Music in the University 2015-16 in association with Sound
FINDING THE BEAUTY AND WONDER IN MODERN MUSIC: A TALK GIVEN BY DR EDWARD CAMPBELL
ENSEMBLE ALTERNANCE
FRÉDÉRIC BALDASSARE: Cello | DIMITRI VASSILAKIS: Piano | JACQUES GHESTEM: Violin | JEAN-LUC MENET: Flutes
KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL
Friday, 30 October 2015
Before the short lunchtime concert given by the virtuoso French group Ensemble Alternance, I went to the lecture given by Dr Edward Campbell of Aberdeen University Music in the MacRobert Building. Dr Campbell is currently chairing a conference hosted by the University and sound with the fascinating title – Musical Modernity, The Beautiful and the Sublime.
Dr Campbell, like Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) whom he referred to several times in his lecture, is a student of philosophy as well as a musicologist. The central point of his lecture was centred on the question - what is Beauty? How is it to be thought of in relation to modern music? Can avant garde music in particular ever be beautiful or is it just ugly?
I know what some audience members would say – one of them once referred to a piece that was not particularly out on a limb as “sair teeth music”. Such people will never be convinced. Dr Campbell referred to an event which caused a kind of earthquake in the appreciation and composition of music in the twentieth century. This was the holocaust – how could cultured and intelligent people listen to the music of Schubert for example and then go and immediately do things too dreadful to mention? This turned many composers especially in Germany against traditional music. The First World War had already had an effect on music and art. I think that today we have got away from the idea that beauty in art has anything at all to do with truth or morality. Perhaps we could agree with Stravinsky who once, surprisingly in his case, said that music can never express anything at all except itself?
I remember one of my lecturers in the English Department, Walter Keir, saying that our recognition of beauty in any kind of art came about when something in that music, poem or painting resonated with something within us that was the product of our inheritance, our education and our life experiences. I think he was onto something there.
After Dr Campbell’s splendidly mind expanding lecture, I went to a performance that was every bit as mind expanding in a different way. Many of today’s composers are turning back to writing traditional style music. Someone referring to a certain piece in the Festival said that it could have been composed back in the 1920’s so it was interesting to hear a piece that seemed to go back to the kind of music that sound has often championed. Ensemble Alternance from France founded in 1983 by their flute player Jean-Luc Menet are an astonishingly virtuosic group who play really challenging modern repertoire.
At the lunchtime concert they performed just one piece lasting just under three quarters of an hour. This was Rokh by the French composer Raphaël Cendo. The title refers to a giant mythological bird that appears in the stories from the Thousand and One Nights. If that fabled bird is utterly fantastical, so much more so was Cendo’s music.
The four instruments, piano, violin, cello and flutes were all used in ways that the term extended sound possibilities hardly begins to explain. We have heard flute pieces before played by Richard Craig for instance that contained many of the effects produced by Jean-Luc Menet on Friday so I was familiar with those but many of the others were a surprise. In particular, the pianist Dimitri Vassilakis had a marvellous array of effects often scraping the strings inside the piano or on one occasion muting them with a piece of aluminium foil. He also struck part of the body of the piano with a small beater. The piano is basically a percussion instrument but not always played as such - but today it definitely was.
Actually nearly all the instruments could have been regarded as part of a percussion ensemble in this piece. The cello had slides and slaps on his strings and at one point he made his instrument sound like an angry wasp. The violin had a bouncy bow and a great deal of fantastic fast playing.
Someone who had never been to sound before and had never heard this music could well have supposed it to be absolute chaos with the performers doing whatever they wanted to their instruments but I have been to sound performances many times and soon appreciated the fabulous intensity of control employed by the performers in this work. The form and shapes of the music stood out in high relief created by differences in dynamics, the repeating of sounds and musical textures, many of these both new and surprising, especially I thought, on the piano. The ensemble playing was also admirable, for instance the pianist played a trill on deadened strings against harmonics on both stringed instruments. Cendo has created a musical landscape in which so many varied sound landmarks stood out. I was able to follow the three movements too because I could see the violinists score from where I was sitting.
This raised another thought for me. A great deal of the success of performances like this gain from our being able to see the performers in action. I remember performances of Le Marteau sans Maître by Boulez which gained so much from being seen.
I wondered how I would have reacted if I had only been able to hear the music without seeing the performers. I did think about that and there has been some film music that sounded not unlike this piece; though of course nothing like as extensive.
My final impression however was of how well structured this music was and how precise and well disciplined the performers were – managing everything in such an apparently relaxed way and without the slightest fuss.
