THERE aren't many living composers who have managed to stir up as much controversy as Karlheinz Stockhausen, now strange as it may seem, approaching his 70th birthday. In the years following the second World War he was early into the field of electronic music and became a leading exponent of serialism.
As a high priest of the avant-garde he produced a stream of still challenging works, among them a distinguished series of piano pieces (Klavierstucke), and
Gruppen for three orchestras with three conductors (featured in Simon Rattle's recent TV history of 20th-century music).
A major development in the 1960s was his abandonment of musical notation, leading to what he called "intuitive music", for which the "scores" consisted entirely of text. Fully notated works returned in the 1970s (the pivotal piece here was Mantra for two pianos and electronics) and since 1977 he has been engaged on a mammoth, partly-autobiographical operatic project, Licht (Light), involving the composition of seven individual operas, one for each day of the week.
Since he started work on Licht, Stockhausen's concert pieces have tended to be offshoots of the music for the opera, in the form of "instrumental theatre". These pieces are typically performed with amplification, from memory, in costume and with stage movement. The composer works with an inner core of musicians - his trumpeter son, Markus, clarinettist Suzanne Stephens, flautist Kathinka Pasveer and soprano Annette Meriweather - whose particular abilities also seem to colour the pieces written for them.
Stockhausen was the featured composer of the first weekend of this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where some of his more recent work was contrasted with pieces which have already acquired classic status the early, haunting electronic masterpiece, Gesang der Junglinge (Song of The Youth), the brilliant Klavierstuck X (which makes such a feature of glissando that performers have to wear protective mitts), and the monumental structure of Mantra, with an endlessly fascinating world of timbre created through the use of ring modulators controlled by the performers.
Alongside these, the more recent works heard at Huddersfield were small beer indeed. The more I've seen and heard of Stockhausen's "instrumental theatre" the less there seems to be to it. His ear for presentation (sound in space has been a lifelong concern) is as alive as ever and the musical intelligence behind the sound projection makes impeccable judgments still. But the melodic material that Stockhausen now works with is striking only in its banality (his aspiration is to evoke "archetypal figures that make a lasting impression"), the theatrical concepts so thin as to be hardly sustainable, and the costuming reminiscent of a 1950s science fiction B movie.
At the other extreme, Huddersfield focused on the work of New Yorker Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Feldman's music is typically slow and soft, and, in the later works, long. A number of pieces played in Huddersfield stretched beyond an hour. Feldman relishes the way minute patterns soak into silence and he sequences his material to create an almost organic recursive timelessness. The longer pieces heard at Huddersfield, Patterns in a Chromatic Field for cello and piano, and the self-explanatory Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello didn't quite come off; the former suffered rather too many accidents in the piano part (Feldman, even when he sounds simple, is phenomenally demanding on performers), and the latter lacked a certain essential aura around the sound.
The lively resonance of the festival's major venue, St Paul's Hall (a converted church), might have been regarded as the culprit were it not for the fact that, with different performers, these problems didn't exist at all. The highlight of the Feldman weekend was the Sunday morning concert by the Ensemble Recherche from Germany. With Omar Ebrahim as the bass soloist, the O'Hara Songs (a single text set three times over) were breathtaking, and the concert included some very early Feldman (the two-minute piece for violin and piano of 1950) where the composer's lifelong musical preoccupations were already clearly evident.
THE second weekend also featured work by Ireland's leading composer, Gerald Barry. The Ives Ensemble from the Netherlands ran up against a mis-match of music and acoustic (St Paul's Hall, again) in the two Piano Quartets, the second of which was receiving a premiere performance. The group's handling of the First Piano Quartet had an impressive raw energy, but missed, at times, an underlying lilt. They were devastatingly to the point, however, in the Second, in music that has already been heard in Ireland in the composer's La Jalousie Taciturne, written for the strings of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. The use of the piano made for a harder, edgier sound world (prolonged fist and elbow clusters from the pianist at the start) and the Dutch players negotiated the transitions on which the composer places such importance with real sensitivity.
Barry was in Huddersfield, rehearsing with the players, and taking part in a typically engaging public discussion with festival director Richard Steinitz.
Other composers present during the festival included the Paris-born American Betsy Jotas, now 70, whose fondness for arabesque was delightfully represented in her Quartet No 2 for soprano (the quite remarkable Elizabeth Parcells) and string trio. Sofia Gubaidulina spoke movingly about religious engagement in her music during and after the Soviet era (she now lives in the West). And Michael Finnissy, 50 this year, was generously featured in music that generally seemed to be of a redundant complexity and largely left me cold.
The exceptions were in a short recital by Australia's Elision ensemble, a group that sports multiple guitars (also sitar), Japanese koto, harp, and mandolin in its line-up. The exotically coloured (mandolin, guitar and harp) Obrecht Motet II impressed more than any of Finnissy's bigger pieces, as did the frenetic Runnin' Wild for solo clarinet. On the other hand (in a different concert) there was the endurance test of his Selected Movements of Great Masters for saxophone quartet, a piece that is saddled with dreadfully feeble gestures of schoolboy humour. The best new example of complexity was in parts of Richard Barrett's Negatives, again from the ensemble Elision.
HUDDERSFIELD this year explored borders of theatre and music, with some pieces in the spirit of the 1960s (the circus-cum-music of Kagel's Variete rather less dated than the Ensemble Recherche's 1994 working of Dieter Schnebel's Glossolalie), a string band cum theatre group called the Gogmagogs (directed by Lucy Bailey) whose undoubted gifts and entertainment value may just be waiting for the right composer, and the hit-and-miss routines of Idee Fixe, all of which would fit with as much ease into the programme of the Dublin theatre Festival as into a music festival.
Of a different order was Chinese composer Tan Dun's Orchestral Theatre III, Red Forecast, an orchestral piece with video. The real risk here was that the music would be subsumed by the visual images (documentary-style footage from the 19605), and this is largely what happened. The mixture of video, effective (if not particularly original) theatricality, and punchy orchestral writing seemed more than a little cheap (effects too easily won) to me. It was enthusiastically received, however, by a largely young audience, many of whom had been working on educational projects based on Tan Dun's work. It is here that one of the less trumpeted aspects of the festival's endeavour could be felt. The number of educational projects has increased over the years, and space is found within the festival programme for presentation of the student performances. And the under-20s, it must be said, seemed to have a far kinder response to the new Stockhausen than their elders.
