Dermot Gault reviews the Sonorities Festival at Queen's University, Belfast.
Inevitably, this year's Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music at Queen's University Belfast centred on the new Sonic Arts Research Centre, specially constructed to explore the possibilities of electro-acoustic music.
Given this emphasis, it was interesting to see how important live performers were in the scheme of things.
The concert on Thursday by laut, a new media collective featuring Franziska Schroeder (saxophones) and Pedro Rebello (electronics) emphasised the live aspect by incorporating elements of music theatre (Schroeder entered from the rear of the room, wandered around, and finally lay down to sleep).
The primacy of the performers was further emphasised by incorporating pieces by Cort Lippe, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Peter Nelson and laut themselves into a performance of Breath, for one wind instrument by the master of music theatre, Mauricio Kagel, the whole comprising a single unbroken music-theatre event in which difference of style between the various composers was not especially evident.
But while there is no doubt that electronics are enhanced by interaction with live performers, the reverse is also true.
There are, after all, limits to the amount of musical interest that can be obtained from one solo saxophone.
The following evening's concert drew from pieces composed during the 25-year life of the Sonic Arts Network.
With classics such as Trevor Wishart's Vox 5 and Jonty Harrison's Pair/Impair the result was, musically, the strongest event of the series.
I particularly liked Hugh Davies's Strata for tape and concert Aeolian harp, a fragile metal array which the composer performer blew on, gently, and Steven Montague's engagingly nostalgic Haiku, in which the piano was played by the emerging English specialist in new music, Daniel Becker.
Finding a shape for electronic pieces, a reason why they should end at one point rather than another, can be problematic, and some of the most effective pieces, such as Barry Anderson's Electroacoustic Fanfare and the Edge Dance by Javier Alvarez and Ian Dearden, were also the shortest.
Visual display is another of the studio's resources, albeit one which is experiencing a few teething troubles, and a blue screen with the legend "video input not detected" was liable to appear.
The most restrained visuals often turned out to be the most effective. In Symbiont Matthew Adkins's sounds functioned as an accompaniment to Miles Chalcraft's images, but Curtis Roads's Point Line Cloud achieved a more satisfactory balance with Brian O'Reilly's visuals.
For the final concert of the series, the Sonorities Festival teamed up with the ongoing BBC Music Live festival.
The main interest here lay in two imaginative and energetic works by Xenakis. Live Stochastic Synthesis by Russel Haswell was the work chosen to bring the festival to an end.
We were warned of extreme noise levels, and earplugs, which turned out to be of no use whatsoever, were offered to the audience as they went in.
Whatever the composer's intentions, several audience members found this a bit of a stress test, and followed the example of the composer himself in leaving before the end.
