Aspiration sometimes exceeded achievement among the composers featured at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. But the event, one of Europe's biggest new-music bashes, lived up to its reputation for the unexpected, reports Michael Dervan
DROR FEILER IS the sort of composer who makes it into the news pages rather than the arts pages of newspapers in this country. The installation, Snow White and the Madness of Truth, by Feiler and his artist wife, Gunilla Sköld-Feiler, was vandalised at an exhibition in Stockholm in 2004 by the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel. The artwork consisted of a basin filled with blood-red fluid on which floated a boat (the Snow White) with a portrait of Hanadi Jaradat, who had killed herself and 22 Israelis in a restaurant attack in Haifa in October 2003. Last April, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra's performance of Feiler's Halat Hisar (State of Siege)had to be abandoned on health and safety grounds, when the players were distressed by the volume levels. As the orchestra manager explained: "The piece starts with machine-gun shots . . . and that's the quietest part of it."
There were no machine guns called for in the Feiler works heard at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The most unusual elements were refuse collection trucks, one of which ground glass and wooden pallets against the sound of brass band marches in an outdoor performance of Basura(the Spanish word for rubbish). The other had a wired-to-the-sky bass-baritone (Martin Winkler) in the driving seat for Müll(rubbish again, this time in German), where Klangforum Wien's performance (with Feiler himself a balefully weaving presence in front of his laptop) offered a full vindication of the composer's reputation as a man more interested in noise than what's conventionally regarded as music. Müllis like a kind of chilli-hot food experience created on the basis that if you endure it long enough, the parameters of taste - or, in this case, hearing - will shift. Feiler lays on so much so soon in this work that he leaves himself almost nowhere to go. The music has the dense, threatening activity of molten lava, with moments of spitting violence to suggest the possibility of an imminent cataclysm.
Incredible as it may seem, the smaller number of players in Dror Feiler's Noise Orchestra play a lot louder again, as they showed for a full hour in the premiere of Music is Castrated Noise. Feiler says he views music as a filtered version of noise, and relates his interest in noise to his experience as an Israeli living in Sweden: "For me to be in exile, to be an immigrant, is like being noise in a musical context." In his programme note he pursues this argument in painstaking detail. The piece is the kind of experience that's interesting once, if you protect your ears, which I did for the full duration, save for a few peeps to hear what I might be missing. But it's not exactly inviting of a repeat. Feiler came across as a man desperately seeking to communicate the significance of his vision while stirred beyond his natural capacity for musical expression.
Feiler is 57. Klangforum Wien's other festival contribution was a portrait concert of a German composer nearly two decades younger. Enno Poppe, who'll turn 40 next year, conducted three of his own works - Knochen (Bones), Salz (Salt), and Öl (Oil)- pieces which in ways unusual for contemporary music actually relate to the titles (think of percussive knocking for the first, smoothness for the third). The most interesting was Salt, a substance which interests Poppe for the apparent paradox of its being essential to life while at the same time being constituted of two toxic elements, sodium and chlorine. The piece is at once seductive and unsettling, and makes remarkable use of a Hammond organ tuned to a 32-note scale, climaxing in a cadenza which exploits the vertiginous and disorientating possibilities of its microtonal scale with dazzling virtuosity.
THE FESTIVAL PAIDtribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died, aged 79, this time last year. The Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart gave a light account of Stimmung (Tuning), the famous 1969 exploration of a single six-note chord encompassing overtone singing, erotic poetry and magic names. There were pieces from the Klang (Sound)cycle, following the hours of the day, which the composer was working on at the time of his death (three of the 24 hours remain unfinished).
Pianist Nicolas Hodges gave a steely-toned account of the cycle's 24-movement Third Hour , Natürliche Dauern (Natural Durations, 2005-6), which spends much of its two-hour duration presenting strongly projected single notes and not always very interesting chords for extended contemplation.
The Ninth Hour, Hoffnung (Hope, 2007), is for string trio (members of musikFabrik) and has a strong retro feel but shies away from development in its obsessive repetitions. Litanei 97, "for choir and conductor" (the always excellent New London Voices under James Weeks), has the cassocked performers intoning and singing in a circle and occasionally dancing in tripping movements around the conductor (who also sings). It's a gobsmackingly strange piece, like a work that's come fully formed from a newly discovered foreign culture.
The text is autobiographical (Stockhausen was never shy in this regard) and the overall effect is both mesmerising and alienating.
Stockhausen's reputation has faded since the late 1970s, when he started work on his seven-part opera cycle, Licht (Light), each work named after a day of the week. His later music is even less well-known. The Huddersfield performances suggested that he never lost the ability to surprise. Getting a handle on his output is obviously going to take some time yet.
Glasgow-based Irish composer David Fennessy featured in two concerts. His Big Lungsets up a Brobdingnagian tug of war that pits two percussionists (Asuka Hatanaka and Tom de Cock, each with a much-used bass drum in their battery of instruments) against the formidable acoustic power of that beast which never needs to breathe, the organ (Kevin Bowyer). The result is a tussle of almost comic-book bluntness.
Foot Foot and Other Stories, for flute trio, percussion and tape, appeared in a choreographed concert by the Scottish Flute Trio. Fennessy's free-wheeling nature can be gauged from the fact that the two outer movements are "interpretations or cover versions" of two tracks from the Philosophy of the Worldalbum by the maverick, musically disjointed 1960s group, The Shaggs, and the central movement was inspired by the 2001 suicide pact of the Mulrooney sisters in Leixlip. Once again, the music was daring in its bluntness.
Bluntness was actually a feature of many of the concerts during a festival in which the major commitment seemed to be to work of an experimental or improvisatory nature. Sadly, there was a super-abundance of the kind of music where big-topic aspirations count for more than the achievement that can be discerned in the finished work.
YOU CAN ALWAYSexpect the unexpected at Huddersfield which, with more than 50 events, is the largest festival of new music in these islands.
This year there were performances by Crank, a trio (including Irish composer Scott McLaughlin) who perform transcriptions and newly written works for the tiny sounds of hand-cranked music boxes, and they shared a programme with pieces for the Piano Baschet-Malbos, a French invention with a piano keyboard linked to an array of rods and almost floral metal sheets.
It looked like something Jean Tinguely might have created, and Wilhem Latchoumia's performance of Nick Williams's Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, a grotesque, mad-scientist toccata, gave it a full workout.
Other highlights included musikFabrik in high-powered arrangements of pieces by jazzman Sun Ra; the ensemble Apartment House in Alvin Curran's wild and wacky Erat Verbum John(which featured in a modified recreation of John Cage's 1958 New York Town Hall concert); and a compact programme by the Arditti String Quartet (pieces by Paul Archbold, Roger Redgate, Brian Ferneyhough and Harrison Birtwistle), heavy-duty in content but astonishingly lucid in delivery.
