KRONOS QUARTET
Barbican Centre, London, Mon
9th May
It can sometimes feel like modern music
is hopelessly split in twain – between that which ceaselessly coins
new compound genres (death metal disco, anyone?) and music which
regurgitates the past with the diligence of a re-enactment society.
It can feel like the post-modernists have bewitched us into a
self-fulfilling prophecy, sticking us between the rock of novelty and
the hard place of nostalgia. When great music has always come partly
through an engagement with it's times and partly through an
inter-relationship with the music of the past.
In which case acclaimed San Francisco
ensemble the Kronos Quartet are not just a longstanding exception but
a kind of antidote. As I said of the last time they played the Barbican (with Laurie Anderson) “for all their commissioning of scores and
ceaseless boundary-pushing, [they] are at root a string quartet whose
business is to perform recitals from scores.” For the most part
they play 'classical' stringed instruments, unfiltered and
unprocessed. They're even named after a figure deemed archaic by the
Ancient Greeks. (Okay, its more likely to be about connoting time.
Just go with it, okay?) They’re like spotting a classic car still
on the road, so elegant when queued up with mass-produced indentikit
boxes and yet able to keep going.
With one single exception, every
composer in the programme is still alive. (Two join the quartet
onstage.) And only two compositions are pre-millennium. Four are part
of their new 'Fifty for the Future' series, where fifty new compositions
will have their scores stuck up on-line as part of a learning
repertoire to enable further performances.
One notable feature of their approach
is the lack of a video screen. When it works multimedia can work very
well, but when it's bad its horrid. An automatic expectation of i
screens means stuff gets dragged aboard by rote, and often just ends
up distracting. The band onstage can't be just a band onstage but
becomes like one of those overloaded commercial websites, surrounded
by clickbait and dancing GIFs.
Belying the widespread notion that this
music is austere and difficult, several pieces are melodic and
lyrical. Fode Lassana Daibate's 'Sunjata's Time'
is like one of those works based around a folk tune. In fact the
problem was almost the reverse. Some pieces were too short to get a
hold of and consequently felt rather ephemeral. (Including Laurie
Anderson's 'Flow'.)
Kronos continued their longstanding
relationship with Terry Riley with 'One Earth, One People,
One Love', dating from 2002. The title springs from a
'mantra' made up by Alice Walker as an anti-bellicose response to
September 11th, so the sentiment may well be welcome. But,
perhaps even more than with his own Barbican appearance, it's further evidence that the
once pioneering minimalist is now little more than a New Ager. It's
platitudinous quality was mirrored by some soporific music.
Alexsandra Vrebalov's 'My
Desert, My Rose' (part of the Fifty for the Future series)
was by contrast an indeterminate composition more akin to the Riley
of old. Each player is given control of their own musical line, free
to meet up with the others but also to separate off again. Think of
four mountain walkers following four separate spiralling paths,
criss-crossing then uniting on the speak.
Martin Green (of Lau) accompanied the
band on his own home-made instruments for his 'Seiche'.
Two 'Kronoscillators' were mixed-up slinkys, the other (at the back
of the stage) had some strange mechanics I couldn't discern. His
interest was in creating something “impure... slightly
uncontrollable and unpredictable”, where even the player couldn't
determine what the instrument would be doing next. Perhaps
consequently, it was hard to tell how composed and how improvised it
was. Perhaps the 'proper' instruments were scored, but with the
capacity for the players to respond to the unpredictable. It ended up
with both the ups and downs of improvisation, at points stumbling
along while at others everything would come together and sound like
nothing else.
Mary Kouyomdjan's 'Beiruit'
provided the finale of the main set. The piece begins with recordings
of her own family from Lebanon. As they start to discuss the Civil
War and their emigration, the recordings start to overlap and the
accompanying music becomes more agitated. (A woman's voice tells of
giving birth while bombs drop.) The stage then falls into darkness as
we hear actual recordings of bombing. It is somewhat chilling to read
in the programme that these are not from sound library but were
recorded by her family from their balcony. And yet once framed by
music they take on their own musicality, like a Futurist noise
symphony. The players stridently join in with the sounds before
taking over from them, to subside back into quietude. The piece is so
striking it's a surprise to read Kouyomdjan was only thirty when she
wrote it.
The Quartet's sole concession to
rock'n'roll behaviour was to be pulled back onstage for two encores.
'Bombs of Beirut',
but not from the Barbican...
BRIGHTON:
SYMPHONY OF A CITY
Brighton
Dome, 11th May
This
collaboration between film-maker Lizzie Thynne and composer Ed Hughes
was a modern, home-based update of the 'city symphony' film genre “drawing on such precedents as
Walter Ruttman's silent classic 'Berlin, Symphony of a Great
City'.”
Hughes'
music, though a series of pieces more than an actual symphony, was
quite involving. It was effective the way strings and brass would
effectively work as two musical channels, creatively playing off
against one another.
Thynne's
film contained a neat device in framing the history footage within...
well, within the frame. A woman lines up a seafront photo on her
phone, and we see she's somehow time-machined a picture of
yesteryear. This is of course the way we do see the past, we cannot
help but mentally compare it to the present. It's something which
could perhaps have been played up more. The seafront facade for
example could have been shown as dissolving back through time
periods, until we pass before the film stock era. Brighton was a
centre of the early film industry, so the footage should be
available.
Overall,
the emphasis seemed to be on the ordinariness of Brighton, on people
doing everyday things. Which is perhaps the best approach to take.
Art that manages to reframe the everyday can be more effective that
art that aims at grand metaphysical statements.
But
it may be harder to pull off. Perhaps the film was unlucky in that I
re-watched Chris Marker's classic poetic essay film 'Sans
Soliel' only a short while later. A film which states its
intent near the beginning with the comment “I've been round the
world several times and now only the everyday still interests me”.
And Marker's film is suffused with such small everyday moments;
catching the January shadows of Tokyo, or people awkwardly trying to
sleep in their seats on a slow ferry. It's those intimate moments,
the poetry of everyday life, which seemed absent here.
Perhaps
it fell between stools, the images not striking enough to be
memorable while feeling too framed and composed to truly evoke the
ordinary. Perhaps it should have done something like the 2009
'All Tomorrow's Parties' documentary, which took
attendees' home footage and assembled it into “a post-punk DIY bricolage”.
But
perhaps the biggest failing was that the heralded collaboration
between film-maker and composer didn't actually happen. They may have
done their things at the same time, but there was little creative
spark between the two. The musical pieces would vary in tone and
tempo, but those variations were never really matched by the visuals.
And
the genre took it's name for a reason. Alex Barrett defines it as “films that are influenced by the
form and structure of a musical symphony.” Chris Marker, again from
'Sans Soliel', said:
“This
city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost
in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And
that created the cheapest image... overcrowded, megalomaniac,
inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms,
clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and
precise as groups of instruments.”
Perhaps
they worked at different scales, Ruttman's film capturing the grand
sweep of a classical symphony and Marker's more modern work homing in
on clusters - the difference between Beethoven and Philip Glass. Yet
Thynne's effort lacked any kind of rhythm or musicality at all, just
serving up shot after shot of people ambling around.
There
were points when it felt like an art-house version of a tourist info
film, detailing the city's attractions for the visitor. (The Sea Life
Centre not only featured prominently but got their logo in the end
credits, so were presumably a sponsor.) At others it seemed keen to
portray a city of hipsters at play. (“Look! A young woman boarding
a train carrying an acoustic guitar! That's the kind of crazy,
happening place Brighton is!”) The sort of stuff which gets me
muttering “one day a real rain will fall”. Though there were
admittedly some counter-scenes of student demos and homelessness.
Given
which, it would be neat to dismiss the film as 'neoliberal',
exposing how unlike the amassed city symphonies of the past people
today don't play their part or even bang their own drum – they just
tap it listlessly.
But
even that seems to grant the film too much. A film for example like 'Wolf of Wall Street' may in many ways be risible, but is in a
sense doing it's job (at the most surface level) of capturing the era
it's in. I'm not sure this achieved even that. I didn't even take
against it, so much as shrugged and went home.
When
Brighton was granted city status back in 2001 many of us took against
the idea, feeling we were swapping our uniqueness for a non-identity
as London-by-the-sea – becoming like everywhere else to make it
easier for other people to come here. To this day many people I know
still defiantly call their home town a town. And here we had proof of
how much media froth that 'city status' really was - a non-symphony
for a non-city.
GHOSTFACE KILLAH
Royal Festival Hall, London, Sat
14th May
I don't really need to tell you that
Ghostface Killah was a founder member of Wu-Tang Clan, do I? Their
importance not just to hip-hop but to general music history was
perhaps best summed up by the posse themselves, with the track
'The Wu-Tang Clan Are Not a Bunch of Fellows to be Trifled
With'. (They may have phrased that slightly differently.
They are from New York.) Their ability to be streetwise and cerebral
at the same time was again handily summed up by a track title -
'Da Mystery of Chessboxin'. Their edgier, more
aggressive sound both galvanised hip-hop and fed into some of the
excesses of gangster rap. But important artists always leave both
good and bad music in their wake.
With hip—hop the rapid-fire rapping
can sound stream-of-consciousness. But the music's often intricately
layered, dragging sounds and samples in from different directions
like Tom Cruise on those video screens in 'Minority
Report'. Which reprises a question asked over
the Cannibal Ox gig, is it something which can work well
live?
Ghostface Killah's approach seems to be
not to try to reproduce the studio but embrace the chaos. He takes to
the stage with a large entourage in tow, announces mid-way he'll only
perform under red lights because “red is my favourite colour”,
drags audience members onstage to take the parts of absent Clan
members (which works surprisingly well), brings on guests (which
doesn't, one gets booed off), starts and stops tracks at seeming
random.
He holds much of it together through
sheer strength of personality, something he seems to have little
shortage of. And you could argue that you can only get the
good chaos, the unexpected event, with the bad
stuff. But it seems remarkably like he'd forgotten he was in London
to do a gig until five minutes beforehand, and works only fitfully.
At points it starts to sound like karaoke for rabble-rousers.
Notably, when stuck for something else to do, his co-vocalist breaks
into a bar from 'Purple Rain'. And as a result we
do get to hear a fair bit of 'Purple Rain'. It
ends almost mid-song, with him transmitting the news his time is up,
and the house lights switching straight on.
For once there is footage of the
Brighton gig, and it's a time when I caught the London show.
Figures...
Coming soon! More Brighton Festival stuff...
No comments:
Post a Comment