secret public
streets of Brussels, 14th March from 2 p.m. - Ars Musica Festival
Blindman, Champ d'Action, Het Collectief, Musiques Nouvelles, Hermes, Ictus, Nadar, Prometheus, Spectra: the whole of the Belgian musical family, with the support of the City of Brussels, is sending its best soloists to celebrate the anniversary of the Ars Musica festival. Throughout this Saturday afternoon, the Secret Public programme will consist of several tens of mini-concerts spread around the centre of Brussels in workman’s huts. A new version of the salon concert, if you like, but in the street, found as you walk around, for ten or so people at a time. In the shelter of portable cabins, up close to the musician and his or her instrument, this is an opportunity to see, at close quarters, just how much today’s music involves in terms of physical investment, stamina and nerves. Ictus presents cello solos and duets, with Geert De Bièvre and François Deppe.
With the support of | Met de steun van Hamza Fassi-Fihri, Deputy Burgomaster of the City of Brussels responsible for Culture | Schepen van de Stad Brussel bevoegd voor Cultuur
steve reich : drumming
14.3.2009: Salzburg (AT)
25.3.2009: Maerz Musik, Berlin (D)
Steve Reich finished Drumming in 1971 after an intensive year of composing that followed his journey to Africa in early 1970. It is a decisive, a conclusive work that sums up the acquired mastery of the composer and yet offers a glimpse of his future orientation. Written after Phase Patterns and Four Organs (both dated 1970), Drumming may be considered the last of Reich’s radical works: with wild exuberance it signals the end of the uncompromising avant-garde era of minimalism.
Through the diversity of its textures, the suppleness of the compositional process, its structurization in four movements, its long dionysian end, Drumming opens the long way that Reich was to follow towards a synthesis between minimalism and the classical heritage - a synthesis that has affirmed itself more and more in his subsequent works: Music for Eighteen Musicians, for example, then Tehillim, followed by City Life... where the harmonic modulationniment, the formal arch-like structures progressively interchange the minimalist experience for rhythmical process.
With Drumming, of course, we have not yet reached this stage. The general outlines of the work still clearly situate it within the series using gradual processes, progressive metamorphosis of an initial musical situation that the listener can follow step by step - as in the very ‘underground’ Pendulum Music of 1968, a work that nowadays one would rather qualify as an installation: two microphones are set in movement perpendicularly between two loudspeakers until they stop swinging, producing a contrapuntal array of feedback effects that constitute the entire musical material. However ıtrue it might be, as Sébastien Jean* notes, that ‘the exclusive and draconian use of the gradual process (phasing out or augmentation) brings about music that neither presents nor raises any challenge, but yields itself to our hearing as a simple object of contemplation’’, the fierce insistence and persistent way of proceeding in Reich’s early pieces precisely prove them challenging and reminiscent of the aesthetics of John Cage: an anti-romantic way of getting rid of every trace of the author’s subjectivity.
Steve Reich, however, has often admitted that he is hardly interested in radicality as such and has, since his first works, been interested in strategies that would prevent the listener from becoming bored. Like all of Reich’s work, Drumming is full of minimal theatrical events, carefully dosed, that dramatize the process without changing the flux. The entry of a new instrument, the range changing, melodic permutations... all of this right up to the end of the fourth movement, followed by the° coda, so characteristic of Reich: the process has been resolved, not a single event will be introduced any more that would disturb the never-ending game of repetition. This is the moment the composer chooses to reintroduce the voices and the piccolo (which the listener may have in the meantime forgotten) in a long stamping crescendo, saturated with high frequencies, which can be compared with the ecstatic impact of the final Alleluia in Tehillim.
In the four sections of the work the following combinations of instruments are used:
I-four pairs of tuned
II-three marimbas, coloured by two female voices
III-three glockenspiel, coloured by one piccolo and whistling
IV-all instruments together
The first and second movement (and the second and third movement) connect flowingly with one another as if interwoven, one group of instruments covering the other in a way quite similar to filtering effects used in electronic music. At the end of the third movement, the notes become more and more sparse, which in turn gives the last movement the ‘classical’ feel of a da capo recapitulation, when the entire group of musicians join in a progressive accumulation of all the material heard so far.
oscar bianchi : matra
18.3.2009: Stuttgart Neue Vocalsolisten, Georges-Elie Octors (conductor)
Flagey, Studio 4 (Ars Musica Festival), Brussels (B)
Cantata for six voices (the wonderful Neue Vocalsolisten of Stuttgart), three bass instruments (Suzie Fröhlich, Petzold recorder; Rico Gübler, tubax; Mike Schmid, bass flute), ensemble and a touch of electronics.
The Sanskrit word "MATRA" refers both to the Hindu musical theory, in which it means "beat", and to Tantric mysticism, in which it means the vastness of the physical aura. Finally, it has the paradoxical meaning of "misery", of emptiness. Putting these meanings together, it should no doubt be understood as signifying something like: "empty vibration" or "beat of the Being".
The libretto is a montage from three sources:
-The Vigyana Bhairava Tantra, revealed book of Tantric Shivaism -The Gnostic writings of Maria Magdalena, discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt -Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.
The intertwining of the three texts highlights their points of concordance: they celebrate the multifaceted nature of matter in movement, and its unity in the void of the being; as well as: spiritual experience as a test of love. The œuvre lasts just under an hour.
The cantata movement is one of a contrast which resolves into rapture: the tireless swarming of the low-register soloists (bass flute, contrabass recorder, contrabass saxophone) vies with the suspended harmonies of the voices. But in the final movement, it’s the rhythm that prevails: the voices then adopt the ecstatic techniques of Hindu vocality, similar to overbreathing.
Note, in the first part: recent a capella oeuvre for 6 singers by Michael Levinas, "Le Ô du Haut". After Valère Novarina and Jean Genet, and before tackling Kafka, Levinas braves the crazy language of the French-speaking Romanian Gherasim Luca.
morton feldman : for philip guston
20.03.2009: Mike Schmid (flute), Gerrit Nulens (percussion)
Jean-Luc Fafchamps (piano), ca 260 minutes
Musica de Hoy, Madrid (ES)
Fred Orton: With regard to referentiality and Guston, it seems to me that there is a certain kind of hesitancy about the Guston piano piece which is implicit in Guston's pictures.
Morton Feldman: A little bit I think. Also the touch. It's a piece that's involved very much with touch if you play it.
FO: But also no matter what you put down, whether it's on the keys of a piano or on the canvas, there are thousands of other possible notes or other marks to choose from. And there seems to be that kind of hesitancy in it.
MF: Yes, that's pretty good.
FO: The two people who were really important to you were Guston and Cage in different ways.
MF: Yes, Guston and Cage. I don't see Guston any more, things kind of cooled off. You know there is a great line of Frank O'Hara's where he says 'I'm the most reasonable of men: all I want is unbounded love', some fabulous remark like that. And Guston was always like that in my life. He was very reasonable but, boy, was he demanding. When his work started going into this new period I saw it the first time in his studio. I looked at it a long time and just couldn't say anything about it. He was a little upset that I didn't give him this instant enthusiasm.
Gavin Bryars: You think it was a crucial point for him that he should have had that enthusiasm?
MF: Yes. But I mean every ten years. I couldn't. I met him right after he got back from Italy and did a whole series of red paintings. That was a very important show, a big abstract show in 1950, just when I met John Cage at the Modern. I went to see the show with Cage and I came across a red painting. I looked at that picture and it knocked me out. My eyes are lousy and I walked over to see who the name was. John Cage knew everybody and said 'He's a marvellous person, we'll have to have him over', which he did about a week later.
source : www.cnvill.net/mforton.htm
Philip Guston, Painting, 1954
Oil on canvas, 63 1/4 x 60 1/8 inches, Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson Fund
Beat Furrer : Apoklisis (2004)
25.3.2009, Lille Opera House, FR Dirk Descheemaeker, Benjamin Dieltjens (bass clarinets) François Deppe, presentation
A little gem of materialist poetry, of an art as pared down as it is perfectly knowing, Beat Furrer’s Apoklisis, for two bass clarinets, makes some elementary objects (beating, wah-wah waves, short falling scales, etc.) circulate in panoramic and artisanal stereo (the two clarinettists are four metres apart). False ingenuousness, discreet irony, controlled sophistication: they sway between Cage and Ligeti. Concert "One-Only-One" at the Lille Opera House: the œuvre is performed twice, with commentaries and listening keys between the two versions.
28.3.2009: gérard grisey, vortex temporum
for piano and five instruments (flute, clarinet, violin, alto and cello) Georges-Elie Octors conductor Handelsbeurs, Ghent
Launched into an attack on formalism, the "spectral" composers (including Gérard Grisey) claimed a music of the future, of metamorphosis, of sound fusion, of an exploration of thresholds. The musical œuvre became an infinite zoom lens directed towards the pure timbre, in the slow time of colourful hallucination. And yet 1996 saw a dramatic turn of events: Grisey dropped the bombshell of the Vortex Temporum, in which ultra-fast loops evoke American minimalism. Without renouncing his starting principles, Grisey opened up the framework: sounds would no longer be thrown into the river of time, but into the whirlpool of times, all sorts of times: the time of whales, the time of man, the time of birds. These are his words… And Vortex remains the most engaging masterpiece of the late 20th century.
liquid room (ars musica, brussels & bruges)
02.04.2009, Kaaitheater, Brussels (B)
07.04.2009: Concertgebouw, Brugge (B)
Special guests :
François Sarhan, Eva Reiter, Cédric Dambrain, Matthieu Metzger
Son : Alex Fostier
Liquid Room continues the Nuove Sincronie experiment, attempted in Milan by Fausto Romitelli and Riccardo Nova. Contemporary music, but a way of listening to it as though at a rock festival or an electronic improvisation night: the public comes and goes, stays standing, the music follows on without a break, the bar stays open: in and out. Instantaneous production (remix, improvisation based on a framework) vies with premeditated works, distracted listening vies with restless listening, but, in the end, you can no longer tell: the accumulated effect blurs the outlines.
Helmut Oehring
Romitelli : Seascape
Dambrain : In Memoriam
Eva Reiter : Alle Verbindungen gelten nur jetzt
françois sarhan, william kentridge :
telegrams from the nose (2008)
april 03rd et 04th 2009, Kaaitheater, Brussles (B)
Georges-Elie Octors, conductor; François Sarhan, narrator
Production : Ictus, Ars Musica
Copresentation : Kaaitheater, Ars Musica