In mid-September I was in London – all too briefly; and I apologise that it took so long to write about it...
I can remember some of my response in words, at least, even if the visceral immediacy of it has faded.
The short form: I went down to London, merely overnight, on a day when it was pleasantly, and unexpectedly, hot in the south (not so here in the north, I ended up lugging my leather jacket across London and back).
Rolf Hind organised a couple of concerts that focused on gay and lesbian composers, and wanted three of us to introduce them – a half-hour panel with Philip Venables, whom I hadn't previously known, and Freya Jarman, an old friend. It was great fun talking through the whole, grand history, for me since the mid-1980s, of talking about gay and lesbian studies in music, what they might mean, what they might not mean... and the intense reactions of people who can't stand them.
The weather changed the tone of everything – by London standards, it was hot and sweaty, but in a pleasant, freeing sort of way: some men on the street tended to look fairly muscular and energetic. Including one of the pianists, the muscular and energetic American Adam Tendler... the whole trip had an unexpectedly erotic tone to it: man-watching is not often a great pleasure in London (at least not compared to Barcelona, San Francisco, etc., etc.), but the guys were at their best: busy in a citified way, carrying things and waiting for buses, all the while in shirts cut off at the shoulder, with the current trends towards muscular gym fitness and beards...
But this is, at least mostly, about the music.
Much of the concert was – how can I adequately speak of this? – truly dazzling. Early modern to high modern to postmodern, a number of works that were intensely demanding, that stretched time and one's sense of the possible – you know that there are twentieth-century works that really seem to wake you to different levels of consciousness (like minimalism at its best, or more atonal works that set up elaborate, complex patterns, then expand the ground they seem to be occupying, all the way out to... ah sometimes it's just too hard to explain).
Transcendental musics: not quite like the emotional passions of major nineteenth-century works, but experiences that alter one's sense of time and space and awareness...
I'm not explaining this well.
Erotic, powerful music: is it possible that the fading of my long engagement with the avant-garde, so fascinating for me for most of my life but less so in the past few years, is simply because I'm depending too much on recordings? Because, as I've learned often enough, the ability of a performer to play highly complex musics doesn't guarantee that they can make the works 'fly', so to speak. A favourite example: Roger Woodward's demented, universe-shattering performance of Barraqué's Sonate seems to be disappointingly unique: knowing that I like the sonata so much, at different times I bought CDs by two other performers. In both cases, brilliant, hand-stretching virtuosity, but... no life. No shock, no crack across the sky, no sense of time as both unbearable and electric with passion...
Am I making any sense at all here? In any case, the sad truth – that too many performances of difficult modernist musics don't manage to carry the works across mere virtuosity, mere complexity, to bring the works into vivid life. Which can make the difficult process of performing them a bit useless...
But I'm talking about a performance where that didn't happen: where the dark electricity of Claude Vivier's Shiraz, of Julius Eastman's vast, strange Gay Guerrilla, were experiences of another, and more astounding, world: the kind of music that wakes you up to time and all its inarticulable transformations...
Rolf was amazing, as was Siwan Rhys. Others such as Zubin Kanga and Eliza McCarthy, also quite wonderful. One of the more unexpected events of Tendler's performance was a suite of Henry Cowell pieces – and another shock: he made them work, made them sound like real and important music. My experience of Cowell's piano pieces always previously suggested those pieces by George Crumb where the percussionists sing and recite poetry – sure, it's never been done before, and gosh good for them, but... ultimately a bit tacky/embarrassing. Those pieces often feel like not quite being willing to focus on a tacky stage performance, like mere bad acting.
But this performance was nothing like that... Cowell seemed like, well, a major composer, doing brilliant work: not just somebody scrubbing their hands across the strings. And I've never even imagined his work could be that way
Well, perhaps you see what I'm aiming at...
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A minor addendum: last night I read Alessandro Baricco's Mr Gwyn. The first book of his that was translated into English was Silk – which was beautifully subtle, but a bit like a parable (think The Pearl or Being There). Mr Gwyn is larger, more substantial, and – well, again, hard to explain: a writer stops writing, going into a kind of performance art, in an attempt to do something that seems really authentic, really remarkable. And incredibly subtle, incredibly meaningful at each tiny step of the long journey. It's a beautiful book, really impressive: and one of those that moves art out of the world of publicity and sales, of repetition and vanity, into something – ah well can't really explain. But: go read it.
•••
And another, my subtitle 'appealing to the passions' – have you ever read Max Beerbohm's essay, 'A Clergyman'? Perhaps the funniest, most bizarre, most unexpected things he ever wrote... go find it....
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