Music
Cult figures
Robin Holloway
The Barbican Centre has in these more and more exiguous times become a beacon of enterprise and adventure. Nestled between a cycle of endless threadbare Shostakovich, Inventing America, the ambi- tious multi-form celebration of 'innovators, rule-breakers and iconoclasts', stands out as a model of how to put something inter- esting together with knowledge, skill flair. Whatever the value — current, let alone ultimate — of these cultural offerings, the concentration of sheer rarity and zaniness recharges ears and eyes, subverting and sometimes enhancing one's sense of what music is for, what it might yet be, what it actually is.
Time is the keynote. Shostakovich in bulk or piece by piece seems interminable because the way the music uses the time is wholly conventional, remaining unfilled by the weight, intensity, value of invention necessary to justify such durations. Begin- ning from time as mere void — blank page, blank canvas, silence; vast skies, huge rivers, boundless desert — America has `invented' itself musically to cover and express these things in sonorous organisa- tions that circumvent conventional expecta- tions of tension-and-release, integration, fulfilment. Boredom is risked and frequent- ly achieved, but more often a new percep- tion of time passing and its relation to density of musical event is brought about, dreamlike, soporific, nerveless, wherein minutes become hours during which one doesn't consult the watch and think anx- iously about the last train.
The course of the century has veered between the tendency towards radical com- plexity, ellipsis, compression, a tightening of process and content into tough essential- ity demanding of its hearers an intellectual participation of a high order, and this release of the ordinary, the demotic, the humdrum, the open-ended, the accidental. Usually they are set in an antithesis that can be polemicised into civil warfare. It is more fruitful to see them as complemen- tary, existing side by side to their mutual enhancement.
America has excelled at both. The `pio- neers, rule-breakers, iconoclasts' of earlier in the century already show a wide range between artistic free-for-all — Ives, Cowell — and, in Carl Ruggles and Ruth Craw- ford, some of the most intensely construct- ed music ever realised (they certainly didn't break their rules once the rules had been forged anew). Apart from Crawford's ever- fascinating American Songs (the quizzing rat, the steel willpower, the slumberous bees) these predecessors were not present in this festival, which concerned itself almost wholly with cult figures still living and active. The great exceptions were the late John Cage whose liberality of spirit, open equally to the most random and the most organised, provided a liaising link line, and Harry Partch (d. 1974) whose beautiful home-invented and home-made instruments in his own idiosyncratic tuning have always struck me as more beguiling to eye than ear.
But the distances, of now, between the innocent dayglo sea/sun/sky patterning of Terry Riley, the knowing minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the urban rage and violence of John Zom's saxo- phone and Glen Branca's electric guitar, the transcendental emptiness of La Monte Young's `theatre of eternal music' and the commercialised crossover of Tan Dun, the born-again brio of John Adams and unre- generate yet ever-renewed high mod- ernism of Elliott Carter, are as vast culturally as the country is physically.
Most of these very various musicians have been present, usually as performers as well as on film and in live interview, in a spectrum of availability recalling the lamented Almeida festival at its palmiest. (The principal difference is that the once marginal and freakish is now the establish- ment!) The extremest time-bender, La Monte Young, sets up eternal drones that, emulat- ing nature itself, can scarcely be contained by traditional concert genres. Carter, with a recent string quartet, piano quintet, and the Symphonia for large orchestra, is apparently, by comparison, a mainstream- er. It has become commonplace to call this composer — because of the French train- ing, the cultural breadth, the higher esteem and greater number of performances he enjoys this side of the Atlantic (England particularly) — a sort of honorary Euro- pean. But in this Barbican context he is as American as the primitives, mavericks, hip- pies, oblates of Zen, permutators of pat- tern, who form the rest of the company. Again it's a matter of time. His music at its best has fascinatingly succeeded in manipu- lating time and motion in an athematic play of texture that (as Carter himself remarked in a typically spry pre-concert interview) relinquishes not only the age-old rhythms of walking, running, riding (together with diatonic reference points) and even the railway-rhythm of the 19th century and the automobile of the 20th, to render metaphorical flight or inner flux in ways not a thousand miles removed from the free-wheeling arcs of modern jazz, to which, though both are equally an out- growth of New York City, it bears in gener- al idiom and animating aura no resemblance whatever.
In the two new chamber works this flight and flux seemed manneristic and routine. The interplay between the extremes of manic chatter and rabbit-like scuttle, or else glacial freeze, produced no intermedi- ate norms of rhythmic motion for the body machine to latch onto. The Symphonia is in a different league. With its masterful grasp upon a three-quarters of an hour expanse packed with events successively volatile, playful, teasing, exuberant, violent, enig- matic, dark, bleak, searing, bubbling, cas- cading, gently shining, ecstatically exploding, it would be impressive at any stage of a composer's career. Produced in his mid-to-late eighties, it seems not quite credible. Yet its physical actuality is startling.
The direct bodily sensuum (communicat- ed with passion by the BBC SO under an inspired Oliver Knussen) obviated the impression that sometimes, in this compos- er, somewhat abstract concepts of momen- tum, rhetoric, character fuel the pieces to - the disadvantage of what can both please the ear, and be recognised by it as the basis for further comprehension. Symphonia seems to me, as acquaintance deepens, to be Carter's masterpiece (to date!), sus- tained throughout with prodigal invention and touched in the elegiac middle move- ment and the effervescent finale by vision- ary gleams of real greatness.
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