RECORDS
Six to one
MICHAEL NYMAN
A question in the Christmas Quiz might have run as follows: If you take one from DGG'S six why is something less than one and a half left? Answer: because a record of Stockhausen's Mixtur and Telemusik (which I shall review shortly) is the only one worth having' from Deutsche Grammo- phon's six-record 'annual' Avant Garde Vol 2 (643541-6, 170s till the end of Febru- ary, 225s after that).
What baffles me is the shakiness of the criteria of selection. Not that the set is un- systematic: every attempt has been made to plug the gaps left by Avant Garde Vol I. A place has been found for John Cage; there are two records devoted to electronic music, one to new `religious' music and two works each by 'deserving' Germans. So far so good, but now we begin to listen. The electronic music is drawn from the Utrecht Studio whose director. Gottfried Michael Koenig is represented by two very dull pieces; Rainer Riehn's Chants de Maldoror, while slightly less academic, still miserably fails to realise the promise of its opening.
Riehn turns up on another disc as director of the Ensemble Musica Negativa,which shows that the Dutch. like the Germans, lack the temperament for performing Cage. Their serious, cluttered realisation of Atlas Eclipticalis (simultaneously with Winter Music and Cartridge Music) may make in- teresting listening but, alas, it has little to do with Cage. On the same record comes Glossolalie by Dieter Schnebel. deserving German, evangelist pastor and, apparently, composer. There is no denying the histori- cal importance of this work which, as early as 1960, exploded the domination of pitches and rhythms in European music by build- ing up a mainly vocal piece out of scraps of multilingual conversation and quotation (intentionally not 'sung') and naive instru- mentalisms. Pioneering it may be, unmusical or rather pre-musical is certainly is.
Schnebel's 'fur stinimen' (. . . mis.sa est), a portentous assemblage of overwhelming triviality, is coupled with Kagel's Hallelujah (1967) a virtuoso choral piece of acute orig- inality, which shows what a real composer (gifted with a genuine sense of the absurd) can do with raw material not very distant from Schnebel's. Quite apart from its novel methods of articulation, Hallelujah has a very strong and convincing shape: solo voices are at first heard against a back- ground of a kind of discontented pulsating murmuring from the chorus and as the climax is reached the roles have been im- perceptibly reversed.
One whole record is devoted to 'deserv- ing cause number two', Bernd Alois Zim- mermann, pushing sixty, who has, like the Pole Lutoslawski, taken over modern methods and materials without ever getting rid of an essentially Bartokian mode of expression. More obviously `modern' are the live electronic improvisations of the Gruppe Nuova Consonanza. The first side (.. .e poi?) is a fair example of the increasingly im- portant method of making music, violent and subdued by turns, producing intriguing sounds by unfamiliar means. There is a real feeling of events being sparked off individu- ally and extended through spontaneous in- teraction. Less good are four short unin- teresting 'genre' pieces on side two.
As if to disprove DGG'S ridiculous claim that Nuova Consonanza is 'the only en- semble of its kind in Europe', Polydor have put out a record devoted to a single work, Friday, by the Italian-American group Musica Elettronica Viva (583 769, 37s 6d). Friday is a most impressive continuous organic growth, held together by a strong communal creativity and by a subdued electronic 'continuo' and repeated trom- bone notes. But the record is a pale re- flection of the group's live performances.
From the Virgo label comes a record of cellist Siegfried Palm (unfairly marvellous on the Zimmermann disc) on which he plays, along with Webern and Hindemith, Ligeti's superb evanescent twilight Cello Concerto (2549 004, 25s). Anothet record (2549 003), also at 25s, is devoted entirely to Ligeti. It contains his Aventures, a sort of 'opera' without text and context, made up of vocalised gesticulations, and his luxuriantly tactile orchestral Atmospheres which will be familiar to all 2001 addicts.
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