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Where we're at London
South Bank Centre
04/15/2000 -
State of the Nation
State of the Nation is an extended weekend under the aegis of the
London Sinfonietta that provides an overview of contemporary British music,
with British and music defined fairly broadly. This year, it was also part
of the Hear Now/Towards the Millenium series. Events included short
concerts of newish and comissioned works (by the London Sinfonietta and
other groups), open performance workshops and sessions on a range of topics
from composing for double bass to self-presentation when submitting a
proposal. A range of sponsors, including the Performing Rights Society,
ensured that admission to most events was free.
The weekend was clearly successful as an opportunity for organizations,
schools groups and individuals students, performers and composers to
network in a congenial, fairly structured environment. It was probably also
successful in providing a snapshot of what is going on in music in these
islands at the moment, though the subject and composition of the picture
might be problematic. An anxious article in the Guardian last week
worried about whether the programme was pushing too far away from
"classical" music, which it did notably with an ambient event on Saturday
evening but also with strong threads of jazz and art-school multimedia. But
if a grand idea didn't emerge, a network of reasonably interesting ones
did.
There was plenty of academic composition. Five "fanfares" (also recorded
for broadcast on BBC Radio 3) included the intricate, if quintessentially
plinky-plonky, Stellar by Mary Bellamy, a series of subtly changing
starbursts for clarinet, cello and piano, and Static a "pygmy horn
concerto" for horn, trombone and bass. Dierdre Gribbens' 1996 Follow the
Horse combined a strong narrative, the story of Emain Macha's race with
the king's horses, marked out with galloping hooves in the percussion, with
a complex structure and texture, developing towards a modal march that
fades away again into hoof-beats accompanied by tin whistles. Follow the
Horse was performed on Sunday afternoon, with spirit, by an open
ensemble organized by COMA, the slighly unfortunately named group that aims
to encourage adult participation in musical performances of all kinds.
The second part of the concert on Sunday afternoon was music by Russell van
den Berg for Charlie Chaplin's 1917 film Easy Street. Easy Street is
the ironically named urban hell where Charlie, inspired by love for a
mission doll, takes up a beat as a policeman and overcomes the wife-beating
genius of the place by guile and accident. He also rescues the mission
doll, who has been imprisioned by a lascivious Jew, from a drug-crazed
rapist. It's not clear whether the near-reality depicted, the crude
stereotypes or the comic use of brutaiy is more disturbing. Russell van den
Berg's music, initially sounding like mainstream jazz, was never pictorial
but caught the rhythm of violence in the film and ignored the pathos
completely. A wife-beating episode was somewhat similar to the mayhem
upstairs in the first act of Mark Anthony Turnage's The Silver
Tassie, which following O'Casey's play, treats a similar setting of
urban poverty more sympathetically, though also more comically.
The closing concert was a survey of short-to-medium length pieces. Donnacha
Dennehy's 1997 Junk Box Fraud, a video of found and generated images
with two vocal performers and instrumentalists, was definitely performance
art, but quite exhilarating. So was Geoffrey Hannan's 1997
Rigmarole, for various flutes and percussion, an energetic series of
sections that seem to go nowhere but keep returning to the same motif.
Jonathan Cole's Ouroboros, written as a prize commission for the
Royal Philharmonic Society, wasn't nearly as alienating as James McMillan's
Oceanos whose theme of an element encircling the universe it seems
to share. But it seemed on a first hearing to be self-absorbedly formal
without the interest suggested by the varied symbolism of the snake. Still,
it was representative of the music performed this weekend in being
conherently and boldly conceived.
H.E. Elsom
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