MUSIC Flowerpot men
MICHAEL NYMAN
There is small doubt that at the moment, and in some circles at least, music as an art is being energetically invaded by life, in the form of chance happenings. `free' scores, indeterminacy and what one could call the unfettered functioning of the behaviour pat- terns of composer-musicians. It takes some- one like Harrison Birtwistle, with his ironi- cally-titled `Spring Song.' to remind us. forcibly but charmingly, that art is still essentially an artificial product. Birtwistle had obviously 'composed' his concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last week with as much care as he expended on his new work Medusa. Which is not a bad idea consider- ing that so many concerts are a fairly hap- hazard collection of 'interesting' pieces, thrown together by promoters and calculated as likely as not to negate the effect of any- thing really striking: sturdy but exotic plants like Birtwistle's music need special soil in which to flourish and show them- selves to best advantage.
The concert as a whole was perhaps the most provocative that London has seen since Stockhausen's notorious November 1968 pre- sentation; and the contrast between the two could not be more instructive. Stockhausen set out deliberately to confuse4and hope- fully to reorientate, his audience, by re- arranging the seating in an unconventional way and allowing one piece to flow over, around and into another, without prior warning. Birtwistle, on the other hand, took
as his starting point the conventional 4artiq ficial' sequence of separate items, and puro sued it to its logical extreme of artificiality (he has done the same with opera in Punch and Judy) by tightening it up, cunningly calculating the effect of each item, both in- dividually and in the overall symmetrical structure, by its quality, placing, the use of dramatic lighting effects, and by cutting out applause-pauses between numbers.
Take, for example, the opening short clarinet piece (the first of the Four Inter- ludes from a Tragedy which acted as the cornerstones of the evening): piercing, strident, with a disturbingly pulsating tape part, played by Alan Hacker, stage right, bathed in a ghoulish green light. As the tape murmurs into nothingness the centre of the stage lights up to reveal under a silver stel- loid structure (reminiscent of the Mad King cages) the Pierrot Players, who immediately strike up a Hacker-arranged Czardas. This is done very stylishly (suggesting perhaps a new role for the PPS. as a professional wan- dering gypsy band). its genuine jokiness emphasised by its seemingly endless unvaried repetitions and very 'correct' cadenzas.
There follows the central work of the first half—David Bedford's Sword of Orion, inspired by his own observations of stellar configurations. Not a heavy piece, but genuinely witty and certainly the best Bed- ford I've heard for a long time, since he has at last abandoned the simplistic combina- tions of endless long notes with bursts of short ones, which had recently become so very mannered. Instead, a surprisingly wide range of effects were held together with un- erring delicacy, from the opening where each player played to independently ticking metronomes, through multiple glissandi and the lighthearted eroticism of a lady and gentleman simultaneously playing one cello, to the final ring-a-ring-a-roses in which all the players walk round in single file tapping the chains of toy percussion—tuned flower- pots and milk bottles.
The back of the stage lights up to reveal Mary Thomas—done up as a Beardsley Salome of 1920s flapper vintage, and pros- trate on a chaise longue—who proceeds with skilful and entertaining exaggeration (as comic counterbalance to her equally fine Pierrot Lurtaire) to speak the text of Satie's Sports et Divertissements to Stephen Prus- lin's admirably discreet piano accompani- ment. All this, of course, was merely a foil to the serious events of the second half : namely, the fifty-minute Medusa, a puzzling and impressive work, which progresses with a fiery. throbbing. meditative, slow energy. preyed over by a wailing two-note motif heard from the very outset on saxophone and by disturbing desolate electronics.
If its time-scale was impressive, so was the genuineness of its material and the way in which it constantly sent up its own pre- tensions. whether with joky sub-Hindemith or with a shattering electronic outburst which sliced thro“gh one's head after a parti- cular passage had lulled itself to sleep. What was puzzling was the fact that, in a previous incarnation, the piece contained a lot of attractive ideas which Birtwistle had inex- plicably deleted, so that what he did retain had to carry a weight slightly too heavy for it; and almost equally puzzling was the con- centration on a somewhat tiring mood of brooding, full-blooded desolation, a mood always immanent in Birtwistle's music, but usually set off by marvellously violent, sharp-edged images, which were conspicu- ously absent from Medusa,
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