Christopher Fox

EDITORIAL: TIME AND STYLE

Not time and tide, nor style and idea, but somewhere in between. As TEMPO sets out on another volume perhaps this is a good moment to think about what’s in and what’s out, to think about suitable subjects and suitable ways of discussing them. TEMPO is a review of new music, yet this issue includes an article about the final piano sonata by Michael Tippett, a work written in the last century by a composer born almost at the beginning of that century. This issue also includes an article that reaches back to the early years of the Cold War and speculates on possible connections between the development of, on the one hand, surveillance technology and, on the other, electronic and computer music. Yet, quite often, potential contributors send in articles which are rejected on the grounds that they are about subjects too far in the past. How far is too far? If late Tippett and Cold War spookery are suitable subjects for a review of new music, it is because the issues they raise continue to resonate in the newest music. Thus Philip Mead’s article on Tippett is not only a companion piece to Toby Young’s consideration of the same composer’s Fourth Symphony in TEMPO 277 but it also raises questions about a performer’s understanding of a work. As long as new music practice – some of it, at least – involves musicians playing from notation, it will remain interesting to think about the point at which the performer of a piece of music becomes a more reliable witness than its composer. Similarly, Robin Maconie’s article on Boulez and the links between voice recognition technology and computer music offers both a fascinating exploration of the ways in which apparently unrelated events might be more closely connected than we thought and a model for thinking about the ways in which contemporary artists are responding to big data and post-internet ideologies. Some of those ideologies played out in Darmstadt this summer, during the Ferienkurse für neue Musik, and this issue of TEMPO includes two reviews of the Ferienkurse and an extended essay in which Donal Sarsfield attempts to give a sense of how the Ferienkurse played out for him. Too much Darmstadt? Perhaps. But that is itself a characteristic Darmstadt experience. Since no one can even attend, let alone see and hear everything that happens across a 20-day, multi-centred assemblage of classes, seminars, concerts, how can one describe what happened? In what is something of an experiment for TEMPO we publish three very different accounts, all of them partial. They are also stylistically different, and this too is something of an experiment. TEMPO is published by an academic press, but is not an academic journal, even if it adopts many of the manners of one. Nevertheless some readers will probably object that Sarsfield’s essay and Max Erwin’s Darmstadt review are too subjective, that their writers have placed themselves too firmly in the foreground of the musical landscape they are describing. I understand such objections TEMPO 71 (279) 3–4

EDITORIAL: FRAGILITY AND RESISTANCE

When I was first offered the opportunity of becoming editor of TEMPO one of the things that worried me was topicality: how could a quarterly publication ever engage with the contemporary world? This editorial is the last part of the present issue to be written but even were I tempted to comment on some aspect of this week’s news it would be at least three months out of date by the time it appeared in print or on-line. Elsewhere in this issue there are reviews of events which happened before TEMPO 280, the issue before this one, went to press. If it’s sometimes hard to keep track of time there is at least the consolation that in TEMPO all time is past. Over time, however, I have come to realise that this may not be so important. After all, we live in an era where on-line reporting renders all print journalism out of date by the time readers have the newspaper in their hands. But every so often there is a reaction to something we publish here that seems to need a response and after TEMPO 280 was published there was a brief flurry of social media activity, most of it objecting to the tone of some of the reporting of the 2016 Darmstädter Ferienkurse, which was felt to be too harsh, more divisive in its condemnation than was appropriate within the confines of the new music community. In the old days this sort of dissatisfaction might have been translated into a Letter to the Editor; in January 2017 a burst of Twitter and Facebook posts did the business. Perhaps this is to be regretted: a social media flurry leaves less of a trace than a formal complaint and now the only trace will be these few editorial sentences, which will appear almost a year after the event whose reporting caused the flurry. Some topical events do need comment, however, because their impact is likely to last much longer than three, six, or twelve months and since TEMPO 280 went to press we have started to see evidence of the potential impact of the new administration in the USA. Already the Trump presidency has demonstrated its capacity both for crude chauvinism and for low cunning, using a mixture of misinformation and threats to create a confused cloud of dissent. So public broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, two supporters of new music in the USA, are said to be targets for Trump cuts but, at the time of writing, there are no policy details. Similar cuts are part of the agenda in those European countries where, as in the UK, austerity governments are already in place, or where, as in the Netherlands and France, hard-right parties are campaigning for power. How should artists respond to this climate of fear and division? This issue of TEMPO offers at least two approaches. In Barbara Jillian Dignam’s fascinating survey of currents in recent Irish electroacoustic music she suggests that a ‘DIY aesthetic’ has emerged in recent years, artists making work outside the conventional modes of production because changes in economic circumstances have restricted their access to the old ways of working. I will leave her to make the argument in more detail, but certainly some of the most powerful music TEMPO 71 (281) 3–4

EDITORIAL: MAKING HISTORY

The idea of journalism as ‘the first rough draft of history’, often attributed to Philip L. Grahamof theWashington Post, is one that reaches back at least 100 years. Yet it probably overstates the provisional nature of that first draft: so many histories do little more than recycle, the passage of time polishing away the roughness, leaving us with something as shiny as a fact, but not quite true. As a journal, TEMPO is in the first draft business, but in this particular issue a recurrent theme is the questioning of the historical and historiographical process. The music that currently calls itself ‘classical’ has always been generous to historians, leaving a helpful paper-trail of scores, programme books and concert reviews behind, and more recently the advent of sound recording has enabled other forms of musicmaking to leave an audible, collectable trace. All too often, however, archival material is ignored in favour of another telling of the story provided in that first draft. Ian Helliwell’s research into some of the forgotten figures in early British electronic music shows how the conventional history of electronic music in the 1950s and 60s – a tale of groups of composers clustered around large institutions – became a common sense orthodoxy. Of course, that’s how the story should go because, after all, electronic music requires expensive equipment if it’s going to be of any worth. But, as Helliwell argues, what if that were not the case? What about a music made by people who owned their own tape recorder, understood circuit diagrams and could assemble home studios of their own? How do we account for a music that is stored in people’s attics rather than in humidity-controlled vaults? If the history of electronic music has, until now, mostly been written around large institutions, then it might also be useful to think about other ways in which music history has been centralised. In the UK, those of us who are not born and bred Londoners tend to be suspicious of a hegemonic metropolitan musical culture, but in Canada the situation is much more complicated, complicated by the vastness of the land and its distinctly different cultural zones. In TEMPO 280 Anna Höstman interviewed Linda Catlin Smith, a Toronto-based composer whose music is at last beginning to become much better known, with the recent releases of recordings on the Another Timbre label an important step towards wider recognition. In this issue Anna introduces Christopher Butterfield, a major figure in Victoria, British Columbia, who is also quite well-known in the rest of Canada. Why is his provocatively enigmatic music not much better known? Is it because of his typically Canadian modesty, or because Victoria is a long way away from . . . where? somewhere bigger? somewhere more economically significant? We are now nearly 30 years past ‘the end of history’ and struggling with the reality of a world in which truth is for some a malleable convenience, for others an ideological weapon with which to justify the most terrible atrocities. In such a world we need history more than ever: a history that is based on real things that actually TEMPO 71 (282) 3–4

EDITORIAL: HOW WE TALK ABOUT WHAT WE HEAR

Using words to describe music is a necessary but problematic task. As a means of introducing or explaining, it’s a vital one, of course, but any attempt to recreate the listening experience is probably misguided, a Sisyphean effort. Which is good news for music: it can’t be reduced; it can’t be substituted. But we do want to talk about it, don’t we, to share our experiences and insights, and for that we have to grapple with the inadequacies of words. Labels are particularly problematic; we may accept that they are dangerously but necessarily reductive as a shorthand, and that we all resent as missing-the-mark those that are applied to our own work, but how vigilant are we about the ones we bandy around? The other day I [Juliet] was looking at a new score with a friend whose immediate response was to laugh, ‘Ha! It’s so German!’ Actually, the composer wasn’t German, and I was a bit surprised because this quality really hadn’t struck me, and yet I suppose we both know what he meant. We use these labels to try to describe what we recognise in music, but nationality just doesn’t seem an effective way of conceiving of music today, when the reach and availability of our sources and our creations is so unbound by geography. To think this way about the music of our time is hopeless, surely (and, if one goes along with the Hobsbawmian theory that the nation state is essentially a nineteenth-century (and European) blip, this model fails also to map onto the music of the past). Of course, there are some composers whose music does sound ‘British’ (or should that be ‘English’ – pastoral, somehow? With flavours of Elgar, RVW or Britten, perhaps?), but in the music of most of my British composer friends I certainly don’t sense a dominant style: one writes music that sounds rather French to me, another rather American (i.e. minimalist), one who’s come over all Wandelweiser, one who loves to plunder the historical dressing-up box and don all sorts of national costumes. Isn’t this the nub of it, that it’s not so much about nationality as about influence?

SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES: A PERSONAL REFLECTION

The death on 14 March of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was very properly marked in British broadsheet obituary columns and broadcast news bulletins, as befitted the passing of a knight of the realm and the former Master of the Queen’s Music. Social media were full of messages mourning the loss of a musician whose generous advocacy of music had touched many lives, and it is to that latter, more informal category of tribute that I would like to add a few words. For many of us whose awakening to new music came in the late 1960s, Maxwell Davies was a key figure in British musical life. In particular, the creation of the Pierrot Players and then the Fires of London, as they became when Max took sole direction of the ensemble, provided a focal point both for Max’s own compositional energies and for the development of modern music in Britain. The Fires were a group of musicians with an unusual mixture of great virtuosity and formidable musical intelligence; Alan Hacker, Duncan Druce and Jennifer Ward Clarke were as equally influential in the development of the historically informed performance of early music as they were in championing new music, and Stephen Pruslin was both a superb keyboard player and a consistently perceptive writer on new music, Max’s in particular. Together with the flautist Judith Pearce and percussionist Barry Quinn they constituted an ensemble that took new music seriously and in turn demanded to be taken seriously themselves. Max’s response to the challenge of writing for such a demanding group was a series of increasingly spectacular works whose ability to shock the concert-going public reached its peak with Eight Songs of a Mad King (1969). Eight Songs remains an iconic work – literally so in the beautiful calligraphy of its hand-drawn score which Boosey and Hawkes made available in a handsome facsimile edition soon after the work’s premiere – and one whose vocal, instrumental and theatrical imagery retains much of its original visceral power. Remarkably for a work whose demands on its performers seemed so extreme Eight Songs became one of Max’s most performed works. Some years after they had both given up playing with the Fires I got to know Alan Hacker and Duncan Druce, and we often talked about their role in creating this early Fires repertoire. Druce tended to be rather dismissive of Eight Songs – for him it lacked compositional sophistication – but Hacker was fascinated by the way in which music which originally seemed so dependent on the special skills of its first performers, vocalist Julius Eastman in particular, could be taken up so widely. For me, those early Fires works remain the highpoint of Max’s output; they are strange, troubling works which inhabit an aesthetic TEMPO 70 (277) 79–81

EDITORIAL: SAME OLD?

In the last chapter of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross muses on the changing status of composers within society. He recalls how ‘on Mahler’s last day on earth, the Viennese press reported that his body temperature was wavering between 37.2 and 38 degrees Celsius’. But today ‘composers have largely vanished from the radar screen of mainstream culture’ and as John Adams walks down the street to his next rehearsal ‘no one whispers “Der Adams!”’ Ross is probably right. Not only do composers no longer command popular attention, they don’t command all that much specialist attention either. When Adams walks down Silk Street to rehearse at the Barbican for the ‘Reich, Glass, Adams: the Sounds that Changed America’ festival in December, how many Guildhall students will even recognise him? Yet Adams is really quite famous. Certainly he is far better known than any of the other composers featured in this issue of TEMPO and, as I have been putting the issue together, I have been pondering the relationship between the music to which TEMPO’s coverage is devoted and conventional ideas about what is noteworthy. Why is this music not better known? Does it matter that what TEMPO readers think of as mainstream music is regarded as wilfully obscure by most of the rest of the population? There are lots of answers to those questions but although some of them may, as Ross suggests, make us think about the changing status of composers, none of them need depress us about the state of new music. Societies change and we live in a world where the available attention for any but the most spectacular cultural events is always divided. The production of art has proliferated, been democratised, and audiences have fragmented, only occasionally coalescing. So in this issue of TEMPO, readers will find the quite famous Adams alongside Martin Arnold, a composer little known outside the Canadian new music scene, itself a musical territory too little known, in spite of my predecessor Bob Gilmore’s podcast ‘Canada – the music of Generation X’, part of his Tentative Affinities series (www.podcastchart. com/podcasts/tentative-affinities/episodes/canada-the-music-of-generat ion-x). Elsewhere an article that subjects a work by Helmut Lachenmann to detailed examination is a few pages away from a much more general consideration of the nature of musical discourse in recent music and just a few more pages away from a consideration of how a particular set of compositional ideologies have played out in the reception of British orchestral music. Within the world of new music these articles may seem to represent a wildly diffuse set of topics – post-minimalism, complexity, musique concrète instrumentale, to name just the ones with readymade labels – but I would argue that the gap in public familiarity from Adams to Arnold, Lachenmann to Steen-Andersen, Benjamin to Hayden, is far narrower than that between any of them and Adele or Lady Gaga. Perhaps it might be useful to be less preoccupied TEMPO 70 (277) 3–4

AN UNTIMELY COMPLETION

I’m writing these words about my great friend Bob Gilmore, four weeks after getting the news that he had died. Since then I have been to Amsterdam to his funeral, a wonderful occasion suffused with love, planned and realised with the most extraordinary care by Bob’s partner, Elisabeth Smalt, and his son, Ben. I have thought about all the times Bob and I ate, drank, strolled, talked, worked together, I have re-read our email correspondence, listened to recordings of him playing and talking, and still part of me – quite a large part – cannot reconcile myself to the idea that there will be no more from this astonishing man. So what follows is necessarily partial – just a few words to describe someone who brought such energy to so many activities – and still tinged with this disbelief. But I think Bob would have understood. Everything about the way he lived the last two years of his life after the cancer diagnosis suggests that he too could not quite believe that one day he would be stopped in his tracks. This is not to suggest that he was in any sort of denial about his condition; on the contrary, he knew he was dying but, because he did not want this to become the subject of his life, he lived as if he were not. Bob also understood that great lives leave the rest of us with memories, and perhaps a body of work too, which can sustain us long after the person who created them has gone. I remember sitting with Bob in the living room at the top of the house that he and Elisabeth made their home in the Hazenstraat, listening to recordings, looking at scores, gazing across the rooftops and trees, talking about music. Bob talked about music with the sort of passion that always marks out people for whom music is like breath, like food, like sunlight, utterly indispensible. And because Bob loved people he moved easily between talk about music and talk about the people who made it. This in turn informed the sort of work he did. His reputation as a musicologist will surely rest on his biographies of Harry Partch and Claude Vivier, works which have both the magisterial authority that comes from painstaking research and the accessibility of the story well told. In both books Bob scrupulously delineates what he knows and what he can only speculate about, but he tells stories too, and it’s his ability to do this that distinguishes these books from most musical scholarship. Through their pages we get to know Partch and Vivier as people and to understand what it was about them that made them write music; in turn we discover why this music is so remarkable and why, by making it, these troubled, awkward people became so fascinating that we need to read about them. It sounds straightforward but it’s only in the hands of a master like Bob that the constant transition – life and works, works and life – becomes so seamless that we barely notice it. I knew of Bob long before we became friends. We were students at York University at the same time, he an undergraduate, I a doctoral student whose registration was beginning to stretch. I knew him by TEMPO 69 (272) 45–47

OPENING OFFER OR CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATION? ON THE PRESCRIPTIVE FUNCTION OF NOTATION IN MUSIC TODAY

This article explores some of the diverse forms that musical notation has assumed in the early twenty-first century and discusses its use along a broad spectrum of creative intention, which includes visual representation of sounds, verbal lists of instructions or provocations, and much else. Drawing upon his own experience as a composer, and on studies of the work of composers both older and younger (Stockhausen, Lucier, Wolff; Molitor, Lely), the author examines the changing meanings of notes, staves and clefs, and the possibilities of graphic scores, text scores, and hybrid forms of notation.