Michael Dervanreviews the Printing House Festival of New Musicat Printing House, TCD
Life after Feldman was the name of the second Printing House Festival of New Music last weekend. The stock of New York composer Morton Feldman has been rising consistently since his death 20 years ago, with last year's Beckett centenary celebrations bringing performances of a handful of major works that Irish audiences would otherwise have been unlikely to hear.
The directors of the festival, Garrett Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, avoided the obvious temptation to turn the event into an actual retrospective of the composer's work. They included only two Feldman pieces, and focused instead on music that, in a factually tight but sometimes aesthetically loose way, delivered what the festival's title promised.
The programme opened and closed with Feldman. First up was The King of Denmarkfor solo percussion, a work that hovers on the cusp of silence, which Richard O'Donnell somehow managed to play with a strange matter-of-factness. This was part of a concert by the RIAM Percussion Ensemble, where the pieces which stood out were the two excerpts from Larry Polyansky's Tetherball( Haikuand Frengelmusic), and Aengus Ó Maoláin's new clunge/elegance, a festival commission that delivered the kind of chunky drumming which offers immediate delights to both players and audience.
The Feldman piece chosen to end the festival, the 1980 Trio for violin, cello and piano, had a concert to itself, its specified duration of around 80 minutes extended by a full 40 minutes in the performance by Marc Sabat, Rohan de Saram and Aki Takahashi.
This is one of the earliest of Feldman's late long pieces. The dynamic marking is typically below pianissimo (with, around a third of the way through, a shocking moment that catapults to the opposite extreme), the strings offering grainy wisps, the piano issuing quiet chords that emerge without edge, and hover with a faint halo.
Movement within the Trio's spidery, floating sound world is irregular and unpredictable, even when there's repetition involved (some repetitions are exact, but others involve minute changes). The effect is spellbinding, with Feldman's sense of timing placing one of the piece's most conventional gestures, a set of rising, connected piano chords towards the end, so that it can sound like something you've never heard before. Music is usually the experience of sound in time, but Feldman turns it into the timeless contemplation of the minutest of gestures and inflections.
Feldman famously had his first encounter with John Cage during a concert in which Dimitri Mitropoulos had conducted Webern's Symphony to a hostile New York audience. And just as Feldman was excited by the delicate and ethereal in Webern, rather than the compositional procedures that got other composers excited, there are a lot of starting points in his own work from which younger composers can draw inspiration: slowness, softness, indeterminacy, repetition, microtones, pieces of long durations, the adoption of an intuitive rather than a calculated approach.
Given the festival's theme, it was to be expected that Feldman's Trio would not be the festival's only long work involving repetition. Paul G Smyth played Simon O'Connor's Ovum(part of The Paradise), a piece which works on the Chinese water torture principle, that a single thing experienced long enough will change the way you feel.
Brian Ledwidge Flynn's Combination Lock, played by Ensemble Imp, and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's Ocean (a world premiere by mezzo soprano Michelle O'Rourke and the RIAM Percussion Ensemble), also set out as process pieces where the apparent attractiveness of the basic ideas was not matched by the interest of the outcomes.
During the festival, I came to think of this as "the Beethoven Op 39 problem". Beethoven's Op 37 is his Third Piano Concerto, his Op 38 is a clarinet trio arrangement of his popular Septet, and his Op 40 is the Romance in G for violin and orchestra. But few people have ever heard of Op 39, which is, in fact a pair of process pieces with a goal that's declared in their title, Two Preludesthrough all the major keys, a fascinating idea which resulted in music that's anything but.
The festival's tightest Feldman-ish programme was a recital by Aki Takahashi, a pianist that the composer himself held in the highest regard. She has the enviable knack of seeming to shape every note as if it's a perfect calligraphic stroke, while at the same time managing to keep a clear view of the bigger picture. Her recital of works by Michael Byron, Barbara Monk Feldman, Walter Zimmermann, Christian Wolff, Bunita Marcus and James Tenney was an object lesson in pianistic sound-sculpting. But the last piece in her programme, a microtonal trio with violin and cello by Marc Sabat, fell clearly into the Op 39 category.
The highlight of the ConTempo String Quartet's programme was Jennifer Walshe's minard/nithscale, a work which fruitfully uses unorthodox effects to make an unsettling exploration along the dividing line between childhood play and adult derangement. Christopher Fox's 1-2-3was brightly patterned and often as Ladybird-book-lurid as it's title might suggest. Donnacha Dennehy's specially commissioned Pushpulling essayed a minimalism of nostalgia, based on the pleasure of recurrent beginnings. And Ian Wilson's in fretto, in vento sounded like a strange intrusion from an expressionist past.
Sadly, the world of John Cage's Foureluded the ConTempos in an otherwise well-played programme.
The Dublin Guitar Quartet sounded off-colour in their opener, the arrangement of Kevin Volans's White Man Sleeps, which has effectively become their signature piece. They returned to form for the rest of the programme, offering a series of 13 one-minute commissions from the members of the Young Composers' Collective (best I thought were the toy-like sounds of Brian Ledwidge Flynn's Cameo and the fluid, interestingly cluttered textures of Daniel Jacobson's eccentrically titled Flocculondular; anterior and posterior lobes; Phylogenetical divisions of the cerebellum). This programme's festival commission from Seán Clancy also had an extreme title, The Shrinking of the Aura With an Artificial Build Up (Not To Be Reproduced).The music was at its most interesting when building up patterns that created moiré-like effects.
