Music
Cambridge diversions
Robin Holloway
Kttle's Yard, Cambridge: my memo- ries of this miniature cultural mecca go back to distant student days when most undergraduates (a male majority; co-edu- cational colleges were yet a gleam in the future's eye) went short-back-and-sides and clad themselves in grey flannels and sports- jackets. Kettle's Yard represented then something admirable but also chilly and very slightly absurd. The aesthetic of Jim Ede's residence — rising from objets trou- yes (hand-picked shingle and old rope) right up to the summit of its particular taste, the exiguous elegance of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson — served refinement and repression, starving sensu- ality and good red blood. The arts centre of nowadays that has grown up, and flour- ished, so convivial and visitor-friendly, around the original domestic nucleus can still induce a slight shiver of cold comfort. Art as Improvement, austere, high-minded, plain, eschewing frills and trinkets, per- fumes and tickles, pinks, mauves, cerises and purples, still rules in principle, positive encitement to low hankering for everything so scrupulously omitted; all things naughty- but-nice, all things below-the-belt.
Last weekend's musical events there brought all this home with a frisson of recognition. Never more so than in the opening and closing music of Friday's con- cert, string music by Elgar, the little-known Elegy, the well-loved Serenade. Dam cette galerie? these strains of sweet nostalgia, sentiment, charm, creating salon and tea shop in the angular white-walled spaces with their searching spotlights, under the very nose of Gaudier-Brzeska's 'Wrestlers'. In fact, the incongruity paid off; the largely student ensemble solicitously shaped by Andrew Parrott revealed the tensile within Elgar's tenderness, and communicated the wit and unexpectedness, bravura collapsing into poignancy, of John Woolrich's It is midnight, Doctor Schweitzer (music rendi- tions of Jean Tinguely's machines), as well as the eloquent melancholy of his scena after Monteverdi, Ulysses Awakes.
Woolrich, currently the first of what will surely become a continuous succession of composers-in-association at Kettle's Yard, had planned the entire sequence of events. Their climax was a 'portrait' of Harrison Birtwistle, via such of his music, and music close to him by analogy or affinity, as is practicable in such an intimate place. It was preceded by a public conversation between the composer and the painter of his actual portrait, Tom Phillips. While diverting enough, this never left familiar ground and the exchange of courtesies (the composer would like to have been a painter; the pro- tean painter, who does indeed write a sort of music on the side, a composer; etc. etc.). One had the sense that these two engaging grey-bearded cards could have managed better, and found rich surprises, if un-corn- pered by the two young academic 'special- ists' with their pious questions (that dire phrase 'the creative act' made a routine appearance), hastily interposed into every pregnant pause. The composer indicated his debt to Klee, notebooks and pedagogy as well as the actual paintings. The artist told an anecdote of Braque being taken to meet the Swiss master, their sitting silent for 20 minutes, after which the visitor departing saying, 'I've seen him now; that's enough.' Similarly, the sheer sight of two such attractively characterised physiog- nomies — Tom's clear penetrating twin- kling eye and bohemian spruceness, Harry's rumply-crumply furry-dormouse oclusion, lit up by the wonderful slow smile — would have sufficed. 'Speech has been given us to conceal our thoughts.'
The ensuing concert opened up for me some perennial worries about modernism and tradition, culture as living language or dead letter, nostalgia as legitimate longing or wimpish cop-out. Birtwistle had recalled the instinctive, innate sounds of his early youth, against which music as dispensed by official education seemed alien and unus- able. Rejecting this, he doesn't have to bother with its cumbrous trappings: 'any- thing will do' to set a piece of music going: music for him grows not from its native soil of styles, skills, practices, but from stray impulses, usually visual. Pulse Sampler gave a perfect instance, from its inspiration in a simple rhythmic idea crisscrossed with the technique and motion of stitching, to its upshot by rigorous pursuit of all the possi- bilities: maximal effect with minimal means.
The worries concern what's missing when culture is so emphatically ditched. Culture, i.e. perpetually evolving techniques handed down as a living language, is contrasted with freedom from culture, i.e. no debt or dependency, make it up yourself as you go along. A deep yet mischievously elusive dividing line appears between 'real' music by Bach or Schubert (etc.), and these liber- ated mobiles of sound. It's not the presence or absence of tonality that makes this divi- sion any more than in the visual arts it's a matter of being or not being lifelike. All music is neccessarily made out of sonority, process, movement (even when static) in time; maybe something (I can't name it) can be abstracted from the plenum of musical utterance, as shape, line, colour, can in painting be abstracted from an object, a person, a view. Naked sonority, sound without roots, a genetic leap; from within an art that has essentially been con- cerned with continually reproducing itself out of its own substance. It can disconcert, even repel, by the harshness, even cruelty, of the sacrificial slaying that precedes a new order.
Enough amateurish speculation with no issue. This concert certainly presented the most compelling case imaginable for what Birtwistle stands for and has so brilliantly achieved. Whereas his orchestral and oper- atic megalumps can suffer from overload and overlength, his control of the limited — in duration, in forces, in actual musical material — brings out the enormous power within the most basic processes. Together with Pulse Sampler we heard three further of these mighty mini-monoliths. Each sets a solo woodwind player (oboe or clarinet) against the barest of 'accompaniments' (either piano stripped of Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, or — not so different! — just a pair of resonant wooden sticks). All mani- fest an unmistakable genius of 'less is more'. Often with this catchphrase less really is less and more is craved from gen- uine need. In the concluding piece Linoi in particular, the latent then actual violence 'Look, Robbie, a house made out of bpoze and fags!' released from the primitivistic materials, the sense of vastness within the brief dura- tion, the combination of mythic remoteness with narrative nearness, the evocation of lyricism, pathos, archaic keening without romantic dross, all-in-all the master- draughtsman's absolute certainty of hand and line, are overwhelming. While in the surrounding decor the eye and spirit longed for the insipid beige to yield, any hint in this music of colour, perfume, juicy succulence, normally so relishable in life and in art, would be tasteless and out of place.
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