Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024

[Extended cut of a review forthcoming in The Wire.]

A bastion of New Music for over one hundred years, the Donaueschinger Musiktage continues to make its way into the twenty-first century as that century reaches its quarter-way point. Along the way, many questions; and perhaps, some answers. Taking place before I arrived was an early concert by double-bassist Florentin Ginot in works by Rebecca Saunders and Clara Iannotta, though I caught him on Saturday night in an outdoor performance in the ‘enchanted forest’ setting of the Schlosspark, the trees framing another glade of speakers which projected creaking, woody electronics which merged environmental and virtual sound in pieces by Carola Bauckholt and Lucia Kliger. At one point, the sound of a passing train appeared to come from the speakers before we saw its lights speeding past the glade; at another, I could have sworn I heard owl hooting through the trees, only to look up and see Ginot rubbing on a string.

I also missed Enno Poppe’s hour-long piece for ten drumkits, Streik, while somewhere between the bus stop and the freeway, but the festival’s association with radio station Südwestrundfunk (SWR) ensures that virtually all the music is broadcast, enabling a listen-through on return. Much of the work’s play with spatialisation—as well as the visual spectacle of ten drummers—is lost encountering the music this way, but, on this purely audio evidence, it effectively negotiates between stuttering announcements and raucous clatter, and retaining interest for its hour-long running time is no mean feat. (Though Poppe’s claim in the programme notes that an ensemble of this size “needs a composer” arguably overlooks the work of percussion ensembles not controlled by composers—albeit ones not necessarily operating in the frame of New Music. Take Max Roach’s M’Boom for a start. Quiet as it’s kept, the Black avant-garde was there well over half-a-century ago.)

Between the big orchestral concerts held on the Friday and Sunday in the Baarsporthalle, a gymnasium temporarily converted to concert hall, were works for smaller forces, though one would be hard put to describe them as “chamber music” in anything but name. In a smaller gymnasium next door, earplugs were handed out for a Friday night concert of the late Phill Niblock’s final compositions—perhaps a first for the festival. Neil Leonard’s programme note beautifully describes Niblock’s woodwind pieces as “something akin to an Ellington chord [...] sustained beyond the limits of a single player’s breath”. That was heard here in BLK + LND, a duo for Leonard, on bass clarinet, and double-bassist John Eckhardt, along with the ever-present drones of along with the ever-present drones of Niblockian electronics. As the audience sprawled on the floor, Leonard moved his way through them in an exploration of spatial effects, while Eckhardt and the speakers formed fixed points around which to anchor the sound. In Biliana, a solo work for Biliana Voutchkova, voice and violin united to take on a timbre that seemed to draw on folk musics. Niblock’s music is a kind of return to basic principles—the combination of unison tones, the drone, the open string—in ways that both abstract them and render them palpably material, vibrating in a kind of small-scale sublime. He will be missed.

The next morning, amidst the more high-tech surroundings of the Donauhalle, Mark Andre’s hour-long selig ist...followed traces of mourning. The work was written in memory of a friend’s child, and includes samples from Berlin’s Charité Hospital and the Tränenpalast, or ‘palace of tears’, at Friedrichstraße, where families from either side of the Wall would say tearful farewells. In concept and instrumentation, there were resonances with Nono’s …Sofferte onde serene, but whereas that work’s tape part is often rough-edged and palpably physical in its transformation of Maurizio Pollini’s piano playing, the electronics here functioned more like a sort of additional, infinitely-detailed sustain pedal to Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s piano. In the afternoon, the ensemble lovemusic offered chamber works by Kari Watson, Hannah Kendall, David Bird, and Laura Bowler that were, as Bird put it, in various ways “pop-facing”. Amidst taped interludes featuring an old-fashioned radio as a prop, electronics functioned here to explore what the programme notes (via Bachelard) termed “the dialectics of inside and outside” in various ways. Perhaps most effective, though, was the use, in a work from Kendall’s tuxedo series, of an older technology, that of multiple music boxes, containing snippets of hymns, spirituals and works from the classic repertoire, history over-layered in a kind of haze. (It was through the premiere of Kendall’s large-scale work shouting forever into the receiver at Donaueschingen a couple of years ago that I first came across her work, in which a rigorous historical consciousness is profoundly allied to aesthetic experimentation in ways that feel especially vital.) Meanwhile, across the road in a small cinema, a beautifully understated film by Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva depicted the rehearsals for Occam Ocean Cinquanta, the orchestral work by Éliane Radigue and co-composer Carol Robinson premiered at last year’s festival, further suggesting ways in which traditional ideas of the ensemble—whether those concern instrumentation, the role of improvisation, or the development of pieces along ‘narrative’ lines—continue to be interrogated in search of new ways of conceptualizing music itself. 

Radigue’s was the big opening piece at last year’s festival. Opening the Friday night orchestra concert this time was a very different work, Simon Steen-Anderson’s Grosso, featuring the group Yarn/Wire and a gigantic Leslie speaker. As its title implies, the piece is a kind of concerto grosso, retaining the format of the concertino group within the broader mass of the orchestra, but without necessarily treating that group soloistically. Over its forty-something minutes, the piece worked through repertoire of lightly ironized gestures—among them, vibraphone descents that might have accompanied a flashback dissolve or a sci-fi cartoon, and passages for multiple harmonicas—in various configurations. Audience response was certainly positive, and there was a lot of intricate texture, but there was something about its surface I found off-putting: a playfulness that felt oddly joyless, a music in perpetual quotation marks or parentheses. Pascale Criton’s Alter similarly questioned the frames in which we hear music, but in ways that felt more closely related to the question of a more deeply shared experience. As soloist, the magisterial Juliet Fraser was set amidst a sea of orchestral microtones, at first singing fractured syllables and consonants on the borders of language, and then an English-language text she’d herself written about pandemic isolation, ending with a plea for collective listening. A surprising and effective shift to intimacy, this conclusion functioned to gently break the third wall—or at least, to gently crack it—not as a magic trick or a stock alienation effect, but in ways that sparked welcome reflection.

The concert closed with George Lewis’ The Reincarnation of Blind Tom, a concerto for composed orchestra and two improvising soloists: Roscoe Mitchell, on soprano, and the latest iteration of Lewis’ machine improviser Voyager, now an AI programme for piano, working off the composed music from the orchestral principals. Furious scrabbles from the piano or smeared, acidic soprano saxophone alternated with tuned gongs, brass plunger mutes, downward slides and smears. As ever with Lewis’s work, the piece has a broader conceptual underpinning. Blind Tom Wiggins, the pianist prodigy whose near-superhuman musical memory and pianist virtuosity saw him play the White House aged ten while still enslaved--and to whom Pat Thomas has also recently paid tribute--here offers a figure for reflecting on music’s role in mediating ideas of human agency and human freedom, with the AI pianist offers at once a ghost (or reincarnation) and a presence from the future, capable of the hyper-human virtuosity Wiggins was said to possess. 

The work, Lewis commented in a Q&A, is not so much about idea of “machine consciousness” or of “what it means to be a machine” as it is about “the phenomenology of freedom”. Blind Tom could play just about anything, but, as an enslaved person, his musical ‘freedom’ occurred within conditions of profound unfreedom. In such cases, music, as the supposed index of what it means to be human, to be a subject, have a soul, in turn posed a problem for the system in which enslavement relied on denying human agency, the capacity to feel or desire, to the enslaved. And today, the algorithm is guided and framed by racialized bias, the AI considered, in Lewis’ words, “something to take power with”, the tool of the Elon Musks of this world. So often framed as a kind of neutral or scientific mode of technological advancement, AI is shaped—as are all modes of technological advancement—by existing biases, often racialized and gendered, and by existing structural imbalances. Today, for instance, as AI opens new artistic horizons and triggers existential dread about job security, AI-databases decide which Palestinians to kill. And back in the 1980s, as Georgina Born details, there was controversy about the role of the US military in computer technology developed at IRCAM, where Lewis first developed Voyager. It’s vital to be aware of these contexts, and Lewis’ piece was salutary in drawing attention to these vexed questions of freedom. Improvisation, of course, played a key role in debates about the musical capacity of racialized subjects. If improvisation can be dismissed as somehow 'not real music', entire modes of music-making outside a certain idea of the western tradition can be discounted. Voyager doesn’t know the difference between composition and improvisation, Lewis suggested, and perhaps we don’t either, but the uneasy dalliance between the two continues to be a kind of unspoken problem within new music. In restoring the tradition of improvisation to the concerto format from outside the confines of the cadenza, the work performs a valuable service, as improvisation is finally, slowly, accorded a seat at the new music table, the improvising soloist expanding the palette of the orchestra and vice versa. 

Yet if things are changing, they are changing slowly. There was marked discomfort among some sections of the audience during the improvised performance that followed by the trio of Roscoe Mitchell, on bass and sopranino saxophones and little instruments, turntablist Ignaz Schick and percussionist Michele Rabbia. By my reckoning, at least a quarter had walked by the end, and there was a snigger or two to my left as Mitchell switched from saxophones to his table of little instruments and Schnick pulled electronic swoops from his turntables. To many of us, these were not unfamiliar musical gestures, but to sectors of those in attendance, it seems, they are perhaps (still!) seen as illegitimate, and it’s precisely the ambiguity they raise that indicates their radicality. This might seem bizarre, given that Mitchell has performed at the festival before, for instance, his 1977 duo with Richard Teitelbaum as part of the now-defunct ‘SWF-Jazz Session’ slot following Lewis’s own duo with Anthony Braxton the year before. But old habits die hard. Facing a hostile reaction from the audience at Willisau in 1976, Mitchell repeated  the opening phrases of ‘Nonaah’ dozens of times, until the audience came on side. That was nearly fifty year ago, but perhaps there’s still a need for that kind of gesture. That’s to say: there is (still!) great value, within a new music context, in work that still retains the capacity to discomfort, and thus to interrogate basic assumptions about what is acceptable, or not, within this supposedly experimental frame. The sparseness and space, the awkwardness heard in the music: the way overlapping lines apparently fail to connect, the moments it falls away into the edge of nothing, are precisely the places where such music does its work. When the trio reaches a pause or near-pause, they are not playing composed silences, but improvised silences. I don’t just mean that these are improvised because they take place within the frame of musical improvisation, but that the quality of the silences themselves, and their framing, feels radically open, unstable. This music dares to be awkward, unscripted, to show—and not, as in the case of some of the pieces, to choreograph, stage and compose—the joins, the parts where things don’t fit, where a musical language might be negotiated through live, improvised, real-time encounter, an ongoing dialectic rather than the presentation of (however beautiful) a completed thought. The place to begin is in the cracks, at the edge.

 This is not necessarily a generic designation, but a matter of context. On the Sunday, Michael Finnissy’s choral work Was frag ich nach der Welt may, in a sense, have been one of the most ‘traditional’ pieces on the programme, in that it worked exclusively with a form that has existed for centuries—the a capella choir—in a setting of 15th century poetry by Andreas Gryphius that interpolated elements of a mass by Heinrich Schütz. (The piece’s title is also shared with a Bach cantata.) Likewise, its sonic vocabulary harked back more to the sounds of what might by now be heard as the ‘traditional’ avant-garde, concerned with line, with gesture, with rhetoric and musical argument, more so than with texture or timbre. Yet it was precisely through this historical untimeliness that it reached contemporaneity. Finnissy explained in the Q&A his interest in the way the texts balanced formal strictures (poetic Alexandrines)--a distancing or objectivizing of experience-- with the reality of war trauma. In Gryphius’s Europe, tormented by the 30 Years War that destroyed two thirds of the population, including half of Gryphius’ family, that destruction was up close. Today, we watch wars on a screen—Gaza, Ukraine—and those mediations take on a new light. The point is not to evoke the ‘timeless suffering’ of war, so vague it becomes liberal generality, but to think the way art frames and re-frames these experiences: what changes in them, what stays the same. The work comes to us doubly out of time: as an echo, or what Finnissy calls an “annotated discussion”, both of pre-modernism and of 20th century modernism. Its contemporaneity is to be out of time, even as its setting of German war poetry of the 1600s layers onto our experience (distanced, mediated, prohibited) of Gaza. Sounded in unison at the beginning and end of the work, the title phrase—“what do I ask about the world?” (or, “what do I care for the world?”)—remains a vitally open question.

 

 

On the same bill, Claudia Jane Scroccaro’s impressive On the Edge gently interrogated the concert format, the work opening as the audience filed in, with the choir distributed around the walls of the hall, speakers playing both live and pre-recorded vocals and filtering the ambient sounds of the concert hall, so that the line between the pre-recorded and the live was blurred. Though the work derived in part from her work at a women’s shelter in Paris, where women could often not speak directly of their trauma but approached it through songs, such as lullabies, Scroccaro in a Q&A the next day noted her reluctance to aestheticize and appropriate these women’s experiences, turning such questions into part of the fabric of the piece itself. Setting poems by Mina Loy revolving around the figure of the outsider, the work asks how to speak, and who speaks, for whom. Taking the stage, the soloists repeat words from Loy—“Come to me, there is something I have to tell you but cannot say”—each syllable a downward-sloping melisma in looping tendrils, as if caught in its own, perpetually preludial loop, the condition of narration, explication, revelation. Music here contains both trauma and balm, speaking by not speaking, revealing or refusing to reveal through an opacity at once lulling and barbed. As material from the lullabies emerges, swelling and rumbling on the verge of perpetual climax, electronics swirl up like tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, after-echo of an explosion we can’t hear: rather, we can only witness the after-echoes, the traces of its origin. The soloists walk off the darkened stage, singing, joined by the choir, in an undoubtedly effective madrigal of leave taking, the sound moving to the back of the head, the back of the room, in a kind of spatialized fade-out. It hangs there, the resonant conclusion of an unfinished thought, this music that is always coming after, always leaving, never quite managing to depart.

The final concert was similarly devoted to expanding the idea of the orchestra. In the second half, Chaya Czernowin’s unforeseen dusk: bones into wings added six amplified singers who, she notes in a pre-concert Q&A, function not so much as soloists as, in her words, “survivors from a storm”, cast adrift amidst quiet, amplified sounds and constant, see-sawing pitch slides: episodes and structures that strive, by the work’s end, to “take flight”. Meanwhile, it’s not often, perhaps, that those words ‘exuberant’ or ‘entertaining’ can be genuinely applied to new music, but the two works in the first half buck the trend. In both, it’s hard to say whether electronics replicate orchestra or whether orchestra replicates electronics; better to call it a case of mutual transformation. Francisco Alvarado’s piece REW.PLAY.FFWD took its inspiration from a by-now dated piece of technology—though one of late enjoying a revival—the cassette tape. Orchestral whooshes and whoops, accelerandos and ritardandos imitated the tape’s rewind and fast-forward function as a kind of rollercoaster or perpetual motion machine, interspersed with hushed interludes sparked by bowed electric guitar harmonics. Sara Glojnarić’s DING, DONG, DARLING! did similar work with digital sounds, somewhere between Tyondai Braxton and footwork, glitter and jitter. Hi-hats, played live or pre-recorded, stuttered alongside proliferating electronic basslines, contemplative string chords interrupted by brass stabs that refuse to separate the zone of contemplation and action. A spoken voice intoned the title phrase with camp relish at two points, the evocation of what the piece identifies as a queer utopia. Both works had an infectious energy and were received with whoops and cheers, Glojanrić’s taking the Orchester Preis. One of the trends in the New Music of the past half-century has been to deal with the problems of history through the veil of mourning, the pathos of distance, and another to ignore those problems through a formalistic or decorative concern with colour and timbre. Alvarado and Glojnarić’s works, like that of Lewis on the first night, suggested a third approach: fully aware of those questions of history, of the exclusions and oversights of music new and old, but refusing to give up on notions of play, of joy. Critical play, critical joy, joyful criticism, joyful participation in the endless work that still has to be done. 

 

Juliet Fraser - Wave Songs

Juliet Fraser - Wave Songs

City University, Tuesday 11th October 2022 

Alvin Lucier, Wave Songs

Newando Ebizie, I birth the moon

Newton Armstrong, The Book of the Sediments

[Note: A shorter version of this piece will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Wire magazine.]

Image: Lee Lozano, from Wave Paintings.

As part of City University’s laudable free concert series, soprano Juliet Fraser presented three works for voice and electronics in a condensed but focused programme lasting around an hour. This condensation was reflected in the evening’s visual presentation. At recent concerts at City’s basement performance space, I’ve seen percussion spilling over the limits of the stage (for the Pierrot Ensemble’s performance of the late Harrison Birtwistle’s The Axe Manual alongside new music by Marc Yeats). On this occasion, however, the stage was bare apart from four speakers, a music stand, and Fraser herself. Onstage, the lights meant Fraser’s shadow was doubled, at times tripled, the darker shadow and its overlapping, progressively lighter ghosts: aura, umbra, penumbra. It was an appropriate figure for all three works’ play with liveness and pre-recording, various forms of doubling and recurrence—impersonally in Alvin Lucier’s Wave Songs, noisily, shatteringly in Nwando Ebizie’s I birth the moon, and with a kind of melancholic implacability in Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments, the latter two pieces world premieres forming part of Fraser’s cycle of commissions based on the work of Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy. (Previous instalments, by Laurence Crane and Lara Agar, were heard at John Lely’s and Tim Parkinson’s long-running series Music We’d Like to Hear late last year.)

 
The concert took its title from Lucier’s piece, “for female voice and pure wave oscillators” commissioned in response to Lee Lozano’s Wave Paintings in 1998 and first performed by Joan La Barbara, but so far, never officially recorded. “Wave Songs”, Lucier’s programme note remarks, “consists of eleven solos for female voice with two pure wave oscillators”, with tones fading in and out at the beginning and end of each song. 

“The singer stands between the two loudspeakers from which the pure waves flow. Throughout the course of the work she sings pure tones on the vowel ‘oo’ matching the sounds of the pure waves, in order to create the most vivid beating [...] As the oscillator tones get closer and closer together as the work progresses, it becomes virtually impossible for the singer to accurately tune her pitches”. 

This play with human error and with the ‘purity’ of electronically generated sound waves is not so much an animating tension as a flicker at the work’s edges, the drama of pitch regulating that governs much western music a kind of crackling undercurrent to a work that often sounds like an encapsulation of that very principle. Introducing the concert from the stage, Fraser remarked that Lucier’s piece, involving various complex mathematical complications, can seem like an intellectual exercise. Her advice was to “feel the piece rather than listen to it”. At the same time, that very distinction between feeling and listening is perhaps one the piece is also interested in collapsing. Expanding and exploding customary practices of listening, Lucier treats sound as material, vibration, solid yet evanescent, something both literally and metaphorically felt, a world of sonic illusion in which the distances between sine waves and the vocal line create ‘beating’ effects—as Lucier puts it, “bumps of sound produced as sound waves collide”. But this vocabulary of expansion, explosion, collapse and collision doesn’t really capture the still spirit of the piece, its moving stasis, its static movement.

 
As is well-known, Lozano effectively dropped out of the New York art world in the early ’70s, her early work, “comix”, sexualised paintings and drawings that drew with fresh and raging energy from the currents that also produced the often tamer works of pop art. Subsequently moving from these works into sexualised depictions of tools—screws, pipes, wrenches—Lozano in turn embarked from 1967-1970 on the Wave Paintings, abstract canvases depicting multiplying wavelengths of light. Lozano had planned a follow-up series with each painting painted in a different state, including “stoned, drunk, horny”—the body and the changing passions of the body mixing with the ‘objective’ phenomena of light and object, tool and, questioning what abstraction is and means and how it interacts with the female body and perceptions of the female artist. As it stood, however, she instead made a series of dramatic gestures of refusal that aimed to resolve contradiction, first through Dialogue Piece--inviting “people [she] would rarely see [...] to [her] loft for a dialogue”--and then Untitled (General Strike Piece, Feb. 8, 1969) and DECIDE TO BOYCOTT WOMEN (1971), in which she cut off communication, first with the art world—instead, Lozano promised to work only towards “total personal and public revolution”—then with all women, before dropping out altogether.

 
Painted before this process of removal, Lozano’s Wave Paintings saw her painting accumulating waves on canvas, culminating in a total of ninety-six waves painted over three days, stopping only when she reached the physical limit of how many waves she could paint in a single session. As painter David Reed remarks in an Artforum interview on Lozano’s work with Katy Siegel, “the series is infinite, it’s just her physical limitations that stopped it.” For Siegel, the work “seems to combine a rigorous scientific approach with some kind of personal statement.” Reed concurs: 

“Her interest in science is a way of connecting art to larger issues and keeping it from becoming merely formal [...] Lozano’s “Wave” paintings seem to offer proof of the difficulties of that transformation of the self, and reasons for the doubts. The series is meant to be endless, but she can’t make it endless. It ends physically, not conceptually. She desires more than she can achieve, not just physically, but in other ways as well. It’s like Kafka saying, “Oh, there’s infinite hope, just not for us.””

As Reed remarks, in Lozano’s work, “you aren’t coerced into having emotions; you decide to have them.” Such work explores the nexus of perception, emotion, abstraction and the material presence of bodies. And Lucier’s own interest in the pure, potentially infinite sound of oscillators, activated by disturbances in environment, relates to his own position as a stutterer, explored most famously in I am Sitting in a room (1969), in which the imperfections in his speech contribute to and are then erased by the feedback created from repeatedly playing it back into a room. “I want audiences to open up their ears to their environments”, Lucier commented to his student Douglas Simon. In exploring “how space intrudes its personality on the sounds you produce”, Lucier continued,  “I simply want to find out what these [different] environments do to sounds, not to make them but to take what I can find, and in that way each performance will teach me something.” Ideally, this process of learning sees both Lucier and his listeners alike as embarking on a process of finding out about sound, about themselves, about the world. 

 
“Are you trying to tell the audience something beyond what they hear?” asked Douglas Simon. “Yes”, Lucier replies. 

“It’s just an extension of what you do when you’re a small child at the beach and put a shell up to your ear and hear the ocean. Then you stop. You don’t do that as you grow older. Your ear stops doing that because you’ve got to think about other things, how to make a living and how to speak to people, how to communicate verbally. I guess I’m trying to help people hold shells up to their ears and listen to the ocean again”. 

Waves were a longstanding metaphor for Lucier: the generation of music from the performer’s brain waves in Music for Solo Performer (1965), the recreation of the sounds of the sea in Chambers (1969), for resonating objects. Lucier’s sound waves, Lozano’s light waves, and the oceanic framing of the concert come together Lucier’s Wave Songs is in eleven short movements. The piece achieves the remarkable feat of generating a soundworld at once extremely quiet—it seems that every audience twitch can be heard—and one that totally fills the space of perception, huge and morphingly fixed, the soprano singing held notes over sine waves producing beats/difference tones against them. In a music that collapses the traditional divisions between melody, harmony and rhythm, the work operates on a principle of held tones and tone succession, the differences between which generate rhythm and harmony at once. The third song sees vocal leaps approaching Feldmanesque melody—specifically, the Feldman of Three Voices, like Lucier’s piece, premiered by Joan La Barbara, and likewise recorded by Fraser—as the sine waves chirrup like frozen, heavy birdsong or a muted car alarm. 

A work so rooted in physical phenomena becomes moving in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. As is so often the case with Lucier’s work, it opens up the environment, gives us a space to see ourselves or whatever we choose to see reflected and enabled there, getting to the roots of sound, what it does to us and what we make it do. In the penultimate “song”, language enters the work for the first and only time, as the soprano sings words from Lozano’s writings describing the thinking behind the Wave Paintings, the shock of the entrance of language subdued by the rendition of the text as a single-note melody. Lozano’s text describes light waves—“the waves are really a reference to the electromagnetic spectrum”, Lucier ‘translating’ this to apply to sound waves: a description of waves heard on waves of sound. Here is a blurring of metaphor and sound, of waves in multiple senses as movement in time and space.

 
“I was trying”, Lozano writes, “to combine art and science and existence. It was a science idea transferred to an art idea.” In much of Lucier’s own work, if not Lozano’s, this becomes something like a general principle. But it’s not just about “objective phenomena”, which in Lucier’s explanations of his own work is so often described in technical, relentlessly material terms: in a work like this, they form the stage for weird dramas, audio tricks, suspensions of disbelief at once contained and expansive. “I imagine the work as a mini opera”, Lucier remarked, “with the singer taking the part of the artist, singing her paintings into existence or perhaps simply humming to herself as she worked on them.” Lozano, who’d been persuaded to allow retrospective shows such as the one for which the piece was commissioned, would die the following year; given Lucier’s own recent death, the piece assumes the status of a double memorial, the speakers both tombstones and openings to a world of other possibility, in which that which is prior emerges uncannily into the present: the voices of the dead, living still.

 
In the next and final movement, the vocals are a back of throat murmur, a sound click, murmuring on the edges of perception and of being recognisable as a singing voice, or for that matter, a human voice at all—those effects so effectively explored by the likes of Ami Yoshida’s ‘howling voice’ technique—“a barely audible sound that is perceived as sound itself rather than as vocalization”—developed, coincidentally, around the same time on Spiritual Voice, recorded between 1995 and 1997, and whose work with the sinewaves of Sachiko M as Cosmos on Tears (2002) the no-input mixing board of Toshimara Nakamura on Soba to Bara 2009) has notable similarities with Lucier’s work. Hearing the work in this space, over the course of Lucier’s Wave Songs, the acoustic voice, in proximity with the pre-recorded sine waves, paradoxically starts to sound more electronic and the electronics to sound more ‘voice-like’ or human. Or is that just a perceptual trick, the experience of one listener, with their own metaphorical and perceptual projections that they, like each listener, bring to the piece? The piece, it seems to me, asks us to interrogate the very basis of sound, of how and why we listen, while, at the same time, imposing nothing but itself. 

You could just listen. 

Image: Nwando Ebizie. Image from ColoRising.

Before—and even, arguably, during—the production of the Wave Paintings, Lozano’s work was to do with the body, with all that was stigmatised as ‘unscientific’, feminine, hysterical—the altered states of being stoned, of drinking, of sex, of changing oneself by changing the environment around one and vice versa. Her move from physical works based in objects—culminating in the immense materiality of the wave paintings—leads to performance works based on renunciation—first a dialogue piece, then a dropout piece, then a boycott piece, art as a self-contained enterprise collapsing into life and its messiness. Lucier’s work might appear to do the opposite: to order, to regulate, to present. Yet there’s something here that deranges, de-arranges perception, something between contemplation and agitation, between ecstasy, ex-stasis, a being taken out of self, and a revelation of self and its limits, the limits of a body, of hearing, of being in a space. Then there’s the question, of course, of the position of male composer and female performer, of the way that the piece is or is not gendered, questions that, perhaps, go beyond what the work can hold. 

These questions of gender more directly inflect the next piece, the world premiere of Todmodern-based, British-Nigerian multimedia artist Nwando Ebizie’s I birth the moon. As her programme note suggests, Ebizie’s concern, like Lucier’s, is with embodiment and how it shapes perception, but from a perspective that, like Lozano’s, is oriented around the subjective rather than the ‘objective’ elements of sonic process: from its process of composition, constructed in collaboration with Fraser during “a day of walking in the Yorkshire moors, talking, eating and improvising”, and takes inspiration both from Rachel Carson and from “the experience of miscarriage, the hopes, the fears of birth, the absurdity of the body vs the strong will to create, the ‘I’ wanting to become we”. (We might call to mind here Ruth Anderson’s haunting 1968 tape work, The Pregnant Dream, with its swirling spoken voices concerning dreams within dreams, speaking and forgetting.) From a different angle, Ebizie raises similar questions to Lozano and Anderson alike: how does embodiment shape perception? What is time? Where are we positioned in relation to phenomena, to each other, to the world? These are questions that, as Lozano suggests, might be “science idea[s] transferred to art idea[s]”, but they are also, incessantly philosophical, social, political. Lucier’s work, like that of Newton Armstrong at the close of the concert, understands process as something like a grid, composition as the enacting of certain pre-arranged rules with margin for error and change creeping at the edges. Ebizie’s has the feel and sound of a more improvised approach, in which the clarity of successive movements and sections found in the other two pieces is replaced by a more amorphous world of live voice and electronic shifts, of clattering soundscapes that swirl into and out of ambiguous climaxes.

 
The piece begin with Fraser’s spoken voice matter-of-factly announcing the creation myth—“in the beginning”—alongside echoed, drawn-out, multiplying voices and clattering percussion, with live and recorded voices mirroring each other onstage and over the speakers. Fraser’s intonation is at times operatic, but the interaction with the electronic park constantly draws the music away from ready reference, as, in a burst of fractured rhythms on the speakers, a live soprano wail careens into an elongated electronic scream that in turn becomes a buzzing digital whirr. “What is...what is...what is?” Fraser repeats with increasing urgency, before a burst of laughter breaking down into back-of-throat gurgle, gargle, voice crack. “The constant trials and failures of creating life”: an uneasy chant over a heartbeat rhythm, dropping out—“a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space”. Ululation, shimmering echo and on the speakers, the sound of breath that becomes wind or wind that becomes breath. A long, high wordless melodic line over rising and falling voices on tape, melismatic incantation. It all suddenly stops with the sound on the tape of an inhalation, another breath, somewhere between beginning and ending, poised to speak again.

The final piece on the bill, Australian-born City University lecturer Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments. Armstrong’s work has recently received the full-disc treatment on Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre label, in works that, as he puts it in an interview with Reynell, “work on some new approaches to musical line, repetition, and layering.” “All of my recent instrumental music has included electronic sounds,” he continues, “and these are usually treated in an ‘instrumental’ way, with the loudspeakers integrated into the ensemble. And all of my work for the past twenty years has involved computer programming at some point in the process.” This manifests, for instance, in “deformed, non-strict canons [...] created by algorithms that I designed.” Armstrong defines a canon as “a line alongside itself”, and that sense of setting lines alongside one another likewise infused his new work.

 
The work opens with a down-toned drone reminiscent of Giacanto Scelsi--Anahit, perhaps--Armstrong’s ‘instrumental’ treatment of the electronic lines pointing to their acousmatic uncanniness. Are those horns? Woodwinds? Strings? Purely electronic tones? Fraser’s live voice sings in countermelody, a descending two-note motif, a study in recurrent descent and descant, waves’ rise and fall. Now a second motif, silence between each iteration of the tape part, seeming at the end of held sounds to reveal itself, not as instrumental but as a treated voice. If Lucier’s sine wave appears as the index of ‘pure’, non-human sound, Armstrong even more blurs the distinction, ghostly timbres changing into something else then back into themselves, accumulating not so much as ‘progress’ but process.

 
Armstrong’s programme note suggests that he took his cue from Carson’s description of “the slow accumulation of sediments on the deep sea floor” which eventually form the matter of the earth—a process Carson calls an “epic poem”, in Armstrong’s words, “an inscription of all that has happened in the geologic and climatic history of our planet”. Here is another way to approach the relations of material, of time and space found in the preceding works: what Armstrong calls “the interactions between the momentary and the vast, and of endless process as a form of saying”. But can this work’s methodology be called accumulation, as the sediment metaphor suggests, and as Lozano’s expanding wave paintings might also suggest, or is it instead a winding down, in the era of climate change anxiety, the echo chamber of covid, lockdown, of politically-fostered alienation, loneliness, and a sense of real and impending catastrophe? As motifs and layers build, accumulate, recede, white noise sounds—field recordings of oceanic waves?—enter on the tape. A hum, a slight chirrup, a sinewave, a wave, the literal and metaphorical intersecting in sounds and time and tide’s ambiguous embrace.

 
Wave sound to fade. Soprano sings high, Fraser’s hands held together in front in a resting gesture somewhere between benediction and protection, holding something up or holding onto something. Difference tones hum between the ears, ship-like clankings on the tape, surrounded in sound: this is at once a spectacle of control and of overwhelming, of being overwhelmed, lost at sea. Or is it that sound just a dripping tap in the bathroom sink—connected to the problems of world water supply, of declining and rising sea levels, of ice cap melt and of drought? Fraser stands silent onstage while the sines wind down and the water continues to splash, and it’s over. The Book of the Sediments is a work at once of connection and disconnection, alienation and a kind of melancholic peace. After Armstrong’s piece ended, the applause that followed sounded alien, strange, like rain gone wrong. Such music, at root, strives to alter the way we hear. This was a concert that altered the space in which it was placed; one might take us back out into the world with a different sense of how we walk through it, of where we go from here.