Skip and run
MUSIC MICHAEL NYMAN
'If I play Tchaikovsky I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggles. Naturally I condense. I have to know just how many notes my audience will stand for. If there's time left over I fill in with a lot of runs up and down the keyboard'. After the sudden rush to the halls of new music, which have brought to London an impressive list of world, English and local first performances, Liberace's words run up and down my mind.
Incomprehensibility apart, Liberace would have to present Webern whole. Post-Webern composers have, for good or bad, renounced the extreme preciousness both of time and of notes, and in any case the most important developments in new music show that it is more difficult, if not futile, to carve a work up into message, substance and mere decoration than Liberace finds with Tchaikovsky. Even from the point of view of physical presentation one needs more than a piano, a smile and candelabra. The best performers, like sitar players, are indivisible from the music's essence—as was refreshingly shown by the brilliant profes- sionalism of Les Percussions de Strasbourg and of the phenomenal singer-entertainer Cathy Berberian, at the opening concert of the English Bach Festival, And most con- cert halls—the Queen Elizabeth Hall especi- ally—are ludicrously ill-equipped for works like Roger Smalley's Pulses and Serocki's Continuum, which should dispose the in- strumental groups around the hall.
But basic compositional problems remain —and Liberace, in his wrong way, is right: in most new music there are often too few notes to justify the time taken and the ideas are frequently sparse or uninviting; Roger Smalley, in his Pulses for 5 x 4 Players (London Sinfonietta, under David Atherton at the QEH last week) takes, like Stock- hausen, time as his baMc preoccupa- tion. He attempts to 'alter radically our per- ception of the passing of time' by system- atically exploring its minute particles in the form of pulsations of all kinds—rhythms, beats, trills, vibrato, etc. for fifteen brass and five percussion instruments.
Pulses represents the most recent stage of Smalley's rather tangential development, and unites the Stockhausen 'moment' form of The Song of the Highest Tower with the use of electronic modulation in Transfor- mation /—both of which were a little shaky stylistically. By lining his sights on deliber- ately limited raw material Smalley has man- aged both to project his music outwards more successfully than before, and to come up with some of his best sounds to date: ranging from the cavernous opening (and ending) for low trombones (reminiscent more of Stockhausen's Carre than Das Rheingold) to the huge superimposed clim- axes, for the music proceeds by combination and overlapping like a layer cake.
But overall there were structural deficien- cies—one symptom being that each climax was followed by a rather crude drop in volume and density, as though the com- poser were shy of holding this head of sound as pop groups do. And it was in places like this that the music seemed to be treading notes; that there was 'time to fill in'. Other performances might, of course, remedy this as the form of the piece is variable, and performers and composer are joint creators on a fifty-fifty basis. The rhythmic reiterations of Pulses also had its Varese overtones; not the Varese of the sudden aggressive peaks of sound, but of Ionisation which was given a stunning performance (again at the QEH) by the Stras- bourg group in an almost superhuman re- duction of the original parts for thirteen players to six. Such a performance, where the players seemed to reach inside their instruments, of Varese's piece, of Monic Cecconi's pleasant but predictable Imagin- aires, and Serocki's virtuoso Continuum (which made a neat point of constantly re-dividing its 123 instruments into homo- geneous rather than mixed timbre-groups) made all the other percussion group I have heard sound distinctly tentative.
The Varese-Stockhausen process of build- ing large structures out of minute particles which are important in themselves is a far cry from the 'massed' sound of Xennakis (an architect turned composer who collab- orated with Le Corbusier on the design of the Philips Pavilion for the 1953 Brussels Exhibition for which Varese wrote his Poeme Electronique). Xennakis proceeds by deciding the order and constitution of the events and then, by means of 'probability theory' (more recently with the aid of a computer), exploits the full range of chance combinations of dynamics, attacks etc.
The result is usually less aurally fascinat- ing than the theoretical concept. Sounds are drained of everything except incessant move- ment and the ability to band together, like some socially impoverished micro-organism, with other sounds and so lose their identity. (With Xennakis it is possible, without des- troying the whole reason for the music to apply that Liberace test.) The second Eng- lish Bach Festival concert featured three of his works—Syrmos (1959) for strings came across as drab and unfocused, more like a badly-designed pebble-dashed wall than a piece of architecture; Achorripsis (1956-7) could not even disguise the greater variety of tone colour available to wind instru- ments, while only Nomos Alpha for cello seemed to have been written with the genuine sound of an instrument in mind.
This extraordinary piece, given an equally extraordinary performance by Pierre Pan- nassou, stretches cello technique, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not, beyond its extreme limits. It is more successful on record than in a concert hall as the record- _ ing engineers can capture the groping savagery which is essential to the piece, can delete the constant re-tunings which marred Pannassou's performance and can arrange that the unplayable ending—where the in- strument is asked to tackle slow ascending and descending scales simultaneously—can be played. There is to be more Xennakis at the Festival—his Strategie: Game for two orchestras will be given at the Festival Hall on 7 July.
Finally, a rarity, a tiny but not insignifi- cant find: the only work I have heard for a long time which needs neither condensing nor expanding, whose material and gestures are beautifully scaled to its modest propor- tions is Harrison Birtwistle's Cantata given its first performance by Mary Thomas and the Pierrot Players a few weeks ago.
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