces acoustiques, also with other effects which mimic and recreate in instrumental terms some of the transformational techniques that first became possible in the hothouse of the electronic studio. Les Espaces acoustiques is long enough for a complete performance to take up a whole concert, but the music derives from Grisey's analysis of a low E on a trombone. The six movements are variously scored, from an opening Prologue for solo viola, through sections for ensemble (Périodes for seven instruments, Partiels for 18 instruments), and others for orchestra (Modulations for 33 instruments, Transitoires for symphony orchestra, and an Epilogue, for orchestra and four solo horns).
For the listener, much of Les Espaces acoustiques is static, giving an effect of turning on the spot, like a sophisticated, minutely calculated kaleidoscope for the ear. Although the music sometimes pulsates with considerable force, and is deeply concerned with changes of timbre over time, rhythm is less a feature than slower metamorphoses. There is also often a strong sense that the activity that concerned the composer most is concentrated at pitch levels higher than those normally manipulated in the act of composition. In this sense, the music often relates more to the experience of electro-acoustic music than to pieces for conventional instruments.
At its best, Les Espaces acoustiques (most of whose movements can also be performed as separate pieces) is as exotic and mesmerising as the aurora borealis, a display that's suggestive of dimensions normally little explored, even untouched. But, at least in this performance by Garth Knox (viola), with the Orchestra of Norwegian Opera and the Oslo Sinfonietta under Pierre-André Valade, there was a feeling that the music didn't always justify its length. The expectation that the study of psychoacoustics which lies behind spectral music, and the use of proportions derived from natural phenomena, should serve to make things entirely clear for the listener wes not entirely fulfilled here.
I only managed to catch the final five days of the festival, which included just one of the Sciarrino concerts, a deft exposure by the German Ensemble Recherche of music which is often as essentially timbral in concern as Grisey's, but in a way that's entirely different.
GRISEY'S work has been described as blurring the distinction between timbre and harmony. Sciarrino often seems to live on the borderline between timbre and noise - not loud noise, but noise as of breath and wind (he is especially renowned for his flute music, which earlier had a whole programme devoted to it in Oslo). It was interesting to hear some of his arrangements of an earlier Italian composer, Gesualdo, arrangements that in their own way revealed as much about Sciarrino as Webern revealed about himself in his famously idiosyncratic arrangement of Bach.
Ensemble Recherche also offered a programme which included live performances of music for film, Hanns Eisler's score for Joris Ivens's 14 Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (14 Ways of Describing Rain), and Morten Feldman's music for two artist portraits by Paul Falkenberg, of the painters Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. The live music seemed, paradoxically, an odd match for the films, altogether less atmospheric and of a piece with the imperfectly projected images than the original, cramped soundtracks would have been. The concert's film-less pieces by Feldman worked their usual magic of quiet, poignantly timed gesture.
Another highlight was Italian composer Luca Francesconi's Da capo, strong in sensuality and trajectory in the performance by French group Ensemble Court-Circuit, whose programme under Pierre-André Valade also included Norwegian composer Cecilie Ore's Nunquam Non, a work of agitated, microtonal fluttering, shot through with keening lines for wind instruments.
One of the programmes at the Henie Onstad Art Centre outside Oslo (the venue was once a major centre for contemporary music in Norway) offered an impressive performance of Henri Dutilleux's 1948 Piano Sonata from Sveinung Bjelland. At a concert in the main hall of the Norwegian Music Academy, pianist Håkon Austbø offered Rolf Wallin's Seven Imperatives for Piano, pieces which reminded me of György Kurtág's highly focused writing in his Játékok, but without Kurtág's phenomenal aphoristic discipline. And in one of the more unusual undertakings, the Norwegian Defence Forces Staff Band tackled a programme of Stravinsky (Symphonies of Wind Instruments), Olav Anton Thommessen (Lass' O deine Tränen), Scelsi (I Presagi), and Frederic Rzewski (Coming Together), an unusual and successful undertaking for a group of this sort.
The Ultima Festival has expanded greatly since I last attended it seven years ago. It now involves 17 partner organisations, and runs to nearly 80 events over its 11 days. It is impossible to attend everything because, even if you had the stamina, there are events which run at the same time and overlap. It may be due to the sheer abundance, or perhaps to the fact that Sciarrino's presence created a concentration at the beginning that was lacking in the days I was there, but the feeling I had was that there was some dilution of artistic focus compared with my first visit to the festival. But, from a Dublin perspective, that abundance alone would be welcome in the Irish capital, a city that's been without a contemporary music festival of note for more than a decade.
This year, of course, there are two new ones to look forward to: RTÉ's Living MusicFestival takes place at the Helix Centre from next Friday to Sunday, October 27th, and Up North!, a festival of Nordic and Irish music, runs from December 5th to December 8th. The latter features music from Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, taking in some 50 works, more than half of them, including 14 premières, from the 21st century. The times they are a-changin'.
