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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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