Purposeful Listening 3

Line/event, nature/machine, place/sound, surface/depth

Apologies for the delay in getting this out to you. I do aim for Wednesdays, but some weeks other things have to take priority.

In this issue: Some more thoughts on the latest releases from another timbre – this time, a close listen to Antti Tolvi’s slowed-and-reverb interpretation of Feldman’s Intermission 6. Recent discs from Natasha Barrett and Arlene Sierra put different spins on the sounds of ordinary things. And a new collection of resounding piano works by Hugues Dufourt, performed brilliantly by Marilyn Nonken.

Eagle-eyed readers may also have noticed my new avatar:

… which arrives thanks to my in-house designer, Alex R-J. You can follow their work @crowdraws_.

Antti Tolvi plays Morton Feldman: Intermission 6

When Another Timbre’s Simon Reynell sent me the two discs I reviewed last week, he offered me another: a new recording of Feldman’s Intermission 6, extended by the Finnish pianist Antti Tolvi from its usual length of about six minutes to more than seventy. You may hate it, he cautioned. It’s not quite disobeying instructions, but nearly so.

On the contrary, Simon, this is right up my street. I’ve been thinking a lot about duration recently. Partly in the wake of my two experiences with Feldman’s For Philip Guston last year, and partly through my discovery this year of Sviatoslav Richter’s glacial interpretations of the late Schubert sonatas. In particular, I’ve been enraptured by his G major on this recording. Played at Feldmanian proportions – Richter’s first movements are often 30 per cent slower than those of his peers – Schubert becomes more than arch harmonicist and witty melodicist; he stretches into a poet of touch and sonority. And that is where I think he belongs, at least in the piano music – a suspicion that is validated by Richter’s extraordinary performances, which at points entirely relinquish their sense of rhythm to the decay envelope of the piano. Listen to the opening of the G major, in which reiterations of the chord come just at the point when the sound has faded sufficiently to need resounding. This is rhythm not as a function of pulse, but of the weight of the hands, the condition of the instrument, the air in the room, the ear of the player. The recording below is from Snape Maltings and is about ten years younger than the one linked above, but it’s good to see as well as hear:

So if Richter does Schubert as if he were Feldman, is Tolvi doing Feldman as if he were Richter? No, not quite. By his own admission, Tolvi is not an expert pianist (and certainly not one with Richter’s chops). The quality he employs is patience, which, while crucial to the effect of his interpretation, is a few orders of skill below the intricate game of touch, resonance and duration in which Richter is engaged. But as I listen, I keep Richter in my mind.

Two questions come to the fore before one has even released the CD from its cardboard sleeve: how has Tolvi accomplished this? And does he have permission? Answers to both are suggested in Feldman’s own instructions, typed on the page facing his score:

Composition begins with any sound and proceeds to any other. With a minimum of attack, hold each sound until barely audible. Grace notes are not played too quickly. All sounds are to be played as softly as possible.

Simon’s warning notwithstanding, I think this does admit an extended reading. ‘Hold until barely audible’ obviously contains plenty of latitude for taking things slowly. Before I pressed play on the disc, I’d assumed this would be the direction it would take: Wandelweiser-esque interpretation, with roughly the same number of events as a five-minute version, just with the spaces between them ten times larger. And indeed Tolvi’s notes are widely spaced – the first two are held for a full twenty-five seconds – but nothing like enough for this sort of reading.

This instruction contains within it a similar triangulation of touch, resonance and duration to that which Richter brings to his readings of Schubert – although obviously here, the emphasis is on finding the point just before a note disappears into nothing and so almost detaches itself from its surroundings. I say almost because Feldman specifies ‘barely audible’; even if there is little practical difference, it’s clear that at least some sense of continuity is important, rather than complete pointillism. The role of harmony also marks an important difference: Feldman’s harmonies (with their abundance of ninths) are designed to relinquish tonality, even if (with their smattering of fifths and octaves) they do not abandon it entirely. Schubert’s, rooted in glowing major triads, very much relishes the sonority of tonal harmony, even if it occasionally troubles its function. Schubert’s chords seem designed to bloom out of one another; Feldman’s to butt up against.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that grace notes in Feldman’s score create a problem, or at least a question. If all notes are to be held until they stop sounding, then why notate some as shorter than others? (Assuming Feldman isn’t making a Richter-aligned point that these events should be played considerably quieter, and hence shorter, than the others.) A clue is that Feldman doesn’t specify that only one event can be played at a time, and indeed Tolvi takes advantage of this, linking his grace notes to whatever comes after them and holding both for their full length.¹

‘Any sound … proceeds to any other’ is slightly less clear-cut, but it does admit the possibility of repetition. (Although probably not straight repetitions without something else in between.) And in fact, this is what Tolvi most heavily leans on in order to extend his interpretation. Instead of, say, Manfred Werder, we get clumped groups of repeating figures that essentially create harmonic fields, a kind of Brucknerian symphonic form. Feldman invites his performer to wander around the page; Tolvi simply makes multiple circuits, along multiple different paths.

It may seem excessive to devote so much time to picking over the semantics of an apparently simple set of instructions. But performers have to think about these things; and opening up these points of decision reveals much about the nature of the work and of its specific realisation.

I made notes on the first half hour of the recording to give an idea of the sorts of things Tolvi is doing:

• The first few minutes unfold from a pair of notes: the D flat grace note in the top centre of the score, and the middle D aligned directly below it. Tolvi plays these together as a repeating unit; the rhythm slightly different each time (though always obeying Feldman’s note about grace notes, above), and always with a different note to follow; the treble G, the middle C, the middle A (a moment of significance, five and a half minutes in).

• The music remains on the single notes of Feldman’s score until around 8:45, when we get the two Cs, three octaves apart, and thirty seconds after that, the first true chord (the A sharp-based four-note chord in the bottom third of the score). This progression – single notes, octaves, chord – seems compositionally planned by Tolvi. And the decision to emphasise one category of material (indeed, to identify the division at all) is a conscious one. He plays the chord itself slightly broken, with the top C a touch delayed. That’s not in Feldman’s notation, and it’s surely not done for reasons of reach. The same thing happens when the chord returns, at 11:20. It has the effect of aligning this chord, gesturally, rhythmically, with the D flat–D grace note figure that has been the music’s anchor so far.

• Most of the music is still single notes, however.

• At 14:50, the D flat–D motif returns. There’s a real sense of this acting as a point of return and foundation; not only in a harmonic sense, but also as a gestural archetype

• For an extended period around the twenty-minute mark, the music settles on an alternation of D flat and G, as if it has reached a kind of pause; or as if, Schubertly, it has simply located a place it wants to stay for a while, just because.

• After around twenty-five minutes, the music is still predominantly focused on single notes, even if these constitute just seven (eight if you count the octave Cs) of Feldman’s fifteen sounds. By this stage, however, they have become detached from any motivic or developmental function they may have had in the opening minutes – means of orienting and steering the music – to become a loosely circulating gamut that outlines a static (though rarely stable) harmonic space.

And so on. It is endlessly interesting, and once you get into the flow of it, could go on for much longer. The question then is, why has no one else recorded it like this? Because I don’t think they have (answers on a postcard if you know of any), even if some people do play long versions. In this blogpost, for example, Cage and Feldman scholar James Pritchett suggests that he is one of those pianists – ‘I keep playing until I’ve had enough’ – so Tolvi is not completely alone. I suppose, again, practical considerations play a part. (As they do on this disc too; as this conversation makes clear, the recording Tolvi originally sent Reynell was two hours long; Reynell’s reply was to ask for something that would at least fit a single CD.)

But I think also there is a question of form. Intermission 6 is a classic of the single-page, open-form composition that was briefly popular around the mid-1950s. In fact, although Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI is the iconic example, Feldman’s piece got there first. (Funny story: when Stockhausen thought of the idea, in 1955, he asked David Tudor if it was a good one. I actually know someone who has already done it, replied Tudor, who was already working on Feldman’s piece, written two years previously. Maybe I won’t bother then, replied Stockhausen, although obviously he did.)

And the thing about those one-page pieces is that they shatter the idea of linearity. They are pure mobiles. They occupy space like a painting, not time like a novel. And paintings are not naturally durational; they tend to be apprehended (more or less) in relatively short spaces of time. A piece of music whose ontology seems similar to that of a painting should, one would presume, work similarly – all of it taken in, more or less, all at once.

That seems to be the thinking behind the usual five-or-so-minute versions, anyway. By extending his interpretation to more than seventy, however, does Tolvi take Intermission 6 away from the world of painting and back into that of the novel? Certainly, there is a compositional mind at work, in the way that motifs are constructed, used as points of orientation and developed; in how areas of greater or lesser harmonic stability are created; and in how the introduction of new elements is carefully paced. But I still don’t think Tolvi has turned Feldman’s page into something linear. Because, as I suggest above, a combination of long fades into near-nothingness, quasi-but-not-really repetition and Feldman’s genius for finding chords that bubble themselves away from everything around them ensures that any sense of continuity – even with Tolvi’s extensive recycling – is ultimately negated. Events, when they happen, act like just another push of the mobile, sending the different elements spinning once more, rather than a narrative beat or structural pivot.

Instead, what I think Tolvi gives us is something like what TJ Clark gives us in The Sight of Death. That is, a breakdown of Intermission 6 into its constituent details and scenes, and a close examination of each. And by shuffling the cards slightly each time, we get to concentrate as much, maybe more, on the relations between units as on the units themselves. Ironically, this works better in the longer version, because of the repetition and the reordering: the stretching builds, rather than fractures the internal sinews of the work.

In the end, this feels like the reverse of what Richter achieves with Schubert. Somehow, Tolvi’s slower pace allows him to vault over sonority to create lines between isolated objects (where no lines exist). Conversely, Richter’s enables him to dissolve line (where there is nothing but it) to create sonority and detachment.

Yes, Simon, I find this stuff absolutely fascinating. Thanks for putting it out there.

Feldman’s Intermission 6, played by Antti Tolvi, is available from another timbre.

Also listening

Natasha Barrett: Toxic Colour (Persistence of Sound)

Plenty of artists, from Joanna Bailey to Toshiyo Tsunoda to the late Peter Ablinger have produced work that creatively embellishes the sounds of the real world – a kind of sonic augmented reality, if you will. For several years, Natasha Barrett has been creating more convoluted realities from her field recording archives, worlds that collapse and fold in on themselves, like crushed paper bags. 2022’s Heterotopia and 2023’s Reconfiguring the Landscape (both on Persistence of Sound) are two obvious examples. This year’s Toxic Colour picks up the thread, including a third iteration of the Impossible Moments from Venice series begun on Reconfiguring the Landscape. What seems new here, or newly foregrounded, is an implied environmental consciousness, wherein nature is made strange by a warping topology in which sound is both caught in and turns the teeth of the machine. (Barrett speaks of ‘stories – partly of human-made dystopias and partly in search of a melancholic beauty in what the future may hold’.) This is most striking on favourite track The Swifts of Pesaro, city swifts being as much architecture and multi-channel soundscape as they are creatures. Barrett barely has to do anything to capture the affinity their screeching, scimitar swoops have with the parallel lines and cuboids of urban space.

Elsewhere, foregrounds bulge out of backgrounds, sonic planes collide, time distends and shrinks. Barrett cites as inspiration for the album’s shattering title track the exhibition Earth from the Air by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a transfiguration of ravaged landscapes in mesmerising images. A dystopia perhaps; a future in which nature lives only in digital representations of itself but seduces nonetheless. Cling on.

Steven Beck: Arlene Sierra: Birds and Insects (Bridge Records)

The fourth volume in Bridge Records’ Arlene Sierra collection turns to the British-American composer’s three books of Birds and Insects for piano. Composed between 2007 and 2023, these collect a total of fifteen portraits of the natural world – eleven birds and four insects. Most are short, but each book of five is closed by a longer one (the longest being the eleven-minute ‘Bobolink’ that ends Book 2). Each piece was written for a specific pianist (the final five were all written for Sarah Cahill), and their imprints are also on the music: ‘Hermit Thrush’, for Kathleen Supove, is the first to include a tape part; ‘Thermometer Cricket’ for Sarah Nicolls includes some work inside the body of the piano; and ‘Bobolink’ for Marilyn Nonken includes a central section of spectralist sonority.

One can’t help thinking first of Messiaen, although in fact there are few echoes of the Frenchman’s particular ornitho-musical approach. The closest Sierra comes is in the parallel octaves that launch the final piece, ‘Troupial’ – perhaps a parting homage? And there are other passing allusions to French music: the nod towards spectralism (and in particular Sierra’s teacher, Dominique Troncin) noted above, and some echoes in ‘Scarab’ of the last movement of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.

On the whole, though, Sierra pursues her own path. Where Messiaen’s settings are fantastical, bordering on the surreal (their grounding in detailed transcriptions notwithstanding), Sierra’s are based in cooler, more analytical terms. As opposed to Messaien’s wholesale absorption of his birds’ songs into his musical language, her perspective zooms in and out. In some instances, her material derives from an encoding of the creature’s name into pitches. In others, she evokes its habits and behaviour (the skittering ‘Titmouse’ is one example, the jerking ‘Cornish Bantam’ another). And in still others, she goes directly to the birds’ song. Just twice – the aforementioned ‘Hermit Thrush’, and the penultimate ‘Tawny Owls’ – does she make use of recorded birdsong, taken from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology database. In the former, the piano is brought into dialogue with the bird, like an erstwhile mate; in the latter, the instrument creates a sonorous environment for the bird’s nocturnal calls.

I admire what Sierra is doing, but I have found this a difficult album to love. I wish she had taken her project further than she does – whether into abstraction, realism or even Messiaen-ic fantasy. It’s telling that my two favourite tracks are those with tape. Not because of the sounds of the birds themselves – although the contrast is welcome – but because it is in these that the musical game between piano and bird is most apparent.

Marilyn Nonken: Hugues Dufourt: L’Origine du monde (Métier)

Speaking of Marilyn Nonken, her 2013 recording of the complete piano music of Tristan Murail established a high-water mark of performance for that composer’s music. Twelve years later, she has repeated the feat for Murail’s fellow spectral traveller, Hugues Dufourt. Although less well-known than Murail, and certainly Gérard Grisey, it was Dufourt who coined the term ‘musique spectrale’ for the computer-assisted explorations of harmonic spectra the three men (and their colleagues Michäel Levinas and Roger Tessier) were beginning to undertake in the mid-1970s. Spectralism doesn’t translate easily to the piano, though – all those microtonal inflections are flattened out by its ninety-eight equally tempered tones.

And in fact, Dufourt’s spectralism was less concerned with the analysis of sonic objects, or their rendering back into the world of instrumental music, than was that of Grisey et al. Nonken’s chapter, ‘Hugues Dufourt and the Origins of His World’, in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music, makes a valuable accompaniment for those who have access to it (or can stomach the £147.50 sticker price). In it, she writes that Dufourt’s relationship to musique spectrale (beyond his coining the term) was a shared music historical/aesthetic attitude, grounded in a rejection of over-intellectualisation and a restoration of the experiential, of ‘re-enchantment’ and ‘sonic illusion’.

The album’s title work, and the subject of Nonken’s essay, is the only piece on the disc also to feature an ensemble (here the NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Haas; the work was written for and premiered by Ancuza Aproda and Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Daniel Kawka). Dufourt often draws his titles from paintings (titling, as Nonken notes, is always Dufourt’s first act of composition). The image conjured here is Gustave Courbet’s notorious painting of a woman’s vulva and abdomen, portrayed in unabashed close-up (NSFW reproduction here).

Dufourt’s intention is not evocation (beyond that of his title itself), nor translation. Rather, as Nonken suggests, he seeks kinship with the immediacy of Courbet’s painting – the ‘aura of violence’ that lies behind its unveiling of what is otherwise kept hidden. Of Courbet’s painting, she writes, ‘A non-negotiable quality inheres: the viewer is denied conventional distance from something previously thought inaccessible, and no safe or mutually agreed upon interpretation is offered. That which is revealed cannot be unseen; it cannot again become unknowable in the same way.’ Dufourt’s kinship with Courbet is found in the confrontation he establishes between the bodies of his performers and his listeners; an emphasis on energy transfer through sonic immediacy. What you hear, in other words, is very much what you hear.

In this, Dufourt does share territory with his amis spectrales. (And it remains a point of historical intrigue, the philosophical if not aesthetic closeness of French spectralism and American minimalism.) His L’Origin du monde is constructed around a series of heavy piano chords, which resound out to and back in from the surrounding ensemble. As one might expect, this is dominated by metallic percussion instruments. (Themselves echoing the spatialization strategies found in Kurtág’s large ensemble works.) But strings, wind and brass play an equal role in that process of folding and enfolding; indeed, the very first sounds are not of piano or percussion at all, but gently crescendoing wind and strings, as though replaying in reverse one of those resonances that is yet to come. Despite what Nonken says, it is hard to hear these (quite delicately balanced) exchanges in anything like violent terms – even if the common spectral trope of building harmonies from a deep rumbling bass up does evoke the same ominous sensations as, say, Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil or Murail’s Disintégrations. Nevertheless, her point about a restoration of sensual immediacy is well taken.

The opening track, Meeresstille, exhibits a similar dynamic, but more tightly applied and, without the addition of untuned percussion, across a more restricted timbral palette. It comprises variations on a simple two-move gesture – chord collapsing into note, like a reversed appoggiatura – that roll on and on like waves over the titular body of water, never the same but always the same. Sometimes they ripple out into arpeggios; at others, coalesce into single sounds. This is a remarkable work; completely compelling, never taxing, and possessing – as those waves interact with deeper, hidden currents – a strong expressive arc. This is the real gem of the disc.

The other three works here – An Schwager Kronos, Rastlose Liebe and Tombeau de Debussy – explore similar territory, admitting varying degrees of elaboration on the theme of attack and decay. The two I’ve discussed in detail land best for me, but this is overall an expertly realised and deeply rewarding addition to the spectral discography.

Words elsewhere

Just a couple of pieces of writing completed this month – a sleevenote for a Dacapo disc of three items from Mads Emil Dreyer’s deceptively cute Miniature series. The note I wrote for Dreyer’s last disc for the label, Disappearer, was one of my favourite things I did that year. Who knows what my note is like, but the music is fantastic. The other is a note for a forthcoming Riot Ensemble recording that includes Eric Egan’s Privacy of Mind, Saariaho’s Gates from her ballet MAA, Bernhard Gander’s Motörhead-inspired ö, and a gorgeous new work, Tränen und Ozeane by Eden Lonsdale.

Two other items written earlier have just made it into print, however. The first is a chapter, co-written with Patricia Alessandrini, for The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music mentioned above. Edited by Amy Bauer, Liam Cagney and William Mason, OHBSM is an essential, necessarily mammoth compendium of insights into one of the major musical trends of the last fifty years. Our chapter is called ‘A Spectral Methodology of the Cultural and Physical’ and looks at Patricia’s work with computer-aided transcriptions of historical music, in particular her installation with custom-built steel instruments, Adagio sans quatuor (2010).

The second is a chapter, entitled ‘Kurtág and the Twenty-First Century’, for Perspectives on the Music of György Kurtág, published by Brepols. This one really was a labour of love, Kurtág in many ways being the composer whose music set me on the path I find myself on today. (Those celesta chords at the end of Ligatura – Message to Frances-Marie, version 2 have a lot to answer for …) It was also an opportunity to flex my radicant aesthetic muscles one last time, this time in the direction of a composer one wouldn’t instinctively put in that bracket, but whose music absolutely does capture the essence of wandering through the millennial flea market of history.

1. This observation is slightly complicated by Feldman’s description of Intermission VI, first published in the magazine Kulchur in 1963 and reprinted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street. Here, he includes a crucial ‘then’: ‘hold until barely audible, then proceed to whichever sound he may choose’. That ‘then’ suggests a sequential, one-thing-at-a-time reading, although some nuance may have been lost in translation.