Waterford new music week, which opened on Monday and runs until today, is an initiative of the Waterford Institute of Technology's music department, so the week's schedule is heavily loaded in favour of workshops and master-classes. The visiting performers - violinist Darragh Morgan, the Dutch ensemble, Electra, and the Welsh piano duo, Helen and Harvey Davies - are all involved in workshops. And the visiting composer, Louis Andriessen from Amsterdam, is giving daily master classes.
Andriessen is a political animal for whom the master classes have an important social as well as musical function. He digresses widely and loosely when talking of his own music, but remains helpfully clear and focused when discussing the students' works. It's an approach which carefully balances support and challenge, though the shortage of interaction, even of observable responses, made it difficult to work out exactly how the challenges were going down at the session I attended early in the week. WIT's head of music, Eric Sweeney, had set up a workshop on Andriessen's wind band piece, Symphonies of the Netherlands, with students and players from local bands. The composer's relish at this coal-face encounter was as palpable as the positive impact of his comments on the playing itself. However, the planned wrap-up discussion never really acquired any significant momentum, in spite of a generous helping of Andriessen's intentionally provocative bon-mots: "being a composer is a totally ridiculous occupation"; "sometimes music has to be irritating - that is like life"; "I like wrong notes also"; "most composers compose only for other composers"; "pop music is a visual art, it's got to do with dance and images". Part of the problem was the sheer breadth of Andriessen's musical engagement - the riches, complexity and paradoxes of music as he lives and feels it were obviously not yet shared by many of his Waterford listeners.
Tuesday's all-Andriessen concert by Electra featured two works with the composer at the piano. He says he's no pianist, but the playing was lucid, carefully-weighted, and clear in expressive intent. What Shall I buy you, Son?, not so much a song as two songs in one, written in a style blending cabaret and 20th-century French flavours with an Andriessen twist, was premiered in Waterford with the affecting, clear-voiced soprano Marije van Stralen. And Le Voile du Bonheur, for violin and piano, originally written for a didactic collection, is another double-dose piece, tacking a "teenage tune" for singing violinist (Monica Germino) to the end of the plainer original. The concert also included an unofficial, sneak preview of The New Math(s), a short Hal Hartley film (three people grappling with equations, apples and each other) with a soundtrack for tape (Michel van der Aa) and live musicians (Andriessen).
The major impact in the two days I spent at the Waterford festival came from a 1970s Andriessen classic, Workers' Union, heard in a metallically explosive version for solo percussion (Tatiana Koleva) and tape.
And the 1960s were not neglected either. Lucia Mense rocketed through the daunting leaps of Sweet (1964) for solo recorder, written well before the composer came to form his current style from his encounter with US minimalism.
The most notable works in Monday's lunchtime solo violin recital by Darragh Morgan were Siobhan Cleary's Bunuel-inspired The Andalusian Dog, grotesque and plaintive, with an agitated twist at the end, and Joe Cutler's essay in an "imaginary ancient folk music", (re)GAIA.
