Hear and Now - 12th November 2011 - Cut and Splice, Varese's Poeme Electronique

[Guest]

Robert Worby presents more performances from this year's Cut & Splice Festival, co-curated by Hear And Now and Sound And Music at the ICA in London last week. This year's theme is Collectives, and features performances by Jennifer Walshe's Grupat collective, and the Wandelweiser collective. Grupat has a playful and wide-ranging approach that encompasses film, sonic sculpture and interventions alongside concert music. Wandelweiser music is about "the evaluation and integration of silence rather than an ongoing carpet of never-ending sounds", inspired by the ideas of John Cage.

And in the Hear And Now 50 series, composer and rock musician Tyondai Braxton explains why he is so inspired by the Poème électronique by Edgard Varèse, while Gillian Moore tells the story of Varèse's long struggle to create a futuristic music that he finally achieved in this work, composed for an array of hundreds of loudspeakers at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.

Anyone recommend the show this week?

[MrGongGong]

Yes I would
Varèse is a fascinating and hugely influential composer and Gillian Moore is always a joy to listen to and a national treasure
and for mr Worby a glass of Talisker is usually more in keeping than this

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Haven't listened to it yet: bowled over by the Pre-Hear Sonatas for String Quartet by the 26-yr-old (!26!) Brian Ferneyhough. An awesome performance by the Diotima 4tet.

Walshe is always worth hearing and it will be interesting to hear Braxton jnr's thoughts on the Varese.

But do listen to the Pre-Hear, too.

[hackneyvi]

Haven't listened to it yet: bowled over by the Pre-Hear Sonatas for String Quartet by the 26-yr-old (!26!) Brian Ferneyhough ...

But do listen to the Pre-Hear, too.

I think the announcer said he was 24.

I have just finished - may I say? - hearing the Ferneyhough. Over to the Pre-Hear thread ...

[hackneyvi]

Yes I would
Varèse is a fascinating and hugely influential composer ...

Thanks, G. I'd intended to give the Varese a shot but was doubtful about the Cut and Splice stuff. I had the opportunity to hear it at the ICA but the Cage influence deterred me at the time.

[Quarky]

"Anyone recommend the show this week?" -

Not me - I didn't find anything worth taking away from this episode.

I found the Irish female voices rather adolescent at times.

Varèse seemed something of a museum exhibit - and I do not find museums interesting.

Wandelweiser - well as was explained, silence is a main preoccupation. Well good luck to him if he finds it necessary to have a 35 minute silence in a 10 hour work - I'm sure that he has a good reason for it, and many listeners will be entertained. But I do find the relationship of silence to music rather like the physics concepts of anti-matter or the positron. Both are necessary consequences of matter or the electron, and are necessary for a full understanding of the universe. So silence is anti-music in that sense - related to music, but exactly opposite to positive music. If Wandelweiser want to inhabit this negative universe, as I say, good luck to them.

[MrGongGong]

What an odd idea Oddball
that silence is "anti-music" not in my universe
"positive music" is a slightly worrying term IMV
nor is the only function of music to be "entertaining"
music can be that but it can do other things ...........

[hackneyvi]

Oddball's point seems legitimate to me. We infer that he is placing a value on something to which he ascribes a charge or

I find this 'silence also = music' hard to swallow. It might equally be said that 'air also = music' since air is essential to hearing music.

If we say that 'air also = music' because it is an essential component, then 'the brain also = music'. 'The arm'. 'The knee'. (For the quadraplegic) 'the nose'. Why do not all these things 'also = music'?

Why not 'non-musical noise also = music'? Since Cage and 4:33 directs us to the ambient noise of the musical environment and suggests that non-musical noise is an inevitable aspect of music, does 'non-musical noise also = musical noise'? All of it? All sound.

Why isn't everything music?

Band saws. Cuttle fish. Tall boys.

Pretty much anything physical can have musical applications, can yield, transport, reflect, restrain, demarcate tones. But that doesn't make almost everything music.

[MrGongGong]

a thought (and hoping that the usual idiots don't appear !)
is that music is not like Biology or Chemistry in that one can't simply say that "this" compound, animal, plant, element is the name that we give it
any sound CAN be music
as can silence as that is part of the continuum that makes up music
I'm not sure what "non musical" noise is
Murray Schaffer defined "Noise" as an undesirable sound signal
as opposed to the scientific definition (which would make snare drum sounds noise along with the sound of the wind and sea which many people find musical) of noise (white noise ) being every frequency in equal amplitude (and pink noise etc etc etc )

actually air is not essential to hearing music, if i strike a tuning fork and put the base on my head I hear it through my skull, no air involved at all............ I've made a piece using this in the past for a small audience

all sound IS music if we say that it is
it's not a matter of taste but of context (sorry folks !)

The nightingale in Pines of Rome is definitely music
but if you heard the nightingale in the woods as it was recorded would it still be music ?

[Quarky]

""Anyone recommend the show this week?" -

Not me - I didn't find anything worth taking away from this episode."

May be I was being a little too hard on Wandelweiser et al. The music that was performed was quite pleasant, and yes, it seemed to me to have a Cageian influence. But to explain the music that was performed in terms of silence, as did the lady composer - well, it seemed to me that the programme producers might have persuaded her to turn around her explanation of her music to bolster their preoccupation with Cage.