Purposeful Listening 13

Hot/cold

After interviewing BA for the last issue of PL, I’ll admit I was anxious at the recent turn towards narrative taken for their collaborative theatre piece, PIGSPIGSPIGS. Everything I knew of theirs before this had been music-theatrical in the Kagel sense: not music with theatre, but music as theatre; music itself as an inherently theatrical act. By introducing actual stories, actual characters, costumes, sets etc, I was nervous that the music might end up relegated by all that other stuff. Would BA’s innovative spark be extinguished by the necessities of a simple song-and-dance show?

After seeing them perform PIGSPIGSPIGS at the Wigmore Hall last weekend, I know I needn’t have worried. There are musical ‘numbers’ in PIGS – notably a long, piano-led song/instrumental wig-out that is essentially the act one climax – but much more of the sonic work takes place at the edges of music, somewhere between atmosphere, foley and mickey-mousing. If you act – if you just do something – you make vibrations in the air (sound) and articulate a point in time (rhythm). All actions, then, are but one step removed from music; or are like music; or even, occasionally, are music itself. And this was the aesthetic premise on which PIGS rested.

It was clear things would be OK early on, when Caitlin Rowley (as farmer’s son Noah) and Timothy Cape (as his girlfriend India) mimed long drags on a joint, accompanied by a banal inhale-exhale of mouth organs. That simple pairing of mime and music did so much work. It was, all at once, the visual and haptic translated into sound; a breath given harmonic shape (the harmonicas’ inherent plagal cadence); stage actions as musical rhythm; and a pretty decent joke. And when the harmonicas’ wheezing was incorporated into the song that followed, the lines between all these things were definitely erased. This, I realised, has always been BA’s genius: taking isolated musical or physical units and expanding them across every possible dimension.

PIGS also mined heavily that rich, anarchic seam that runs from Victorian music hall to Vic and Bob and beyond. Edward Henderson’s two-handed, two-jacketed conversation between the farmer and a shady real estate developer was an excellent piece of comedy business; and in Josh Spears’ send-up of an Anglican vicar, I caught whiffs of Rowan Atkinson and even Peter Cook. Like music, all actions are potentially comic, and the best moments of PIGS where when the action did a bit of both.

Which is not to say everything was perfect. I’m not sure the story resolved itself completely; and while the opening fifteen minutes were brilliantly energetic, the momentum sagged around the middle. One or two crucial lines got swallowed by the Wigmore’s acoustic (it really hasn’t seen anything like this before). I wasn’t that bothered though. All the above was enough for a good time.

Recording reviews

Apologies for the late delivery of this issue. I came back from London with a stinking head cold that put the brakes on me all last week. Nevertheless, I’ve found time to dig into Alex Paxton’s latest and have a bit of a mither about surfaces, sensuality and deeper meanings; to listen to a pair of wintry recordings by Laura Cannell; and take my third dive into Samuel Vriezen’s 94 Fantasias (part one here; part two here).

Before that, I want to add a quick word for a pair of live recordings by John Tilbury of late piano pieces by Feldman, released on true blanking: For Bunita Marcus, recorded at the I&E Festival, Dublin, in 2007; and Palais de Mari, recorded at Tectonics, Reykjavik, in 2012. Feldman fans won’t want to miss these. And although the latter recording is marred slightly by an audience phone going off in the last few minutes (SWITCH OFF YOUR DAMN PHONES), these are brilliantly hovering, shimmering performances by one of Feldman’s greatest interpreters.

Alex Paxton: Candyfolk Space Drum (Jonah Records)

I think Candyfolk Space Drum was the first piece of Alex Paxton’s I heard, at its London Sinfonietta premiere in 2022. That was a remarkable concert that also featured two works by that other great composer-trombonist, George Lewis. I remember being quite taken aback: half an hour of Paxton’s technicolour bamboozlery is a lot to absorb when it’s your first time. He was soloing too, there was a school choir (the brilliantly excited kids of Belham Primary School), a jazz drummer, all sorts. Lewis, in the audience, approved: his laudatory speech for Paxton’s winning of the Hindemith Prize in 2023 credited Paxton with creating ‘a new, creolized identity for classical music’. It definitely tapped into Paxton’s experience as a primary school music teacher, and everyone seemed to have an absolute blast.

This album – Paxton’s fifth in as many years – pairs CfSD with Blue Chew Cheerio Earpiece, played by Riot Ensemble, the orchestral Pullback Hat Biome Dunk (featuring improvised vocals by Jennifer Walshe) and Carpig for electronic keyboards, played by Zubin Kanga. Undoubtedly, he has hit on a rich and fluent way of doing things. Equally, there is nothing else that sounds like his music. Those are obviously good things, and they have brought Paxton to the forefront position he now occupies in British and European music. Where I start to worry, though, is that while nobody else writes music like Paxton, all of Paxton’s music sounds like Paxton’s music.

I know this because, since that 2022 premiere, I’ve written about it several times – in notes, blurbs and reviews – and I’m starting to run out of vocabulary. I had to invent ‘bamboozlery’, above, just to balance out the over-used ‘technicolour’. But then, I wonder, is that really the problem I think it is? Paxton is hardly the first composer to hit on a pleasing and original way of doing things and to stick with it. Indeed, this is what most of the best do.

So what about it that bothers me? If I’m honest, I’ve started to find it all a bit one-note. Paxton told me once that his aim when composing was to invest every moment with as much sensuality as possible. And while this is a laudibly populist goal, it does foreclose a number of expressive possibilities. In addition, pushing everything up to the surface in this way – making surface itself almost an ethical position – does rather drive one to think (and, yes, to write) only about that surface. And along the way, you run out of words.

What I want more of is not only darkness, banality and barrenness but also a sense of form or purpose with which to grapple. There’s a little of that in the short Pullback Hat Biome Dunk, Walshe’s improvised vocal describing with tragicomic delight the down-the-hatch-and-back-up-again life story of an unwise pina colada (‘You think it’s going to taste like an exotic holiday, but it’s not … Just hold my hair back …’). It’s all over in a flash, is never quite what it seems, and ends in a chirping, chattering halo of regret.

And, to be fair, the emphasis on grooves in Blue Chew Cheerio Earpiece gives that piece greater stability than your typical Paxton; I like too its tendency to fragment rather than saturate the sonic space. There’s a great moment in part five, ‘YOUR MOM Still Laughing’, when everything drops out to leave some faint synths and a bit of vinyl static that is genuinely surprising and suggests that Paxton is mindful of overdoing his schtick. When this material gets developed, via a weird recorder/sax chorale thing, we get a sense of what the underbelly of Paxton’s music might sound like – and I really like it. The default remains the hyperactive, luminous colours stuff, but I could get into this different dimension.

Laura Cannell: The Medieval Drone Society and The Medieval Drone Society II (Brawl Records)

I had listened a few times to the two volumes of Laura Cannell’s The Medieval Drone Society, struggling to find a foothold, before it occurred to me that perhaps I was listening at the wrong time. Cannell recorded these two modest discs in the depths of January, ‘sleepless at the turn of the year’ and seemingly in search of respite and perhaps hope. This morning, a squall of rain had passed briefly over, but now the sun was out, the late daffodils were still nodding and the birds were once more singing in force. To make it make sense, I had to bring her music back with me into a memory of winter.

Both discs of TMDS are made up of multitracked solo improvisations, played variously on cello, recorder and violin and based on short fragments of medieval music – thirteenth-century monophony on volume one, the music of Machaut specifically on volume two. We cannot know what Machaut et al. were thinking when they wrote, but Cannell finds in their pages something chill, something dark, like an unheated corner of the house. And yet despite the ‘drone’ in her CDs’ titles, these sixteen pieces (none of them more than five and a half minutes long) are not steady state blocks, clenched and shivering against the cold, but patches of just enough light and warmth to see one through. What fragments there are of her medieval sources are well disguised, but what they impress is a sense of trajectory, a language of insistence and faith.

And they are proved right. The seasons move on, and with them, the ever-prolific Cannell. AURORAE, her newest record, arrived just a fortnight ago. Clothed in red and blue swirls, like a retinal after-image, and dwelling on the thicker sounds of organs and synths, it orients her once more towards the sun.

Samuel Vriezen: 94 Fantasias for 31 voices (tracks 33–48)

Jumping in again, I switched to headphone listening for most of these. In part out of consideration for the rest of my family against this music’s enduring oddness, in part for the sake of a change. I’d recommend it. The opportunity for a slightly lower volume, without compromising on any detail, takes a bit of the edge off the sound. And listening from inside the music, rather than in front of it, really heightens the spatiality of all that polyphony.

I think this set (as I mentioned last time around, I’m deliberately not re-listening to earlier chunks of the series just yet) contains one of my favourites: the unassumingly titled No. 32 – Molto adagio, a twenty-minute realisation (according to Vriezen it is the second longest of all ninety-four) whose slower pace creates a more pointillistic effect, in which melodic lines fragment and recongeal as a starry tableau before giving way to a long comet’s tail of a coda.

Purposeful Listening 8

Elsewhere, the woozy No. 121 – The Heavens are Drunk with Delight in Life is quite fun; funnier still is No. 51 – Vulgar Djinns, which begins with a similar melodic shape but adds to it raspberries, burps and farts (depending on register). In time, these also congeal, into a kind of wailing incantation.

If we want to talk more generally, that idea of congealing is important, I think: the nature of the project – dense polyphonic experiments whose voices are all set off in tempo and pitch against one another – will tend towards massification, as up to all of those thirty-one voices are heard at once from different angles. But so too are the ascent and descent either side of that point: it’s notable how many of these pieces have codas that sound (and often behaves) so utterly different from their intros. A function of the canon melody being different at its end to its start, for sure, but it’s also an emergent function that gives rise to expressive form: no matter what happens in the middle, no matter how raucous and overwhelming things might get, there’s something sad about these long farewells. The opening moments of No. 9 – Yodel Melt do exactly what their title suggests: an arpeggiated kind of Alpine call that disintegrates into a low ooze as it falls. The middle section resolves almost into a slow chorale, with a weird Mahlerian adagio energy, while the conclusion creeps in on you and away before you know.

I also enjoyed the bassier tones of No. 123 – The Cries of Mokum (Mokum the Yiddish word for Amsterdam; the ‘cries’ therefore those of the city’s erstwhile street vendors), the Vangelis-like melodic hesitancy of No. 34 – Tentacles (I don’t know why Bladerunner should only have come to mind now), and the on-off contrasts of No. 97 – An Emergence, whose distorted tones and on-off contours at the outset made me think of the no-input mixer music of Toshimura Nakumura or Sachiko M, although the rest of the music far outstrips this initial impression. Like Yodel Melt, it too ends up in quite an interesting harmonic space, and again it ends with bare, blasted coda of long isolated tones.

Words elsewhere

I have two more reviews out this month – a long one for Nutida musik (Norway) on GBSR and Taylor MacLennan’s definitive recording of the Feldman trios (watch out for an English reprint of this in a future issue of PL), and my Gramophone debut, reviewing a portrait CD of the Belgian composer Annalies Van Parys, Tuning Time … And then lots of programme notes. For the Salzburg Festival: Grisey and Verunelli, and Huber and Morales; for Aldeburgh: Henze’s Voices, Sean Shibe, Aldeburgh Young Musicians and Luise Drewett, and Aimard playing Kurtág and Schubert; for the Philharmonia: Gabriela Ortiz’s Music of Today concert; for the LSO: notes for all eight pieces from this year’s Panufnik young composers workshop; and for the BBC PO: a short note on Julia Wolfe’s Big Beautiful Dark and Scary.