The Ergodos Festival – Trailing Thoughts

I have been thinking a lot about how few people were at the performance of In A Large, Open Space, the James Tenney piece where the audience walk around a large open space while the scattered performers play the same not over and over. I remain undecided as to whether the low attendance resulted from a failure of publicity on the part of the festival organisers or an essential lack of interest in forward thinking music in the people of Dublin.

In some ways, though, it was just as well that not too many people came along. Things could have got a bit awkward if even a couple of dozen had made it – we would all have found ourselves getting in each others' way as we walked around, and fights would probably break out when people bumped into each other. I suspect that when Tenney wrote the piece he had more in mind a completely open large space – either a warehouse, say, or a church with the seating taken out – and you would need somewhere like that if you were having a large audience.

It was a bit of a shame that the Ergodos people did not ask us along to the massive kegger they obviously must have had on after the festival ended… I mean, there were so few people at the last concert that it would not have made much difference to how quickly all the booze ran out. It would have been great to hang out and discuss double-barrelled name issues with the organisers, and to discover what the various other attendees' games were.