[Live] New Music Dublin

Wow, someone has managed to get the funding together for another modern composition festival in the National Concert Hall, truly the Celtic Tiger is back. But they are still not selling any kind of season ticket to this so going to more than a coupe of events is unaffordably expensive if like me you are attempting to live within your means. Thus I made it to just three events this year. The handy combination of my bad memory and time constraints means that I will not say too much about them.

The first event was a concert in the John Field room by the Arditti Quartet. These are the string quartet of Mr Arditti and they play the modern composition. I have no memory of the composers of the pieces they played on this occasion, but I do remember quite a few of them being of the scratchy scrapey variety. As a person of forward thinking tastes this was right up my alley, but when one movement of one piece suddenly went all melodic (I think representing snowfall or rainfall or something) I found myself thinking that maybe melody is a bit underrated in the world of modern composition, which made me wonder if I was turning into Geir Hongro (Mr Hongro is this fellow I remember from the I Love Music message-board, who used to post about how melody is the only important thing in music and that music without melody is not worth listening to, always advancing this extreme opinion in a very polite and courteous manner regardless of the critical brickbats that would be thrown his way).

Then on Friday I went to a concert by the Crash Ensemble who were playing in what used to be the Engineering Library of UCD in Earlsfort Terrace and has now been annexed to the National Concert Hall. I was amused by the idea that the musicians were sitting where once bound volumes of the International Journal of Sludge Disposal once were shelved. The pieces played were by Michael Gordon and Gyorgy Ligeti and were enjoyable. I think maybe the chamber concerto of Ligeti was the most enjoyable piece as it made the fullest use of the ensemble.

After that in a mysterious room (but not the old Medical Library as claimed by the programme) we were treated to a "performance" of Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Oktphonie'. I put performance in scare-quotes because this was one of those electro-acoustic events where it is all pre-recorded and you could basically be sitting at home listening to it if you had good enough sound system. This was played in room with four speakers (not 8, unless there was an extra four I failed to notice) and the music did proper quadrophonic stuff, moving around the corners and all that. As this was on quite late and I had had a little drink I did get a bit puppy tired and nearly nodded off once or twice, which was most enjoyable.

One final interesting thing about the Friday concerts was that I recognised a lot of faces I am used to seeing at the kind of avant-garde musical events I associate with the Skinny Wolves-Joinery-Hunters Moon axis. I tend not to see that kind of people at events associated with the Crash Ensemble, Ergodos or Kaleidoscope. Could it be that the musical barriers are breaking down and the separate worlds of weirdo music are merging into one unstoppable force?

image source (Wikipedia)

New Music Dublin website (check out all the things I did not go to)

An inuit panda production

Danse Macabre

And what was this? Why it was an opera. I saw it in Olde Londone towne, going over for it because the music was by your friend and mine, Gyorgy Ligeti. And did I like it? Well, a future memo to all readers is that opera is perhaps best enjoyed when your mind is alert, and not numbed by a couple of pints of finest ale at lunchtime.

Even with that, this maybe was not that great. Ligger's music maybe does not seem to suit the operatic style that well, and it was noticeable that the most strikingly Ligeti-tastic bit here was an in-between song bit when no one was singing.

The staging was fascinating, though. The set was dominated by a model of a giant naked woman (though not one you could in any way was there for erotic effect). From various parts of her body the character would appear and do their stuff. There was also a nice scene in a nightclub where the crowd launched into the zombie dance from the 'Thriller' video (completely out of time with the music) and into some of the dancing from the 'Praise You' vid (likewise). But it all seemed a bit like one of those London musicals, where you go home talking about how a helicopter landed on stage.

image source

Festival: Remembering Ligeti

I think that's what this was called. It was a weekend, ages ago now, of events based around the music of Hungary's late composer. As well as discussions and performances of chamber pieces by the great man, they showed a couple of the Stanley Kubrick films in which his music was used. We watched The Shining. It is still very scary. The chamber performances we attended were most enjoyable, the discussions a bit musicological and over my head, but the most fun musical thing might well have been the performance that opened the festival. This was called Poème Symphonique, and it consisted of a hundred metronomes being set going until they all wound down and stopped. It is amazing how you start attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects, and wondering which metronome will be plucky enough to hold out the longest. The piece is great musically too, or at least great in terms of noise, the endless TACK TACK TACK sounds going in and out of phase while the overall number decreasing calls to mind nothing so much as the start of Kraftwerk's Radioactivity album.

Living Music 2007 Event 4: Improvisations and Ligeti's "Etudes"

This was in the John Field Room of the National Concert Hall, and was essentially two concerts in one, separated by a long interval in which they fiddled with the piano.

Rolf Hind went first, playing the Ligeti pieces, explaining them as he went along to buy time to rest his fingers. I found them very enjoyable, so much so that I almost fell asleep during them (As you know, I love falling asleep to classical music). I think some of this music might have been Gamelan influenced.

In the interval we met well-known composer Raymond Deane, and he said something about how he finds live concerts quite stressful. I know what he means – I am always TERRIFIED that in the middle of a classical music concert I will find myself bursting for a piss or possessed by an irresistible urge to cough and cough and cough, or that I will go mad and start shouting "VADGEMONKEY!", or my phone will switch itself on and someone will ring me, etc.. This has never yet happened, but one day it might.

Interval coffee meant there would be no sleeping when Simon Nabotov did his stuff. He was an amiably chubby Russian fellow who did a bit of the old jazz improv, combining this with putting stuff inside the piano to add to its funny noise potential. Deadly.

This was also the last thing I went to in this year's festival.