Irish Timeswriters look at what is happening in the arts scene
Quiet Music Festival
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork
THE FIRST question in relation to Cork's Quiet Music Festival is obvious. What is "quiet music"? Is it just music that's gentle on the ear, say Satie's Gymnopédies, the opening movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Mozart's Ave verum, or Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte?
Is it an Irish branch of Wandelweiser, the composers' collective which, taking its cue from John Cage, has been exploring the nature and nuances of silence?
Or is it a brand new movement that's sprung up out of nowhere? For artistic director John Godfrey, the quiet music name seems to offer an alternative to the labels of "new" or "contemporary" music.
Quiet is his chosen adjective for the experimental music that his festival focuses on. There's a decided emphasis on improvisation, but no actual insistence on quietness.
In fact, most of the performances were actually amplified, and some of the pieces were very loud indeed.
The festival programme included improvisations with found objects and homemade instruments - imagine constructions on the lines of drawings by Heath Robinson or B Kliban - as well as conventional concert instruments.
There was an improvised performance governed by the gestures of Walter Thompson's soundpainting sign language, a free improvisation with music and dance (Heloise Gold with the Quiet Music Ensemble, who debuted at the festival), and an accordion improvisation from veteran composer and improviser Pauline Oliveros.
There were also pieces that encouraged listeners to wander around the venue, exploiting the fact that things can sound very different depending on your location.
The festival's major event was Sssh!, an seven-hour marathon including a string of new pieces at UCC's Lewis Glucksman Gallery on Saturday. Mark Applebaum humorously suggested that his Medium could be viewed as "grossly undercomposed, even lazy", since the score suggests neither specific instruments nor sounds.
It's a graphic score, of the kind Roman Haubenstock-Ramati made famous in the 1960s, trusting to the responsiveness and inventiveness of the performers, who on this occasion made it humorous too.
David Toop's Night Leaves Breathing, for amplified quintet and electronics, was sparked by the sounds of life and movement heard while reading in bed, and was also influenced by the silent activities depicted in 17th-century Dutch paintings.
It was one of those pieces that delivered just what its title suggests.
Both Alvin Lucier's instrumental Shadow Lines and John Godfrey's electronic Strapped were straightforward statements exploiting musical interference patterns.
Juraj Kojs's interest in hybridisation and orchids led to his E-clip-sing, in which the players uninterestingly scrunch up sheets of paper to rub against and slap off their instruments.
And Karen Power's Flies who Dreamt of more than Windscreens pitted the recorded sounds of glass against slow pitch changes from an instrumental trio.
Irene Buckley's Evolution of Close Double Stars, with its alternations between walls of organ-like electronic material - heard earlier at one of the festival's Quiet Evenings at the Triskel Arts Centre - managed to make a much stronger impression.
Pauline Oliveros's free improvisation on accordion included an unintended sonic explosion from a technical mishap.
She uses computer processing to spatialise the sound of her instrument and achieve otherwise unobtainable effects like pitch-bending, but the improvisation, like many of the performances during the festival's Quiet Evenings series, seemed too heavily predicated on looping and reverberation as a kind of substitute for the comforting cushion that can be provided by the piano's sustaining pedal.
And, sadly, her performance of her Portraits, with John Godfrey on electric guitar, didn't seem to get off the ground on this occasion.
All in all, this was a festival where the combination of a 1960s ethos with 21st-century technology involved creative shackling as well as liberation.
MICHAEL DERVAN
Paul Simon
The Marquee, Cork
YOU DON'T need a "shot at redemption" when you have a half-century of songwriting behind you. Anyway, from the opening grooves and audience interaction, this never looked like being that kind of gig.
Coming across like the Bob Dylan of world music and with a steady stream of recording and touring commitments, Paul Simon doesn't appear to be easing off the gas any time soon.
It's been one helluva musical career - whether it was mobilising South African choirs, leading Brazilian drummers and Mexican musicians, or being part of the greatest folk duo of all time. (There was even time to chance his hand at acting in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.)
And that's not forgetting a body of pop tunes as achingly honest, direct and lyrical as any ever written.
But perhaps, based on this outing, Paul Simon could also pitch for the greatest musical tease act on the circuit.
At times, he can be over-reflective and historically naive, as with the title track from the album, How Can You Live in the Northeast?.
Minus Brian Eno's studio contribution, the lyrics are somewhat verbose and struggle to convince.
Take the following lines: "Weak as the winter sun, we enter life on earth; names and religion comes just after date of birth; and everybody gets a tongue to speak, and everyone hears an inner voice."
And these lyrics came from the same songwriter who penned Hello Darkness, my old Friend.
Simon was accompanied by a seven-piece rhythm, blues and African orchestra, and when
he wasn't dependent on less-assured material, the musical breaks, changes in rhythm and distinctive soft vocals were mesmerising.
From the reworking of Mrs Robinson to the rhythmical juggernaut of Graceland, the rolling melodies of Slip Sliding Awayand the quiet intensity of Sound of Silence, perhaps he should rename his tour "50 ways to satisfy your audience" - and then some.
Performing several encores, and with a set lasting more than two hours, Simon at times lost his swagger and sounded more like a maudlin drunk at a bus stop.
But who cares if the path to genius is littered with the odd moment of mediocrity?
In the main, Simon gave a faithful rendition to the faithfully devoted and proved that, even at 66, he's still relevant after all these years.
BRIAN O'CONNELL
Feeley, Rojas, RTÉ NSO/Houlihan
NCH, Dublin
Rodrigo - Fantasia para un Gentilhombre
Brouwer - Concerto Elegiaco
Giuliani - Concerto in A
Rodrigo - Concierto de Aranjuez
JOHN FEELEY and Berta Rojas split solo duty in four of the best-known works for guitar and orchestra in this concert, which was part of the Waltons Guitar Festival of Ireland.
Ironically, the second-most recent piece - Rodrigo's 1954 Fantasia para un Gentilhombre- had the oldest sound, being not really a concerto but a sequence of late 17th-century dances by Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz.
Feeley succeeded in capturing Rodrigo's retrospective, discreetly nostalgic grace, reminiscent of neoclassical pieces by Stravinsky and Respighi, or even Ireland's Arthur Duff (Echoes of Georgian Dublin).
There was much more work to do in the Mozartian Concerto in A by Mauro Giuliani, a near contemporary of Beethoven.
Flying passagework in true classical style afforded a view of Feeley's deceptively easy facility, and there was much thematic interaction between solo and orchestra - kept to a straightforward accompanying role in the Rodrigo.
Paraguayan Rojas engaged with an altogether different sound-world in the Concerto Elegiacoby Leo Brouwer, revolutionary Cuba's leading composer.
Helped by a much broader instrumental palette, the piece ranged between moods that were quite dark in the opening movement to buoyantly lyrical in the finale.
Rojas delivered the slow movement's improvisatory spirit with an impression of gentle spontaneity.
As well as being probably the most popular of all guitar concertos, on this occasion Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez also presented the most overtly Spanish flavour.
Rojas strummed the characteristic Iberian rhythms with a graceful reserve in the outer movements, and tugged upon the heart strings in the famous, melancholic Adagio, the melody nicely echoed in the cor anglais.
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra - expanding and contracting quite substantially in number and instrumentation according to each work - was a sensitive partner under the direction of Robert Houlihan, who always ensured balance between his players and the soft (even if subtly amplified) voice of the guitar.
MICHAEL DUNGAN
