Contemporary Classics November 27, 2018 - Huddlersfield Contemporary Music Festival

Tonight is the second show reflecting on the music presented at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which ended this past week.  This show and last week’s show was created as a result of my meeting and recorded conversation with Graham McKenzie at the Modulus Festival in Vancouver British Columbia

I don’t have any recordings of the music of Christian Marclay that will be played at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival this year.  So to represent Christian Marclay I will be playing his Graffiti Composition. Graffiti Composition by Christian Marclay began as a street installation in 1996 before being converted into a score and recorded.  During the Sonambiente sound art festival, Marclay plastered 5,000 blank posters of sheet music throughout the city. Most of the posters were plastered over or torn down, but with those that remained, passers-by added fragments of musical notation, drawings, writing, graffiti, and abstract marks. The properly written music included scales, waltzes, and drinking songs. Participants sometimes modified each other's writings or made jokes such as an instruction to "repeat yourself until your friends are embarrassed."  All of these scores were photographed  the scores.  150 of the 800 photographs of the posters were selected for the score.  Marclay stated that he was "not only interested in breaking the tradition within the music or whatever I'm making, but also bringing it into a different location, to a new audience." 

The album was recorded live on September 13, 2006 during a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Elliott Sharp conducte Vernon Reid, Mary Halvorson, and Lee Ranaldo on guitar; Melvin Gibbs on bass guitar; and Sharp on eight-string bass guitar. 

“Signale zur Invasion, I” – as presented here is a version for solo trombone – is part of the opera Tuesday which is one of Stockhausen's 7 opera cycle “LICHT” [“Light”]. The composer has the protagonist Lucifer musically represented by a trombonist. From the very beginning, this work has been connected with Svoboda who had been discovered by Stockhausen when he was a young musician.  Svoboda worked with Stockhausen on the development of the score. The total score presents the melodic "superformula" on which the structure of Licht is founded in its most basic form, though the choreographed movements carefully notated in the score.  However in this part of a part, the large scale structure doesn’t really come across in this performance.

Salvatore Sciarrino is a generation younger than those pioneering figures of modern Italian music but his Seventh String Quartet (1999) grew out of that same pool of vocal and choral influences from which the earlier music was developed.   Sciarrino speaks to how it is necessary ‘to free the voice from inert imitation by instruments’; how the ‘superficial pleasure’ of old vocal motifs ‘runs contrary to actual expression’, an agenda which redraws the rule book fundamentally when reapplied to instrumental music. The Seventh Quartet is a compressed nine-minute miniature that obsessively repeats the same gestural terrain, moving ahead slightly, rewinding back to where it started. The whole piece tumbles out from a simple falling glissando, a basic vocal-derived gesture that sounds at first daringly naked and raw but which is tripped soon enough into interlocking webs of notes separated by sudden silences and long held notes: a mad scene for string quartet.

Terry Riley began composing Shri Camel in 1975 on commission from West Germany's Radio Bremen, and performed an early version of the work in Bremen in May 1976. The following year Riley recorded at CBS Studios in San Francisco a different version of the piece, separated into four suites: Anthem of the Trinity, Celestial Valley, Across the Lake and Desert of Ice.  However, CBS did not release the complete recording until 1980.  For the studio recording, Riley performed the work solo on a modified Yamaha YC-45D combo organ tuned in just intonation and augmented with studio digital delay.

This work uses just intonation, a method of tuning instruments in which the frequency of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. The end result is a harmonic sound different from modern western harmonies and more like classical Asian music. “Shri Camel” has a stately classical Asiatic sound and a slower unfolding of events that mimics classic Chinese and Korean court music. Many consider that the end result is one of his finest compositions.   Listen to the music one can imagine Riley in the mid-80s in which he described living on the edge of the California dessert and arising each morning before dawn to face the east in prayer and meditation. This album perfectly captures that unbelievable feeling that arises from the dessert during those poignant pre-dawn moments. Listening to this music can release long lost feelings of spirituality.

Shri Camel is cast in four pre-conceived but largely improvisatory movements. The first movement, "Anthem of the Trinity," begins with a gradual and unmetered exposition of what will become the basic musical materials of the piece. Scholars compare this to the alap in Indian music, a free-form improvisation that precedes the performance of a composed work and demonstrates the features of the raga or scale upon which that piece is constructed. (The title of the movement lends some credence to this idea: the "Trinity" refers to the three greatest composer-saints of Carnatic music, Dikshitar, Sastri, and Tyagaraja.) The Dorian-mode ostinato patterns that dominate the piece are set into motion, but instead of falling into regular metrical matrices they form fluid strata of varying pulse patterns. This practice continues in the second movement, "Celestial Valley," but expands into new modal colors and striking electronic timbres. Riley's skill as an improviser is clearly demonstrated in the intricate contrapuntal web Riley develops here, partly through the aid of real-time digital delay effects. The third movement, "Across the Lake of the Ancient World," borrows a pattern from the first movement and alters it somewhat to create a steady ostinato, above which an elaborate set of theme and variations takes place. The same borrowed material reappears in the final movement, "Desert of Ice," woven into a dense texture of counterpoised figurations and coloristic timbres.