Is this a record?
MUSIC MICHAEL NYMAN
My Christmas was spent, ears boggling, mind splitting, in the company of Deutsche Gramo- phon's celebratory six record set, Avant G til rte (104988-93, stereo only, £12 lOs or 8 gns until 31 January). Mc's achievement has been present indispensable hits of the 'fifties –Stoo:- hausen's Gruppen and Carre; more it:Lent works by composers unplayed and largely un- known here—Kagel and Ligeti; and a number of beta plus pieces, some more avec than avant garde.
The music is grouped according to perform- ing medium, often round the unique capabilities of the performers themselves: three pieces for string quartet, two (by Stockhausen) for orches- tra, four each for organ, choir and trombone, and two by Kagel for miscellaneous chamber groups. Excluded from the encyclopaedia are, for instance, piano, solo voice and, more impor- tant, electronic music—an omission easy to justify, but which perpetuates an artificial dis- tinction (as even a most cursory hearing of the set will show) between live and electronic sound. The international cast of thirteen composers (average age thirty-eight) is similarly representa- tive, until you notice that the affiliations of many of them are to Cologne or thereabouts (Stock- hausen territory) and that the music as a whole has a stylistic and technical consistency which sets it apart from the more anarchic avant garde of Cage and his associates.
Nor is it carping to indicate what one loses when music often intimately linked to its per- forming environment is put on disc (even when stereo is used as imaginatively as it is here)—it merely aids the digestion and the understanding. Thus, aurally one misses the identifiable separa- tion of material when the three orchestras of Gruppen have been unavoidably spread evenly over the two channels; and, visually, there is a similar loss in Berio's superb tragi-comic Sequenza V for trombone, dedicated to the memory of the clown Grock, where the player 'strikes the poses of a variety showman about to sing an old favourite,' utters a bewildered 'why?' and plays the rest seated, 'as though re- hearsing in an empty hall.' More theatrical still is Kagel's Match—a duel between two virtuoso cellists with the percussionist seeing fair play, and indulging in hilarious flights of his own.
Kagel also instructs the percussionist to play instruments as though he were in the process of discovering their potentialities on the spot, and the dynamism of much of the best music on these discs seems to lie in their sense of per- petual self-discovery—a creative circle, in which composer 'plays' performer, performer plays the music, and the musical result 'plays' the com- poser. Thus much of the music is 'about music' —literally so in Kagel's spectacular improvisa- tion ajoutee, for organ, which combines sounds from the everyday life of the organist with composed music, in a sort of music equivalent of split-screen cinema. Some of the pieces —to name a few names, Penderecki's Quartet. Min's organ piece, Mellnass's Succaim for chorus, Alsina's Consecuenza for trombone—seem to be concerned only with 'trying out.' although the Alsina piece is redeemed by its magnificent closing wedge-like progression : alternately lower and higher sounds, until only breath and what seems like a rupture are left.
But if you are not especially concerned with what it all means logically, then these are your records. For the really important thing is the indissolubility of the musical material from the sounds and potentialities of the instruments themselves, not only as (new) tone-producing mechanisms, but as a total physical entity, so to speak. Thus Vinko Globokar, the trombonist, creates percussion effects with his slide and mutes, and a wide range of colours by speaking into his instrument. Jazz musicians have, of course, been doing this for a long time, but they were speaking sentences, whereas here we are dealing with phonetic units- units which Globokar, in his own Discours• 11. seemingly injects into space. Likewise Kagel uses twenty- eight different methods of tone production for the cellists in March; and the choral record amply demonstrates the 'instrumental' methods which choruses are asked to use most melli- fluously in David Bedford's Two Peems---al- though this record suffers from a rather tedious lack of variety, since all the composers still adopt the old-fashioned view that voices can do nothing but 'sing beautifully.'
Nevertheless, Ligeti's Lux Aeterna (used in the film 2001) is a lovely study in slowly chang- ing cloud-like densities, and his two organ pieces -are both cluster-compositions. Volumina is stag- gering by any standards, juxtaposing clusters of varying densities and durations, in straight lines, curves, points, and by turning on and off the organ motor and 'blanket' changes of registra- tions. Ligeti, aided by his co-creator, the organ- ist Gerd Zacher, seems to be stretching and bending sound as though it were pliable plastic.
There is not space here to do full justice to the riches of these records—Lutostawski's attempt to fuse homogeneous cluster textures with the Bartok string quartet tradition, Mayu: zumi's Prelude for String Quartet, which builds a very western climax out of the opening eastern quiescence, only to prick its own bubble, whether deliberately or not, with some pretty trite 'effects.' But the two discoveries of the set are Kagel's Musik fur Renaissance-Instrumenie and Stockhausen's Cara. Kagel exploits the untouched, virgin quality of these old instru- ments and gets them to scrape, bang and blow hell-for-leather in a Bosch-like score staggering in sheer imagination, irony and exuberance.
Stockhausen's imagination is astonishingly fertile, too, when you consider that two so''dis- similar large-scale orchestral works as Gruppen and Carre could have been written within two years of one another. One can feel the applica- tion of his initial forming process in -the position, weight and function of almost every note in Carre, a work of surprisingly direct emotional effect. Its atmosphere, of a vast, prehistoric- sounding battle with the elements, is set in the very first low E flats, and sustained with fragments of chanting, bare fifths, vast super- imposed chords and terrifying climaxes; one, where a simple long soprano D revolves round the four choirs in the midst of the chaos, has burnt itself indelibly into my mind.
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