While contemporary music festivals have come and gone in Dublin, the Sonorities Festival in Belfast has been successfully flying the flag since 1981. This year's event was spread over five days and was based around the residency of the north of England ensemble, Psappha, and the presence for two days of composer Peter Maxwell Davies. The programme opened, however, in another domain entirely, with a performance of one of Stockhausen's "intuitive" pieces from the late 1960s. For these, there is no written-out music, just a printed text. The undertaking raises a veritable hornets' nest of aesthetic and philosophical considerations and the performer-dependence of any of the pieces from Aus den Sieben Tagen is extreme.
It was surprising, then, to encounter four student performers rather than a group of experts in Gold Dust, a piece which calls for a four-day preparatory retreat - silence, no food, a minimum of sleeping and thinking. There were limitations here of skill and imagination which undermined the nature of what was being attempted. No amount of musical intuition can be of much practical use to performers without the technical means to approach the realisation of their aspirations, and the results on this occasion were frankly embarrassing.
The second concert of the "Stockhausen '60s Night" offered Kontakte, for piano, percussion and tape, a classic of its kind. With wild inventiveness, it freely traverses an area where the electronic sounds on tape (assembled with a laboriousness scarcely imaginable in this age of digital technology) and those of the live instruments merge and diverge in a game of dissolving identity.
Nearly 40 years on, there's more to marvel at in this work than in most of the electro acoustic pieces which have been written since. The contrast between the players from Psappha and the students earlier in the evening could hardly have been greater, though Michael Alcorn's sound projection was at times excessively shrill and bright in the confined space of the Ormeau Baths Gallery.
The gallery, where most of the festival concerts were given, is currently exhibiting a number of installations by Barbara Freeman for which pieces were commissioned from Ian Wilson, Michael Alcorn and the husband and wife team of Nicola LeFanu and David Lumsdaine; all three were premiered during the festival. LeFanu and Lumsdaine's Gathering Paths, a mountain soundscape (Lumsdaine) with cliched percussion writing (LeFanu), is the weakest of the three when heard as a self-standing piece. Alcorn's electro acoustic Patina processes sounds from the very type of metallic object which features in the related installation. Alcorn creates a clearly delimited sound world, with only a few moments of explosion disturbing its stability. In truth, the sophistication of the sound processing renders the source material a non-issue for the listener (it could as plausibly have been derived from the sound of the wind in the trees), yet the final result is among the most tightly-focused I have heard from this composer. Wilson's string trio, Phosphorous, often written in trailing lines and pitting one instrument against the other two, has something of that mode of directness and mood of spirituality that is currently associated with some of the composers of eastern Europe.
PSAPPHA'S major presentation was given in the grand, marbled interior of Stormont, the use of which as a performing space quite upstaged the AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses, which makes a speciality of uncovering unusual venues. For Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, the acoustic was lively enough for a fair proportion of the words to get swallowed up, a liability which the composer must clearly have been aware of, given the fantastical nature of some of his vocal lines. As a piece of theatre, it's the Eight Songs which are the surer hit. The sharpness of musical gesture never fails, anymore than do the most un-kingly antics of the demented monarch, here a highly-energised Kelvin Thomas. Miss Donnithorne makes a cooler impact, the spark between instruments and voice seeming less immediate, the music calling for illumination from the words which is none too readily available. In Stormont, Emma Turnbull's jilted maiden did at least have the consolation of a magnificent Hollywood exit, up the main staircase.
Max, as everyone calls him, gave a "keynote speech" on "The composer in society in the late 20th-century" in which he outlined his subject by approaching it from a variety of different angles. His starting point was the excitement of the feeling of musical revolution he experienced growing up in mid-century Manchester. On his journey he touched on the importance of negative audience reaction (which betokens caring and knowledge), the position of music in Fascist and Communist countries (important enough for the authorities to want to control it), the specific case of Shostakovich (who touched in his music on subjects that could not be publicly written or spoken about), the nature of modern composers' possible relationship to popular culture (skewed, he argued, by the commercial nature of that culture), the popularity of unchallenging music, and the question of who composers actually write for. He took swipes at television (the mind-numbing drug to beat all drugs and more effective than Nazi or Communist methods of quelling criticism), the music of the baroque (that miserable period), the demand for accessibility (another form of censorship), and the regrettably blinkered cultural policies of the Labour government. Among the most interesting protestations by a man whose music has occasioned its share of protest over the years (including booing and walkouts) was the statement that, in writing music, "the possibility has to exist in one's mind that something may be changed in the world by the performance of it".
These strong words came back to me the next day, as I listened to the provocatively monotonous lyricism of his Cello Concerto. In spite of the committed advocacy of Raphael Wallfisch and the Ulster Orchestra under Robert Houlihan, this music created something of the effect of an overworked canvas, the minutiae of the detailing become lost in the emergence of blended grays and browns.
The Ulster Orchestra also gave the premiere of North by Kevin O'Connell, a clear and simple statement by comparison with the Cello Concerto, bold in a primitivistic way, with gestures daubed in bluntly. This is not the only recent work by O'Connell to show atavistic tendencies, as the composer appears to be opening himself up to moods and musics he had previously skirted away from. North, however, suggests that the process is still far from complete.
The orchestral programme also included finely-limned readings of Baltic offerings from Arvo Part (If Bach had been a bee-keeper) and Peteris Vasks (Cantabile), and there were not dissimilar concerns with pleasing surfaces to be heard in Piers Hellawell's Sound Carvings from the Ice Wall which was played by Psappha. That particular Psappha programme also featured music of mechanistic intent, Martin Butler's self-explanatory Jazz Machines, which began well but quickly lost steam, Philip Grange's Cimmerian Nocturne, with its structural skeleton on the outside, and Siobhan Cleary's Big Changes, which took simple additive procedures to a perplexing extreme.
The Ormeau Baths Gallery, with an unusual reverberation from the performers end (akin, on a smaller scale, to that in the National Gallery in Dublin), proved a viable small-scale venue, with drawbacks of over-heating (the ceiling is very low) and proximity to a major new fire-station, whose siren activities easily penetrate the performances. The overall music programme, however, lacked the adventurous edge of recent years and seems likely to continue to do so in the absence of major structural change. The question is, what to do now that the composer-in-residence post (which supplied the festival's major artistic input) has been dropped. The answer would seem to be to appoint an independent artistic director. It's a dilemma that will only be resolved by joint action between Queen's University and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the one through welcoming an outsider to run its contemporary music festival, the other through abandoning the parsimony it has shown in the support of contemporary music over the years.
