17th the exposition of new music.

Taking a look at the programme of Expositions of past years, I was once again astounded by its almost chaotic diversity. Is it a case of no clear focus? lack of structure? Absent-mindedness? Or is it maybe like this: a festival that is generous, that doesn't serve as an instrument for composer's cabals or as a banner for prognosticators of the supposed music of tomorrow, a festival whose director knows that there is more need to inform than to cut profiles in our developing country. I consider it proven that the Exposition's prime mover Jaroslav Stastny doesn't produce the festival "for himself". What is more evident is his effort to educate (not necessarily a pejorative term) and the aspiration to present the world of contemporary music in the greatest breadth possible and with the greatest possible "objectivity". And he also knows how to give a chance to new ensembles and composers as well as bringing on the Arditti Quartet.

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All this can be attractive not just for audiences (and essentially all the concerts attracted decent audiences), but also for Czech performers able and willing to get involved in contemporary music (there are not so few of them as is often claimed). In our conditions playing contemporary music means mostly to serve "the self-defence activities of Czech composer groups", and while the these attempts to get one's own work across the legitimate and natural, and soothing at a time when not much more is happening, I have the feeling that the situation does not offer much to performers in the way of motivation and prestige (let us be honest here). Festivals of the Exposition kind can help a little by offering space for the appearance of Czech performers with music from the world repertoire (and perhaps stimulate their performance in the first place), and by providing the necessary lustre in the form of a high-profile event. To a considerable extent this is what is already happening.

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Gunda Gottschalk

The appearance by the violin improviser Gunda Gottschalk left me very much in two minds. In the programme she was presented as the "Jimi Hendrix of the violin". A touch of the circus act, perhaps, but that aside, her play is very energetic, with most of the music loud and lively (and tending to deeper registers). Gottschalk us indisputably outstanding as a violinist, and sometimes sings as well, by no means badly. It is appealing to find that she doesn't succumb too much to the standard improviser cliches--she plays "above the bridge" only occasionally and when she does, in a way that is functional and fresh. The music tends to the tonally based, but without fussy (or automatized) phrases. But the precise re-tuning of the instrument during play is something rather beyond my understanding.

Cheap comparisons with Iva Bittova naturally suggest themselves--what one plays, the other brings off with vocals, but otherwise they have much in common: the same mannerisms in vocals, stamping, occasional shouting. If with Bittova I have sometimes had a sense that the emotions bared were over the top, with Gottschalk this sense became oppressive, and I longed for some non-performing composer with a mathematical approach. When you think about it, how can we talk about the "uniqueness of the most interior and most spontaneous emotions" when they are the same in all cases? Kundera might well write something about aggressive sentimentality.

Petr Kotik & spol.

The abbreviation conceals Joseph Kubera (piano) and Chris Nappi (percussion), i.e., together with Kotik the S.E.M. Ensemble itself, the St. Laurence Quartet [Kvarteto sv. Vavrince] (D. Simickova--soprano, T. Roskovcova--mezzo soprano, P. Kohoutova and M. Marinova--altos) and an incomplete DAMA DAMA. They played pieces by Kotik (There is Singularly Nothing, Devin), Morton Feldman (Why Patterns?) and Christian Wolff (Percussionists, with flute). The same programme could be heard in Prague a few days before the Brno concert.

For me personally the Kotik pieces were the high point, but I can't satisfactorily explain why, since everything about them suggests that they shouldn't be good at all. There is Singularly Nothing: an "unending" melody (the flute and piano in this version) trudging round and round, apparently without imagination and helplessly while a choral quartet declaims an extract from G. Stein's lecture "Composition as Explanation" in a similar manner. No dynamics or other swells, the tempo neither slow not fast, no acoustic charms, everything more or less in the middle register. Devin: a similar situation, but instead of melodic instruments subdued percussion in complex metro-rhythmic overlaps merging into a "hum", vocals on Vancura's prose. Sometimes the singing parts layer up and the originally consecutive parts of the text are sung together, but otherwise practically nothing that would at first sight deviate from the translation of the text into vocal declamation in a routine and even banally archaistic way (frequent fifth doubling, diatonics).

I know we have long ago learned to listen to all kinds of "static", "non-teleological", "non-narrative" and who-knows-what music, but this is something a little different from Feldman, let us say, or Cage's number pieces or Phill Niblock (see below). This is because in Kotik's case there is not only a lack of "drama" (not even Devin is "rhapsodic", although the theme would suggest this to more prosaic souls despite the non-dramatic quality of the Vancura text), but also an absence of that aspect of the "fine" sound, "informed with inner life" (the instrumental colours are conceived in an entirely standard way) and no "suspension of time" either (no pauses, ametrically scattered sound events or patterns a la minimalism). What occurred to me was the phrase "music stripped of music" in the best sense--the removal of musical rhetoric in all its parameters. Why it sounds so good I don't know, perhaps just because ... If Petr Kotik knows, perhaps he could tell us some day.

Konvergence (Convergence)

We wrote about this young composer-performer association at the end of last year. Their appearance at the Exposition of New Music represented the end of their first regular season, and so it is time for a more general evaluation.

They have fulfilled their promise to present works by great world composers, playing Ligeti, Crumb, Xenakis, Feldman and others. They have also played pieces by members of their own generation, rather symptomatically only composers from abroad. The standard of performance has been as good as could be hoped in the circumstances, but the concerts have sometimes suffered from the choice of music more on the basis of practical criteria than on the basis of the quality of the pieces themselves (for example Xenakis's Plekto is perhaps not one of the great man's best productions). It is praiseworthy that Konvergence does not suffer from "premiere mania", rehearsed pieces are played more than once and so have more chance of getting into general consciousness and repertoire (although it is clear that such repetition can easily become a two-edged sword). The quality of the accompanying materials is more problematic. The authorial commentaries tend to be heavy-handed and garrulous, while the information texts on the pieces by the "classics" are sometimes distinctly unsuccessful and misleading--this is not so important in itself but reveals certain stereoptypes of thinking about the music itself. As far as the compositions by the association members themselves are concerned, a characteristic feature is dependence on the sound world of Morton Feldman and, as one of the Brno audience aptly commented, a rather "Jugendstil Taste". This is true particularly of the proclamatively spiritual T. Palka although very much less true of R. Pallas, but Pallas has not been much to the forefront, if we leave aside the actually unmissable interpretation of Crumb's Macrocosmos II. Konvergence seems to lack a strong (and sufficiently cynical) person capable of making the right changes in the activities of the group, starting with presentation and ending with the form of the concerts. And the Brno concert? The core was formed by "domestic" pieces (R. Pallas: Tom & Tom, J. Rybar: Touha [Desire], T. Palka: Prosba [Plea], O. Stochl: Uniky k radosti [Escapes to Please]; the last two were treated spatially), the culmination was than Feldman's The Viola in My Life II and G. Crumb's quartet Black Angels. A good end to the season.

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Arditti Quartet

The obligatory phrase is that the Arditti Quartet neeed no introduction, and I shall keep to it. This year these messengers of new music excelled (how else) with Ligeti's Second Quartet, Brian Ferneyhough's Second Quartet and Xenakis's crowning piece Tetras. At the instigation of the Exposition's organisers the Arditti then premiered quartets by Martin Marek, Martin Smolka and Mirek Srnka. M. Smolka rather disappointed me with his five-minute piece "For a Buck"--Variations on a Theme by Tom Waits since I'm used to hearing more inventive music from him. In the context of the "Arditti" style of music it also seem to huddle back in a slightly inappropriate way, and not just by being so short. His two other Czech colleagues suited the general idea of the correct kind of music for Arditti to a much greater extent (whether this is a good or bad thing, I leave open). M. Marek was represented by the quartet Dromos, which is in my view the best I have heard from him--if Marek's music usually sounds rather awkward, here the composer and performer had enjoyed a fortunate meeting and the result was satisfactory. I am not, however, able to judge how far Marek wanted to suit the performing style of Arditti and how far the quartet perhaps even slightly insensitively apply their own style wherever they get the least chance to do so. (Take a look at their recordings and you will see just how much music we know only in the performance of the Arditti Quartet--naturally they are the last people to blame for the situation, but it would be worth investigating whether their almost complete monopoly has not been excessively influencing our idea of "a typical New Music string quartet". The same goes for the far from bad quartet by M. Srnka, but he seems to have made a deliberate attempt to achieve the "Ardittian note" his deliberate task. Unfortunately, next to Ferneyhough in particular, it did not stand out as much as it should have done.

... and much else

We cannot pass over the solo recital by Gareth Davis. This young but sovereign and much sought after bass-clarinettist presented pieces by Nicola Sani (*1961) and Luigi Ceccarelli (*1953), both with electronics and both interesting and energetic, unburdened by instrumental cliches. (Have you noticed how many pieces for solo clarinet start del niente? A catalogue of first lines of the clarinet repertoire would be quite humorous reading). A good half of the concert was then devoted to pieces by Brno composers (Faltus, Kosut, Parsch, Pinos, Zemek), which I found rather lacking in interest, with the exception of the piece by the last mentioned, Pavel Zemek Novak. If it didn't sound like platitudinising, I would say that that his undisguisedly monodic Chramove solo [Temple Solo] was outstanding for its purity and well thought out, elegant simplicity. Instead I shall write that it was quite beautiful ...

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Afternoon concerts under the heading ComPosition, all of them more or less connected with electronic music, were a new feature at this year's Exposition, Phill Niblock appeared in person, presenting five of his pieces (based on the interference between close frequencies) and the films Movements of People Working (an extensive set of documentary shots of people doing manual work, from which Niblock chooses freely). The music and the picture are in no way connected and despite my usual views I would almost say that the picture does not get in the way of the music--the concurrent projection of two different events shifts the films onto a surprisingly abstract level. The primacy of the visual percept is not overcome, but I cannot with a clear conscience declare that the interesting music was a mere accompaniment. On the other hand, I would still prefer to hear the pieces lying down and in the dark.

The ComPosition series also provided a chance to hear a retrospective of Czech electro-acoustic music. All the generations of the academic branch were represented, and Milos Haas was particularly interesting with his piece Ormai for EA and multipercussion (T. Ondrusek). From the other side--alternative electronic music--listeners heard Jaap Blonk & BRAAXTAAL (Blonk, a crazy phonic poet, most of all resembles some underground Uncle Jedlicka--a Czech comedy character--of the cybernetic age, but his music tends to the conventional) and the Spanish improvisation duo Cremaster, whom unfortunately I didn't get to see.