Gramophone

By AJ Goldmann
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Berlin celebrates American avant-gardists

Gone from this year's Maerzmusik festival for new music (March 20-29) was the frenzied energy and drive to exhibit the very latest in contemporary music that fuelled last year’s installment. Instead, a more limited number of premieres took place alongside an extensive homage to American avant-garde composers. Brand new compositions were featured alongside experimental masterpieces, which added an enriching and, at times, overly demanding context. The impressive programme was an invitation to rediscover how innovative and daring the music of these now-canonised composers remains.

The programme included demanding composer portraits of George Crumb, Robert Ashley and Alvin Lucier. Crumb, who recently turned 80, was unable to attend, but the two others were on hand to present their work.

Lucier performed his Opera with Objects (1997) using a long table arranged with everyday objects, including shoeboxes, cups and matchboxes. Patiently and methodically, Lucier kept time with two pencils, which he then tapped against the various artifacts to demonstrate their resonant properties.

Also on that programme was the German premiere of Twonings (2006), where high, sustained tones are struck on a piano and echoed by a cello playing in its highest register. On cello, Charles Curtis gave a sharply focused account of a work that explores the accidental microtones that invariably occur when such demands are made on the performer.

Compared to Lucier’s down-to-earth sound explorations, the premiere performance of Marc André’s complete orchestral trilogy …auf… (2005 -07) by the SWR Sinfonieorchestra led by Sylvain Cambreling seemed overwrought and portentous in the gimmickry it employed throughout. Lost amidst all the mouthpiece tapping, foil crumpling and screeching and strangling of instruments was much of the honesty and playfulness one encounters by way of many of the experimental pioneers, especially Robert Ashley.

The all-day Ashley portrait began with a screening of the TV Opera Perfect Lives (1983) and a midday talk by Ashley between the episodes. In the evening, Ashley took part in a performance by the Dutch Ensemble MAE, which featured the composer’s monologue Love is a Good Example (1991) and the German premiere of Tap Dancing in the Sand for speaker, alto and musicians. Ashley’s voice has deepened and he declaims more slowly, but it has lost none of its dramatic force and compelling musicality.

A late night programme included rare early tape music and film from the likes of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Louis and Bebe Barron, at a cinema outfitted with over 20 speakers, allowing for complete immersion into these meticulously constructed soundscapes.

At the festival’s midpoint, Reich and Lucier where joined by British composer Michael Nyman for a discussion entitled “American Avant-Garde Revisited,” prior to a feverish performance by the Iktus Ensemble of Reich’s hypnotic Drumming (1971). Nyman is credited with first applying the term “minimalism” to music in his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. What isn’t as well known is that he played marimba for the premiere of “Drumming.”

Nyman’s contribution to the festival was by far the strangest offering. Revisiting ‘Pretty Talk for George Brecht’ (1978-2009), which was heard here in its world premiere, is a densely layered homage to prize-winning talking parakeet Sparkie Williams, who was a recording celebrity in the 1960s. A collaboration with the German artist Carsten Nicolai, Sparkie is a reworking of a 30-years-old piece that Nyman wrote at the suggestion of Fluxus artist George Brecht, who felt that Sparkie’s story would make for an excellent libretto.

The visually arresting if musically baffling performance featured Nyman improvising minimally along with Nicolai’s DJing, while an actress read selections from the memoir of Mrs Mattie Williams, Sparkie’s owner. But the pièce-de-résistance of the evening was Sparkie himself, stuffed and nailed to a perch center stage, who had been flown in from the Great North Museum in Hancock.

For Nyman, best known for his film scores, Sparkie is a step in the direction of the avant-gardism he has written about rather than practiced. “This is the first time that I’ve ever played anything without a score, where I’m sitting at three pianos just responding to two recordings of this particular piece that I made in 1978,” Nyman said before the concert. “So it’s truly experimental for me.”

The following evening, the Chicago-based new music ensemble eighth blackbird made their German début performing Reich’s Double Sextet (2007), a fiercely dramatic work full of motoric rhythms and fractured notes whose dissonances bleed together. The musicians played along to a taped second sextet, which added a surrealistic element especially in the wisps and strains of Viennese waltzes and Yiddish lullabies that nestle in the middle of the piece. Tim Munro, the flutist, was delighted to have his ensemble featured alongside so many musical luminaries. “To make a début at such an illustrious festival in such a great cultural capital is just very humbling,” he explained.

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