Let me tell you a story. No, let me show you one. No, again: let me sew you one. So you won, says the boy to the ocean who laps at his castle of sand; never mind, I will build it again. So they dance, this pair of unlikeliest lovers, always different and every time […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
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Booth (Richard Barrett’s “elsewhen”)
There is a phrase in new music—the colloquial kind, one of those oral indexes traded among colleagues in post-show chatter and off-hand remarking, a shorthand signifier loosely comprehensible but sparingly specific—that goes: “This is a music that teaches you how to listen to it.” Implied in the phrase, though never said outright, is a patience […]
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Church (Liza Lim’s “The Oresteia”)
1987 was a somewhat innocuous year for new music. Neither Orwell nor the Berlin Wall, it straddled the change-years, when the high-rollers of ‘60s and ‘70s European music slowed, gradually uncovering a younger, less stodgy, more disseminated and global avant-garde. Europe as an idea—though it wasn’t sure how yet—was under considerable revision, and the aesthetics […]
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ELISION Dossier
If I say it’s an experiment, you might think me overeager to abdicate on certitude’s authority. So I won’t say that. What I will say is that a report seemed inadequate to the scale of what took place. ELISION Ensemble—Australia’s premiere new music group, ranking members alongside Austria’s Klangforum Wien, Germany’s MusikFabrik, and France’s Ensemble […]
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Bar (ELISION Ensemble at 40)
It’s been 40 years of counting tuplets together; at this point, Daryl Buckley and Peter Neville just talk over one another. Constantly. The conversation looks and feels something like this: So how did the two of you come to know each other? Neville: “Well, we met at VCA!” Buckley: “Yep, right.” “And was that in […]
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Drawer (Archive)
As if the uphill battle ELISION faced was ever in doubt, two reviews from the first concert on a small New Music festival in Melbourne in October of 1986, on which Daryl Buckley played Milton Babbitt’s “Composition for Guitar.” Neither reviewer is much impressed with the work, a reminder of how far New Music criticism […]
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The Body That Carries
Aïda Nosrat’s “Common Routes” sounds, at first, like a record about travel. It takes several listenings to fix its geometry: The accordion is French, the guitar idiom is Manouche, the groove absorbed from Burkina Faso. Nosrat’s voice moves through all of it with an ease that suggests she has been waiting for these specific interlocutors […]
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Music From the Inside of the Sun
Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term is “plasmatic music.” I’ll let the two artists define the term in the correspondence below, which covers that […]
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On the Shore of the Cosmos
Conductor Maxime Pascal delights in the vast, the weird, and the borderline unachievable. At the Salzburg Festival this year, he offered a program featuring two of Pierre Boulez’s most forbidding works—”Sur Incises” and “…explosante-fixe…”—each lasting around 40 minutes and featuring ensemble writing of dazzling complexity. Just programming one is a feat; Pascal did both, with […]
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An Explosive Legacy
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival—or HCMF for short—is in full swing, celebrating its 48th edition with performances, workshops, installations and more, all against the backdrop of mounting economic pressures in the UK’s arts sector. Over 48 hours of concerts, interviews and informal networking receptions, I tried to work out how the festival is negotiating a harsher […]