ERGODOS Day 8: Trio Scordatura

Again in the Unitarian Church. Trio Scordatura formed itself to explore the world of unconventional tunings. It comprises Bob Gilmore on keyboards together with Elisabeth Smalt on viola and Alfrun Schmid on voice. Gilmore was giving a talk earlier in the day on microtonality in music. I skipped that on the basis that it would probably just go over my silly non-PhD-in-music head, but I kind of regretted my decision when I heard Gilmore's introductions to the various places his trio played. I am still not sure I would have understood fully what he was saying, but he has such a pleasant speaking voice that it would all have been delightful. He also looked the part.

From the first piece (Conturador, by Flor Hartigan) you could tell this was going to be a bit special. As well as singing in a most unusual manner, Schmid was slowly twirling a pair of shaker devices that looked oddly like an opium poppy. The sound was as odd as the visual effect.

My limited musical vocabulary and lack of any real understanding of what alternate tunings and microtonality amount to in practice mean that I can only say so much about the Trio Scordatura concert. What I can say is that they were for me the find of the festival, playing the kind of music you get when the avant-garde gets it right. What they played sounded like nothing else I have ever heard, but it still sounded like music, albeit of a most unusual kind. One fascinating piece (composed by Horatiu Radulescu, a man sometimes lumped in with composers of "spectral music") featured Smalt playing an oddly tuned viola over a recording of others playing two grand pianos – grand pianos that had been tipped on their side and were being played by having threads rubbed against their inner strings. I would love to go to a concert where someone could do this for real.

I Remember was another piece, by some Alvin Lucifer fellow, saw Trio Scordatura joined by Garret Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, with the whole lot of them intoning wordlessly into jugs and then individually breaking off to say something they remembered. Sadly, no one remembered dancing in stilettos in the snow.

The other pieces were Enclosures by Peter Adriaansz (the trio playing to a programmed accompaniment of computer generated musical tones; spooky), Harmonium #1 by James Tenney (the trio playing over recordings of themselves playing, with the long sustained vocal notes and the ebb and flow of the viola being the most striking features), some Chinese poems set to music by Harry Partch (apparently very hard to sing; they certainly sounded strange enough, and interestingly this was the only vocal piece that featured lyrics) with accompaniment on prepared viola (a strange instrument of Mr Partch's devising), and …hush by Judith Ring (more prepared viola, playing over samples of prepared viola). The last piece was by Al Margolis, who also records and performs as If, Bwana. From Gilmore's description, this Margolis fellow seems to be a bit of a roffler, and this piece was here to present the fun side of progressive approaches to tuning and tonality. The trio played over a really bizarre musical backing.

My one big regret with this concert was that the trio did not have their debut album with them for sale. Apparently it was meant to be ready but certain unfortunate events prevented its appearance.

Panda Scordatura

ERGODOS Day 4: Judith Ring: Portrait

More back room of the National Concert Hall action. Before I get to any discussion of the music performed here, there are some meta comments to get through, so if you do not like meta then skip through the next couple of paragraphs.

This was a concert of primarily laptop music. I have two real problems with this kind of thing. Firstly, you can never really see what the musician is doing, so I always find myself wondering how actually live any of this is – everything could be pre-programmed, with the musician hitting one key to set it all going. OK, so the musician might still be sitting their behind their laptop, hitting the occasional key or moving the mouse, but the suspicion must always be there that they are just playing Tetris or updating Facebook.

The other problem with laptop music is that it is visually very boring. I know it should be the music that matters (maaaaan), but the mind craves stimuli, and even with the best music in the world a lack of anything visual to engage with makes it easy to drift off into thinking about all kinds of things other than the music in hand.

I think these problems are not insurmountable. In performances of laptop music by people coming from what might broadly be defined as an electronic dance music tradition, there is a tendency to combine the music with projections of visual images. That gives the eye something to engage with. It does not solve the first problem, but it might distract from it. However, the visual images so served, while interesting enough in themselves, often do not really have that much to do with the music. Indeed, they may ultimately serve as a distraction from it. So I have been looking for a better way forward.

I think I might have something. Basically, at laptop concerts they should project whatever is on the musician's screen onto the wall behind them. That way people can watch how the music is being made (or how it is being triggered, or whatever). If the musician is just playing Tetris then the audience can vicariously feel their excitement as they slot the little blocks in place.

The other thing about this concert that got me thinking about how we consume music and so on was the introduction by one of the festival organisers. He made the usual introductory comments, and then said that although the performance would comprise several individual pieces, we were not to applaud between them but to wait until the end. This got me thinking about how classical music (and events like this that come from that tradition) take for granted that audiences are there to be regimented – told when to applaud, made to sit still, and so on. This contrasts with other forms of music, at concerts for which people are allowed to applaud when they wish and can wander off to go to the toilet or get a drink whenever they feel like it. I am sure there must be sound musical reasons why audience control is vital in classical music, but I suspect that factors relating to how high and low cultures are perceived are also important here. Audience control emphasises that classical music is a serious business, one requiring total audience concentration, unlike the frivolous music emanating from other traditions. The different audience requirements must work as an effective barrier to entry into the world of classical music, both old-school and contemporary.

And so, following that long preamble, to the music. Judith Ring was today's guest curator, playing mostly her own music (on a laptop), but handing over to a couple of guest stars for some of the pieces, and having them join her for some of the pieces. Ring's first piece was rather striking, being based on a load of samples of mezzo-soprano Natasha Lohan's voice. From the programme notes I understand that the samples were treated electronically, but Ring layered and combined them to produce an odd overall effect. I was not so gone on the ensuing collaboration by two of her guest stars. It was an improvised piece, with one of them on piano and one on laptop, but it all seemed like the wrong kind of experimentalism – people dicking around on stage, creating a sound that is not going anywhere.

One collaborative and improvised piece was a lot more enjoyable was this avant garde hoe-down that had Judith Ring playing with Linda Buckley, Jonathan Nangle, and David Bremner, the first three of these on laptop and the last on piano. It might be that having a load of people on laptops gets around the visual problems of the instrument, particularly if they are all staring at their screens with the kind of looks normally seen on the faces of worried stock market traders. I have no idea what any of the three laptoppers were doing, but it looked very difficult.

Laptop panda