When leek stalks come into play to perform a dance, we know it can only be about contemporary classical music. Add video technology, artificial intelligence, alternative instrumentation, minimalism and a heap of gender issues to that and the contours of new classical music come clearly into view. An overview of a weekend Transit in Leuven, where listeners also became spectators.
German composer Michael Beil surprised with his picturesque composition Hide to Show in which a fairy tale is told about the paradoxical roots of loneliness - communication technology and social media. Beil's compositional technique keeps itself far from musical development. Its structure consists of scrolling through a nervous sequence of scenes and memes that constantly repeat, reformulate, vary, circulate and mutate. A golden find is the staging. Eight musicians (from Nadar Ensemble) are distributed across a row of six blindfolded (changing) booths. When the blinds are open, spectators see how they play - each for themselves, yet there is harmony. And they dance, change clothes, go wild, freeze. When the blinds are closed they serve as projection screens for recordings made by two (live) video cameras. And sometimes the blinds are only half-closed so that reality and virtuality merge with each other. The result is called hyperreality. The burning question is what is hidden and what is not. That continuous confusion is perfectly in line with communication on social media, where it is equally unclear who or what you are dealing with.
The richness of Beil's composition lies in a colorful fairy-tale-like cross-pollination of video and music. That means listeners are also spectators. The music is both acoustic and electronic and tape, all with an airy texture, under Japanese, Russian, American and European influences. He also makes functional jokes such as dancing with fresh leek stalks. The costumes are provided with childlike patterns in bright colors. The wigs are blonde or turquoise. Sometimes all musicians wear glasses and then again they don't. It is a fancy dress party in which adults enthusiastically hop back to their childhood. The atmosphere is usually playful, sometimes clubby or hip, and then challenging and yearning as in a midsummer nights dream. Nadar Ensemble, for whom Beil wrote this piece, and Hide to Show seem like two hands on one belly. They feel each other perfectly. That a combination of music, movement, mimicry and gesture almost naturally seems to work doesn't happen often. That can only come out after an intense rehearsal process that leads to playing from memory, as Nadar showed. It was a convincing concert that offers perspective on further development of a new music style in which video and technology provide concrete and balanced added value. That this combination can meet a need was also evident from the presence of families with children. There were even groups of children who tried out a couple of the dances on a windy courtyard after the concert. So there is hope.
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But the success of Hide to Show does not mean that the use of fixed structuring elements has had its day. Centuries-old and ever young are the attempts to capture music in mathematical models. Since Aristotle laid the foundation of harmony theory with his theory of planetary spheres, the desire for systematicity has never let go of us. American composer Tom Johnson (°1939) has been busy for years with mathematical block designs in which counting is central. Pianist Daan Vandewalle played his composition Solutions (9, 3, 2), a world premiere. Johnson takes 36 systems of nine notes apart and puts them back together, albeit with variations such as descending sequences, open and closed chords, bare melodic lines, reduction of notes, very slow to slightly faster tempos, long and short rests, louder and softer, fugal, pointed, bound or bone-dry. Vandewalle is a master of nuance. As the tempo slows and fewer and fewer notes are played, a slip in the attack, or a microsecond too long rest is audibly punished mercilessly. Despite these risks, Vandewalle proved not to be caught out, at least it didn't sound mathematical – thankfully.
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On the instrumental front, Dutch brass player Marco Blaauw brought a refreshing innovation. In the composition O.M. Rising by British composer/cellist/activist Ayanna Witter Johnson, he used a bright red pocket trumpet with a matching pocket megaphone to both muffle and amplify. A striking piece in which a single voice speaks out against racial and gender inequality – sober, provocative and therefore effective. Gender issues also came up in the premiere of Counterforces by Flemish composer Frederik Croene. On a text by Dominique De Groen, Amina Osmanu, Lore Binon and IKRAAAN sang about the earthly and social power of women, mirrored against the questionable role men have played in changes in the world. Background was provided with repetitive interventions by composer Frederik Croene on piano and with tape (monotonous motorcycles and grinding wheels). On the instrumental side, not much happened in Counterforces. That need not be the case either, especially since the piece is carried by the text. However, the balance between the sung and instrumental parts was largely off, causing much of the text to be lost. There was also no surtitling.
Another line is the continuation of the rehabilitation of tonal writing. At Transit there were two examples of young composers writing in (expanded) tonality. For several years now, tonality has no longer been taboo. The time when a composition student didn't dare leave home because he was working on a tonal piece is at least a decade behind us. Ensemble Klang, a sextet of musicians that plays without a conductor, ventured into two new pieces by Maya Verlaak and Jesse Broekman. Verlaak's Conditions was performed, a composition of floating harmonies, with the musicians distributed across the ends of the hall. This shifted perspective from traditional static one-directional traffic from the stage to a spatial experience, comparable to a journey through the cosmos. With this, Verlaak seems to have embarked on a new path. She is known for playful compositions in which technology and auditory humour play a leading role. With Conditions, she now adds a contemplative element to her oeuvre.
Klang also played will it be like this for a long time, you asked, a striking creation by Jesse Broekman. In this meditative piece, the leading role was played by percussionist Joey Marijs. With his tender handling of specially sawed aluminium plates, he brought a quiet strength of Asian scents and textures to the hall. Sometimes his plates sounded like a gamelan, then again like bells. Pianist Saskia Lankhoorn referenced John Cage with her prepared piano, who wrote a lot of that genre around 1940. She caressed the incense sticks placed between the strings so smoothly that it came close to a drone. With their new compositions, Verlaak and Broekman have found a tonal language that, as it turned out, feels quite at home through saxophones and electric guitar in a non-classical instrumentation.
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That listeners must accept a dual role as spectators in much new music became clear in the composition Non sono Dei quelli fatti con le mani for six voices and six musicians by Italian duo Mauro Lanza and Claudio Panariello. There was much to see in the performance by Spectra Ensemble and HYOID Voices. After a long opening weave of drones, the vocalists prove multi-functional, whistling with bottle openings, playing recorders and deploying harmonicas. The title ("Those made by hands are not gods") refers to works of art created by artificial intelligence—not by human hands. This composition used passages from one of the iconic masses by Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474), of which ten different versions were used to create algorithms that yielded new material. All of this resulted in a solidly constructed vocal and musical narrative beneath which lay a virtuously knotted tapestry of AI art.
Disiecta Membra ("scattered limbs") by Mauro Lanza for six voices, refers through quotations to the catalogue of limbs in the seven cantatas of Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1705) but is now connected with a parody about slaughtering a pig. Here too, the vocalists regularly coloured outside the lines: a weave of vowels alternated with jabs on the harmonica or squeaks from a plastic toy pig. Whistled tunes transported the spectator to the routine of the slaughterhouse. The wide and elegant arm gestures of conductor Filip Rathé and the expressive way the singers turned the pages of their scores completed the viewing experience.
WHAT: Transit – open mind, open ears WHERE: STUK, Leuven SEEN: 20-22 October 2023