Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival offered an exotic fusion of styles and sounds, writes Michael Dervan.
One characteristic Kevin Volans never seems to have lacked as a composer is the courage to set off in a new direction. He left his native South Africa to study in Cologne under Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen, becoming the latter's teaching assistant. He first made his mark in the 1970s, in the movement that became known as "new simplicity", and he reached an even wider international audience through his First String Quartet, White Man Sleeps, a classical best-seller for the Kronos Quartet in the 1980s.
White Man Sleeps, which shot Volans to fame not long after he relocated to Ireland in 1986 (he's since become an Irish citizen), is the most famous in a series of works in which he endeavoured to combine aspects of African and Western music. The "African" works typically show a great rhythmic intricacy, with an exquisite surface finish that's born of a precision of gesture that makes them highly distinctive.
Although much of his music is repetitive, he has always been keen to distance himself from minimalism. "What I loved about African music and art," he once told me, "was this hand-made quality and the irregularity of it." He dislikes the "machine-like" quality of US minimalism. "What I wrote was in opposition to American minimalism." These days he makes the distinction by describing his work as minimal rather than minimalist.
The retrospective at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where 55-year-old Volans was this year's main featured composer, covered the past two decades of his output in solo and chamber works. The Smith Quartet, long-time advocates, gave expert accounts of White Man Sleeps and its even more attractive immediate successor, Hunting: Gathering. The latest of his string quartets, No 9, Shiva Dances (a BBC commission receiving its première at the festival), is at the more introverted end of his output, one of those works like Cicada for two pianos (played by Jill Richards with the composer), which seek to effect a transformation in the listener by saturation with sameness. You could call the approach meditative, but it's a high-risk strategy that seems to be proving problematic even for a composer with Volans's highly polished skills.
Another aspect of the composer's character was highlighted in separate performances by Scandinavian performers (Jonny Axelsson and the ensemble Sisu) of an array of high-energy works for percussion, some of which essay a rapidity of attack intended to effect the same sort of transformation that causes a sequence of liquid drops to appear as a solid flow.
He has also been working on a series of rewarding études for his own instrument, the piano. These were played by Jill Richards, whose recital also included a performance, remarkable for its finely graded, otherworldly gentleness, of Piano Piece (To Philip Guston) by Morton Feldman, the composer who made the greatest impact on Volans's work.
Volans's marriage of African and European musics was one of many juxtapositions threaded through the festival. The opening concert was a collaboration between the Viennese new music ensemble Klangforum Wien and the China Found Music Workshop of Taipei. Given the range of sounds that composers have explored, particularly since the 1920s, exploiting the exoticism of instruments from far-away cultures has become harder and harder to sustain. The saturated bell evocations of Landschaft Mit Glockenturm III (Landscape With Bell Tower III) by James Clarke (like Volans a former composer-in-residence at Queen's University Belfast) most successfully sidestepped this problem. And Tung Chao-Ming's X best illustrated it: the piece's all-singing, all-dancing role for conductor Jürg Wyttenbach left the cross-cultural aspect of the piece quite in the shade. And in a late-night programme by the ensemble Okeanos, the three short solo virtuoso pieces for oboe, viola and clarinet by another of the festival's featured composers, Peter Maxwell Davies, quite outshone the pieces involving oriental instruments.
There was an afternoon concert of contemporary music written for the Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian folk instrument, to which Volans also contributed. The programme's pieces from the rich Hardanger tradition for all three players, Lars Underdal, Liv Merete Kroken and Nils Øklund, offered richer rewards than the new works, among which Michael Finnissy's heavily folk-influenced Seterjentens Fridag (Milkmaid's Day Off) seemed to sit most comfortably with the instrument's character.
Contemporary Music for Amateurs, or COMA, is an unlikely sounding organisation that manages to keep a profile in Huddersfield programming. Obviously, the experience for the participants is of paramount importance, and the challenges for any composer wanting to engage a public audience through COMA are considerable. The best measure of the situation was registered by Jonathan Harvey's Climbing Frame, which seemed both to give the players leeway and take account of the unpredictability that's normally such a feature of amateur performances.
Scanner: Scans. Sciarrino brought together the music of Salvatore Sciarrino (in heavily amplified performances by the Italian ensemble Alter Ego) and the experimental digital artist Scanner (Robin Rimbaud). Sciarrino gave carte blanche for the project, saying: "Scanner can mix my music according to his own imagination and not according to mine. I offer him my music so that it is transformed in his hands." Sciarrino had not met Scanner when he gave this permission, explaining his stance with a question: "How could I not be open to any genre of music?"
To my ears the sonic funnelling of Scanner's filtering and selectiveness sounded like an impoverished response to the extremes of refinement and violence on offer in Sciarrino's work. It would have been rather more impressive had he conjured those particular responses entirely from other sources. But neither the current bag of digital tricks nor the combination of human brain and fingers yet seem to have that kind of processing speed.
There was an even more ambitious project on offer from the composer Fausto Romitelli, the text supplier Kenka Lekovich, the video artists Léonardo Romoli and Paolo Pachini and the Ictus Ensemble, under Georges-Elie Octors, with the soprano Maria Husmann. According to Romitelli, "composing sound visually and filming images acoustically, before subjecting both to the same computer transformation, has meant a certain period of development, in order to unify the tools for capturing and manipulating elements of both worlds."
Well, now! And if you gave him the right lever he'd move the world too. An appropriate dose of certain psychoactive drugs, or the requisite amount of sleep deprivation, would help Romitelli reach his goals a lot quicker than the high-tech farrago of this presentation, which masqueraded under the title An Index of Metals - A Light Show. The controlled and highly varied beauty of Husmann's voice was the closest the event came to having a redeeming feature.
The festival's other featured composers included the Dutchman Richard Rijnvos, 40 this year, whose Block Beuys (Ives Ensemble conducted by the composer) is an 80-minute cycle written in response to Joseph Beuys's seven-room installation at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, in Darmstadt. The undoubtedly fascinating subject matter seemed to stretch the composer too far and in too many directions, at least to this listener, who has never been to the Darmstadt museum. Illustrations were on display but, given the nature of the contents, didn't really give a sufficiently vivid impression.
Rijnvos's Venice-inspired music-theatre piece, Mappamondo, with musical references from Ciconia to Nono, seemed a much more solid achievement; it was performed by Robert Rice (voice) and Tjeend Oostendorp (tuba), with the Asko Ensemble under Roland Klutting.
Richard Ayres, born in Cornwall but resident in the Netherlands since 1989, is another figure much better known on the European mainland than in these islands. He's a sort of musical prankster who takes the whole of musical history as his oyster and seems unwilling to rein in his imagination, however remote or peculiar the regions it brings him to. His music presents him as a sort of a clown, and it's at times hard to work out what, if anything - clownish tragedy, perhaps - might lie beneath the surface. Huddersfield offered Marco Blaauw with MusikFabrik under Richard Baker in the Noncerto For Trumpet and Wim Timmermans with the ASKO Ensemble under Roland Kluttig in Noncerto For Horn (the "noncerto" series plays with the ideas of uncertainty and non-concerto).
Most extraordinary was the choral and orchestral Valentine Tregashian Considers . . . , Tregashian being an imaginary Cornishman who has forgone speech to interface with the world only through music. Contemporary music doesn't come much wackier than this Alice-in-Wonderland crazy fantasy.
Other single events that stood out were a hugely varied lunchtime programme of repetitive music by the Ives Ensemble (including the British première of Gerald Barry's festival commission, L'Agitation Des Observateurs, Le Tremblement Des Voyeurs, a piece that sounds as if Barry were obsessively imitating the brush strokes of a painter at work); a two-piano recital by Rolf Hind and Nicolas Hodges of a programme so cunningly constructed (James Dillon, Rebecca Saunders, Michael Finnissy, Beat Furrer, Per Nørgård) and expertly delivered it could hardly fail to bring the house down; Ensemble Recherche's programme focusing on the Austrian microtonalist Georg Friedrich Haas (their performance of his anguished-sounding, obsessively étude-like Nach-Ruf . . . Ent-gleitend . . . was one of the most astonishing performances of the festival); and Harrison Birtwistle's convolutedly gripping, symmetry-obsessed, knotty opera The Io Passion. This work should now surely inform a generation of British composers (including many who have featured in Huddersfield's Lawrence Batley Theatre) of quite how uncompromisingly rewarding uncompromising chamber opera can be.
