A frustrating squandering of 20 perfectly good pianos (and pianists)
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
The Huddersfield Festival likes to bag a big name in contemporary music to be “resident composer” each year, but some may balk at the choice of Christian Marclay. This is an artist famous for mixed-media installations, often involving found materials. His 24-hour film The Clock, which pillages hundreds of films for tiny scenes naming an exact time of day, is still entertaining audiences at Tate Modern. He’s made some witty sound pieces involving broken vinyl records. But resident composer at a music festival? Really?
At first glance, his brand new piece Investigations seemed to promise something musical. The floor of Huddersfield’s grand town hall was filled with 20 pianos big and small, and seated at each was a pianist, some well-known in the new music world, like Noriko Kawai, one or two from the jazz world, like Liam Noble. On each piano was a “score” consisting of 100 photographs of pianists, some showing two hands, some as many as eight, caught in the act of playing something complex and possibly Baroque, or a grand romantic melody, or a jazzy riff. The task for each pianist was to imagine the sound being played at that moment and conjure it up, with help from neighbouring pianists when needed. The result was sometimes euphonious, sometimes spiky and chaotic, and once – when a snatch of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto abruptly burst out – unintentionally hilarious. But overall it seemed a squandering of resources to show that chance can sometimes produce something witty.
The other pieces I heard over the festival’s first weekend were very different in their artful complexity. They were a reminder that the complicated quasi-mathematical systems that were once at the heart of new music are long gone. Now “haptic” pieces are all the rage, which – in case you’re wondering – means an approach to composing focused on the sheer physicality of sound. Listening to this kind of music is like feeling the grain of a log, or allowing sand to trickle through one’s fingers.
That sounds refreshingly innocent, but the pleasures it offers soon pall, as the two pieces by Rebecca Saunders performed on Sunday revealed. Much the more beautiful of the two was a piece for solo percussionist entitled aether. It was played by Dirk Rothbrust with balletic dexterity, and the sounds were indeed aethereal. Among them were glistening chimes from giant spinning triangles that seemed to whirl around one’s head, angelic voices from bowed metal, and unearthly groans from a softly scraped bass drum. Saunders arranged these sounds in a pleasing rise-and-fall of tension and relaxation, but given the array of sound objects on stage any ordering of thwacks and feathery strokes would have been pleasing.
More satisfying, because it actually engaged with unruly human passions, was Rundfunk (Radio) by fortysomething German composer Enno Poppe, a love-letter to the funky, futuristic sounds of Sixties electronic music, played by ensemble mosaik on nine digital synthesizers programmed to reproduce those sounds. Echoes of Stockhausen, Tangerine Dream and even gospel organ sounds mingled in unruly profusion, which at some points rose to the kind of winceinducing loudness normally encountered only in nightclubs. This was “physicality” with a vengeance, but it was witty and engaging too.