From 1986 to 1991 the Sligo Arts Festival supported a New Music for Sligo Competition. The spirit behind that worthwhile venture has now been revived and expanded, and the first Sligo Contemporary Music Festival took place at the Model Arts Centre over the weekend.
The featured composer was the multi-faceted Barry Guy. The British ensemble Gemini gave a concert of his work on Friday (in which he also conducted and played double bass) and he was joined in a late-night session of free improvisation by two Swedes, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and percussionist Raymond Strid.
As a performer, Guy has worked at a number of cutting edges, not only as an improviser on the double bass, but as an interpreter of some of the most demanding works of the contemporary repertoire and as a player in period-instrument orchestras.
As a composer, he has shown an interest in sonorities realisable only through the use of recording technology. Whis- tle and Flute (for flute) and Ceremony (baroque violin) both set solo instruments against a multi-layered skein of recorded sound from the same instruments. The chorale-like close of Ceremony, played in Sligo by Maya Homburger, made a strong impression, as did the simple poignancy of Immeasurable Sky, four songs without words for baroque violin and double bass (Homburger with the composer).
Bird Gong Game, for improvising soloist with flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet and percussion, sets out to find a viable solution to the challenge of marrying improvisation and notated music where the improviser is genuinely free and the notated music must flex and accommodate. Guy's solution involves a modular structure with a conductor using show-cards to negotiate a route responsive to the direction taken by the soloist.
In Sligo we were able to hear the piece shape itself around two very different soloists, firstly in response to the astonishingly agile voice of Maggie Nicols, using vocal techniques first explored in the 1960s by the likes of Stockhausen and Berio, and then in tandem with the raunchier, more explosive sax-playing of Mats Gustafsson.
Free improvisation may seem like an exercise in liberality, but most improvisations that I've ever heard seemed driven to extremes. The trio of Guy/Gustafsson/Strid - with guest spots by Maggie Nicols - were no exception, and their moments of magically-manoeuvred transition, of the unexpected become retrospect ively inevitable, were no less exceptional.
Saturday afternoon brought a joint venture by Ronan Guilfoyle's jazz group Devsirme and Eric Sweeney's Waterford New Music Ensemble, repeating a programme heard at Cork's Contemporary Music Festival earlier in the year. Although it's free improvisation which has a do-as-you-please image, on this occasion it was the altogether more restrictive output of Guilfoyle and Sweeney which seemed the more self-indulgent. Guilfoyle seems to want to tie down jazz through composition, Sweeney to open up his narrow brand of minimalism with jazz freedoms. The result is the worst of all possible worlds.
On Saturday evening Jane O'Leary's Concorde ensemble played works by each of the past prizewinners of the Sligo competition. Concorde have long been a stylistic conundrum, playing contemporary music in a manner more suited to music of the past than the present. I found their playing on this occasion both timid and opaque, only Michael Alcorn's Making a Song and Dance and the Winter section from Fergus Johnston's Sig- nals! escaping significantly from the deadening middle ground of the playing.
Concorde's handling of the competition pieces was even more depressing. The performance of the first work, Eunan McCreesh's Ag fas, came apart and had to be re-started, and the prevailing lack of point and precision was breached only by Paul Roe on clarinet, who shapes, phrases, inflects and makes stylistic distinctions in a way none of his colleagues do.
McCreesh's encounter between minimalism and traditional Irish material probably suffered most from the style of performance; the winning piece, David Fennessy's thren odically-expressionist Night piece, least. It was hard to see the point of Vincent Kennedy's Episodes in the Life of Johnny Three Legs, written in a style of illustrative children's music. Frank Lyons's jazzy Kid Gloves, which openly wore the influence of John Adams's Chamber Symphony, carried far greater appeal.
The generous programme of lectures and discussions raised lively issues about free improvisation. More revelatory, however, was a remark by Arts Council music officer Dermot McLaughlin, who bemoaned the fact that performance opportunities for contemporary music were so "appallingly low". This, surely, has to be related to a second remark of his, that the Arts Council "has no precise policy for contemporary music".
