Brass tacks
MICHAEL NYMAN
Let the Music Section of the ICA shine, if only for this week, as a beacon to England's musical insularity. While they failed, through last minute financial bickering, to arrange three concerts by Stockhausen and his merry minstrels, they did succeed in introducing to this country one of the best-established con- temporary music groups, the Domaine Musical, a mere sixteen years after it was established in Paris by Barrault and Boulez.
Now directed by Boulez's successor, Gilbert Amy, the Domaine's Queen Eliza- beth Hall session was arranged like a chapter. at the head of which had been lovingly inscribed Integrates by Varese, and which went on to elaborate some of the implications of his music forty years on. Amy's reading of the Varese was massive and processional, carefully balancing the thrusting, petulant lines against aggressive chordal blocks which, however, emphasised the very modern rawness of the brass and percussion at the expense of the finer shading necessary to match the dynamics of one woodwind instrument with another. Alas, it also stressed Varese's failure of nerve (or his limited repertoire of material) when he pro- ceeds to soften the impact of the lines and masses of his geometrical arrangement with tunes and rhythms from Stravinsky's scrap- heap.
I detected a similar 'failure of nerve' in Berio's Chemins 11 (1967) for viola and nine instruments. This was the only work in the concert whose approach to sound was quietly revolutionary, simply because it avoided sonic abrasiveness and increasing levels of loudness. This reworking of Sequenza VI for solo viola projected the 'mechanical' continuum of, say, a Brandenburg concerto, into an entirely new instrumental context reminiscent of electronic music in its method of building sound masses by means of super- imposed layers. It would have been very bold indeed to keep up this momentum to the end, having made a deliberate attempt to restore to music that neglected commodity, rhythmic continuity. But it fizzled out, un- able to sustain its own vision.
The two works best realised in their own terms (though not necessarily the most important) were Amy's own Relais (1967) for five brass, and Anthony Gilbert's Brighton Piece (1967). Both gave the impres- sion that neither composer was entirely cer- tain of his own musical personality and was. consciously or not. 'putting on the style', a style in essence derived from Varese. Gilbert's work was severe, well controlled. and effectively exploited both a narrow and always audible interval structure (perhaps too narrow and too audible) and the simple extremes of sound and silence, high and low, slow and fast and the magic possibilities of the percussion.
Relair was certainly the most positive, and the least merely sophisticated,. of Amy's pieces that I have heard. Each movement was an intense, kaleidoscopic study in differ- ent styles of 'trend' brass writing and showed great sensitivity towards the subtle- ties of weight and colour, pulse and articula- tion of the inner and outer movement of brass sound. Towards the end it was fairly obvious that Amy had discovered the lack of any real material in the piece—a deficiency it was too late, if not out of place, to make good.
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