Chris Swithinbank

‘Be­fore Christ­mas I got to hear my adop­tive or­ches­tra from King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety in full flow at their con­cert of Elgar and Du­ruflé, so it was with ex­cite­ment that I pre­pared to kick off the New Year with my first work­shop with the or­ches­tra. The or­ches­tra are busy prepar­ing some tricky Bruck­ner and Strauss for their next con­cert at the start of March but we man­aged to find an hour in the sched­ule to work­shop some of my ini­tial ideas last Tues­day.’

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My first work­shop with the or­ches­tra of King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety is on Tues­day — 11.1.11! — and I’m look­ing for­ward to play­ing around with some semi-im­pro­vised ex­per­i­ments mix­ing tra­di­tional no­ta­tion and graph­i­cal el­e­ments that will hope­fully let us cre­ate some in­ter­est­ing co­in­ci­dences and ar­rays of in­ter­act­ing lines. I will post some­thing about how it goes over on the Adopt a Com­poser blog next week, but in the mean­time why not read about the ex­pe­ri­ences so far of the other com­posers in­volved.

Here’s an anec­dote to her­ald in 2011:

‘At one time Karl­heinz [Stock­hausen] and I would talk and ex­change ideas. You know the story about the talk about singing? Well, he was writ­ing a song for Cathy Berber­ian, who I later also wrote for, and he said, “if you were writ­ing for a singer, would you write music, or would you write for the singer?” And I said, “I would write for the singer”, and he said, “well that’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween us, be­cause I would write music.” So then he wrote this song for Cathy, and he asked her to whis­tle. And she can’t whis­tle. So that’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween us. Hmhmhmhm!’

— John Cage

FROM: Steve Sweeney Turner and John Cage, ‘John Cage’s Prac­ti­cal Utopias: John Cage in Con­ver­sa­tion with Steve Sweeney Turner’, The Mu­si­cal Times, cxxxi/1771 (Sep­tem­ber, 1990), p. 469.

As the end of the year ap­proaches, here are some of the best things that I have read, seen and heard in the past twelve months.

Two major, large-scale per­for­mances this au­tumn made an im­pact on me. The Lon­don Sin­foni­etta’s con­cert of Lachen­mann at the South­bank Cen­tre in Oc­to­ber was one. I al­ready knew the mon­u­men­tal piano con­certo Ausklang was some­thing spe­cial, but the high­light that evening was Schreiben, a 25-minute or­ches­tral work from 2003. Here’s the be­gin­ning of that per­for­mance recorded by Radio 3:

The other large-scale per­for­mance that is still burned into my mem­ory came cour­tesy of musik­Fab­rik and their per­for­mance of Re­becca Saun­ders’s CHROMA at the Hud­der­s­field Con­tem­po­rary Music Fes­ti­val in No­vem­ber. A work of vast scope and many beau­ti­ful in­tri­ca­cies, I found my­self deeply moved by the ex­pe­ri­ence of wan­der­ing through that ar­chi­tec­tural sound. Here’s a short video from re­hearsals at Hud­der­s­field Town Hall fea­tur­ing prob­a­bly the creepi­est of Saun­ders’s col­lec­tion of music boxes — music boxes that to­gether pro­duce a kind of glit­ter­ing, metal­lic rain:

On a smaller scale, I was very im­pressed by Punto rosso, the sec­ond string quar­tet by Brazil­ian com­poser Aurélio Edler Copês, per­formed by Quatuor Di­o­tima at this year’s Cen­tre Acan­thes in Metz. Using live elec­tron­ics to great ef­fect, the work of­fers a rich and in­tensely colour­ful sound­world that un­folds to form a pow­er­fully or­ganic struc­ture. Here’s an ex­cerpt:

Going back to the be­gin­ning of the year: Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play I Am Yusuf And This Is My Brother, per­formed by Pales­tin­ian the­atre group Shiber­Hur at the Young Vic in Feb­ru­ary, was po­etic not only in its lan­guage but in its stag­ing. Writ­ten around the up­heaval vis­ited upon a Pales­tin­ian vil­lage dur­ing the con­flict in 1948, the foot­prints left in the dust on stage by the con­tin­u­ally flee­ing ac­tors was as el­e­gant a vi­sual metaphor as the old man bear­ing the weight of an up­rooted tree that he planted, watched grow, and does not wish to aban­don. Here’s a short in­ter­view with the play­wright from The Guardian:

Ola­fur Elias­son’s ex­hi­bi­tion Innen Stadt Außen at the Mar­tin Gropius Bau in Berlin this sum­mer was mind-blow­ing in its sim­plic­ity and ef­fec­tive­ness. I sup­pose that means it was ef­fi­cient, but that seems a crude way of de­scrib­ing in­stal­la­tions that cre­ated some se­ri­ously beau­ti­ful ex­pe­ri­en­tial sit­u­a­tions such as these snap­shots of light­ing cre­ated with strobe light and flail­ing hose (this video’s from the Venice Ar­chi­tec­ture Bi­en­nale:

See also this piece of video art that lent the ex­hi­bi­tion its name.

The death of Tony Judt in Au­gust left us with­out one of the most per­cep­tive, calm and orig­i­nal thinkers on pol­i­tics and his­tory of re­cent times. As his motor neu­rone dis­ease wors­ened, his out­put be­came all the more ur­gent and Ill Fares The Land, pub­lished in March, is an as­ton­ish­ingly clear-sighted and keenly ar­gued book on the state and fu­ture of British and US pol­i­tics. The pa­per­back isn’t out until April, but if you’re still short of a Christ­mas pre­sent, this is well worth the hard cover it comes in. This quote, from to­wards the end of the book, is a brief and valu­able axiom that is worth not­ing:

“If we re­main grotesquely un­equal, we shall lose all sense of fra­ter­nity: and fra­ter­nity, for all its fa­tu­ity as a po­lit­i­cal ob­jec­tive, turns out to be the nec­es­sary con­di­tion of pol­i­tics it­self.”

For some rea­son I re­main a fairly in­fre­quent cin­ema-goer, but Gior­gos Lan­thi­mos’s Kyn­odon­tas (Dog­tooth) was a shock­ing and alien­at­ing ex­pe­ri­ence that had some fel­low mem­bers of the au­di­ence laugh­ing in dis­com­fort and oth­ers sit­ting stiff with ten­sion. Werner Her­zog’s lat­est, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, struck a pleas­ingly inane note in its treat­ment of a clas­sic cin­ema sit­u­a­tion: the hostage stand-off. The sound of Wash­ing­ton Phillips’s ‘I Am Born To Preach The Gospel’ em­a­nat­ing from a tinny radio over a long shot of gath­ered po­lice­men, weapons cocked, (when at this point the au­di­ence al­ready re­alises that the hostages are a pair of pet flamin­goes), ren­der this cliché glo­ri­ously ridicu­lous. On a much lighter note, Stéphane Aubier and Vin­cent Patar’s Panique au vil­lage (A Town Called Panic) had all ages reel­ing at its slap­stick, clay­ma­tion com­edy:

Fi­nally, the run­away album of the year in terms of how often I piped it into my ears, was Joanna New­som’s Have One on Me. Man­ag­ing some­how to fol­low up the twee coarse­ness of The Milk-Eyed Mender and the breadth and scope of Ys with a triple album of tight songs that demon­strate a no­tice­ably stronger and more ma­ture voice, New­som proves her­self to be an un­de­ni­ably mas­ter­ful mu­si­cian.

And that’s all for this year. Here’s to new sights and sounds in 2011.