Queen
Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London, 11th October
Regular
readers, should such a thing exist, will know that Julia Wolfe was a
founder member of the new music ensemble Bang on a Can, whose solo
compositions finally reached my ears via Steve
Reich's birthday celebrations at the Barbican in May last
year.
Should
you want map references as to where Wolfe stems from, such pointers
are probably helpful. Certainly her work's a world away from the punk
music simultaneously celebrated in the 'Someday
All the Adults Will Die' exhibition, elsewhere in the South
Bank complex. And yet it's in what seems a very hackneyed
exhibition's nadir, that a strange point of congruence is hit on.
In
a diatribe by John Holmstrom of 'Punk' magazine he
claims punk was originally a celebration of American culture - until
it was corrupted by the feckless and workshy Brits, which has left
the States more open to the threat of communism. Which, if you're
British, a communist and a punk fan, is a pretty amusing thing to
come across. It's like one of those shock jock fulminations which you
can only wish was right.
But
there is actually a grain of truth to be found there, for in a sense
punk really was a celebration of American culture.
As David Thomas of Pere Ubu commented, “our ambitions were to move
it forward… create something worthy of Faulkner or Melville.”
It's
perhaps too easy to flip the flag, to take up a narrow
anti-Americanism and overlook the amount of American art that's
positively influenced you. But there's an irony and a deeper point.
What we tend to hope for is dissident art which critiques America,
but it's often the least mainstream aspects of American culture which
tend to epitomise what's best about it.
Which
Wolfe does in spades. Even when high culture does embrace the low, it
too often feels like some kind of self-congratulatory eclecticism, or
some philanthropic condescension - like donating money to charity
while ignoring that it's those people you're feeding off. Whereas her
music never starts with such separations between popular and higbrow,
but seizes instead on whatever seems to her the most enticing- a
bottom-line refusal to be fenced in. Wolfe will feed your head and
grab you by the gut simultaneously. She writes in the programme of
her desire “to bring something earthy and visceral to the orchestra
– to break with formality and get down and dirty.”
As
we'll see, such outside-the-box thinking leads to off-the-wall
performances sporting the most unorthodox instrumentation. But it's
not through any circus-act gimmickiness that this is music you just
have to see live. There's a visceral force to it that you've simply
got to be there for. (And I should know. A creative juxtaposition
between the timetables and when the trains were actually running
meant I missed the whole first half of the concert, and only heard it
via the live Radio 3 broadcast on the iPlayer.)
Porceedings
opened with 'Tell Me Everything'
- and she's not kidding with that title. For a composer rooted in
minimalism this was pretty maximalist stuff! Rather than serenely
harmonious it was positively cacophonous, like the whole history of
music happening at once, overlaying itself as if composed on sheets
of acetate paper.
Which
is of course the history of music. Whatever the books tell you, music
did not develop through some neat notion of linear progress, with one
formal innovation supplanting another. It was chaotic and convulsive,
a flow diagram where lines fly everywhere, cross and feed back on
themselves.
Or
if not music the piece could be about the way the history of America
is chaotic, different groups and traditions slamming head-on into
each other and throwing up something new and completely
unpredictable. What if you had Superman hearing and were taking in
the different neighbourhoods of New York all at once? - different
strains emanating from every window, adding to the same patchwork
symphony played in the key of life. Rather than the 'melting pot' of
homogenous white-bread America, this was an alphabet soup of new
words and phrases. It felt reminiscent, in feel more than sound, of
Terry Riley's innovative 'In C', in which everyone
simultaneously plays what they feel like and together.
Yet
if cachophonous it's also cheerily freewheeling, like a party to
which no-one is turned away. It was like George Gershwin thrown tipsy
by a cocktail of drugs and post-modernity, it was like
discombobulated dance music. It's the very opposite of the austere
'challenging' label that new music gets tagged with. Wolfe commented
“there were so many times while writing this piece that I broke
into laughter.”
Remember
that old Carol where you get sent for Christmas “eleven pipers
piping”? Well it wasn't Christmas and it involved a mere nine
pipers, but 'LAD' still seemed
in that spirit.
It
was performed by the bagpipe ensemble (I am not making this up) the
Red Hot Chilli Pipers, previous winners of 'When Will I Be
Famous' (I am still not making this up) who have been
described as “bagrock”, and include Who and AC/DC numbers in
their repertoire (it's all true, honest). Though it was written with
this instrumentation in mind, this is only the second-ever
performance to feature all nine pipers. (Most versions have utilised
the labour-saving minimalist standby of playing along to pre-recorded
tapes.)
One
cool thing about the piece is that much of the score is based around
the incidental sounds the bagpipe makes when being prepared to play
(as the bag is inflated), so ends up exploring the uniqueness of
their timbre much more deeply. In this way, rather than trying to
overcome the limits of the instrument it focuses in on them. Then
times it by nine. If 'Tell Me Everything' made
music out of pluralism, this was music which ganged up on you.
The
resultant sound achieves the 'Modernist double' of sounding ancient
and futuristic at the same time. It was simultaneously like being
present at the dawn of time and standing before a UFO gearing up to
defy gravity. The sound was simultaneously fulsome and indescribable.
This
was the most classically Minimalist piece in the concert, and should
put paid once and for all to the dumb prejudice that the style is
about twee little twinkly sounds, the musical equivalent of Christmas
lights. Wolfe herself has said “being in the same room with a
bagpipe (or nine) is sonically completely overwhelming”. When those
pipers get a pipin' they virtually inflated the room!It really wasn't
so far away from the heavy riffing of hard rock bands. This is music
not to stroke your chin but shake your tonsils.
Then
for the finale came 'rISE and fLY.' (Yes, that's hOW iT'S wRITTEN, perhaps to get bloggers annoyed with
their auto-correct functions.) There was only one non-wind instrument
in the whole of 'LAD', one player striking the
floor with his foot. This next piece built on that one element. It
involved an orchestra the size of a swarm, but backing a soloist
playing his own body. Before moving on to a mix of mostly
extemporised percussion, including plastic buckets and – as he
proudly told us - the oven tray from his flat.
...which
of course immediately breaks one of Minimalism's most cardinal rules,
in allowing one player to be dominant. But... you know... in a
good way. In the Seventies era of uber-radicalism,
leftist composers were always arguing a hierarchy between instruments
represented a hierarchical society, with the second flautist and the
triangle player representing a divided proletariat under the
autocracy of the oboe. Like most such theories, they pushed it to a
somewhat obsessive extent but (despite my jesting) there is most
likely some nugget of truth at the root of it. After all, the main
aim of amplification is to ensure that the very bottom of this
hierarchy is you. You can tap your foot or pat
your leg at a gig, and it's normally so loud you can't hear yourself.
You are outmanned and outgunned.
But
amplification here is used to invert the normal acoustic hierarchy,
less megaphone diplomacy and more a democratising device. Some
strategically placed mikes, some slider action on the mixing desk and
rubbing your hands together is suddenly on a level with a kettle
drum. Film can overcome the laws of scale, with 'Battleship
Potemkin' at one point framing the entirety of the ship
and the next blowing up some maggots to the full size of the screen.
Amplification means music can do the same.
Wolfe
was inspired into this piece by the old Hambone tradition of folk
music played on human body, and by “New York City street beats...
banging out grooves on plastic tubs and pots and pans.” She saw the
piece as “its own short history”, the 'body' and 'percussion'
sections compressing this shift between the two eras. (It reminds me
of the segue at the end of 'How The West Was Won',
as the mountain trail becomes the multi-laned highway.)
The
piece worked least well when the orchestra echoed and underlined the
soloist, like a kind of musical exoskeleton, and most when it treated
him like any other soloist and played around him. Even a football
know-nothing like me knows the team players don't run straight after
the guy with the ball, but arrange themselves around him. Moreover,
when playing as a team, the instruments underlined the uniqueness of
the 'human sounds', the hollow slappiness of striking your chest, the
sharpness of finger snaps.
But
best of all, however exhilarating a sight is a grown man battering
his own thighs and chest, was the way you got used to it so quickly.
It went past being a clever gimmick, and soon became another way of
producing music. The oven tray in your flat? An instrument, waiting
to happen.
The
piece was written specially for the soloist, Colin Currie, and
perhaps its chief weakness was that it at times felt like that -
tipping over into an excuse for virtuoso playing. (Particularly in
it's second half.) Which was perhaps a step too far from Minimalism
for me. However much I enjoyed it, it was my least favourite piece of
the night. But then, given the inspirational audacity of the
programme as a whole, perhaps that's to praise with faint damning.
Four pieces, each striking off on it's own, but sharing the same
underlying ethos – the future of music lies in it's roots.
Next
time someone claims the Americans do nothing but steal foreign folk
traditions and sell it back as packaged blandness, tell the
know-nothings to listen to some Julia Wolfe.
Coming
soon! More from the Ether Festival. (Yeah I know, a bit
late in the day! Are you not used to that yet?)
