Contemporary Music Festival Research Articles

The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music Transformations of Programming Policies

Abstract The present paper surveys the history of the Warsaw Autumn festival focusing on changes in the Festival programming. I discuss the circumstances of organising a cyclic contemporary music festival of international status in Poland. I point out the relations between programming policies and the current political situation, which in the early years of the Festival forced organisers to maintain balance between Western and Soviet music as well as the music from the so-called “people’s democracies” (i.e. the Soviet bloc). Initial strong emphasis on the presentation of 20th-century classics was gradually replaced by an attempt to reflect different tendencies and new phenomena, also those combining music with other arts. Despite changes and adjustments in the programming policy, the central aim of the Festival’s founders – that of presenting contemporary music in all its diversity, without overdue emphasis on any particular trend – has consistently been pursued. The idea of introducing leitmotifs, different for each Festival edition (such as: music involving human voice, mainly electronic, etc.) – is not inconsistent with this general aim since the selected works represent different aesthetics, and the “main theme” is not the only topic of any given edition of the Warsaw Autumn.

Collective vertigo

This paper is an attempt to apply Roger Caillois’ “théorie de la fête” to the contemporary music festivals in Poland and Hungary. The French ethnologist suggested that modernity does not provide the opportunity for collective vertigo, marginalizes the festival, and transforms it into a possibility that is difficult to achieve. Accordingto the results of my ethnographic fieldwork, the festival is a place of rest, fun, elation, rewarding belonging to a community, or even freedom at different levels. For many participants, it is a holiday in its purest form; a festival whose subject is music, but whose purpose is mental rest. In this context, the concept of festivalization should be redefined. In the analyzed cases (Jarocin Festival, OFF Festival, and O.Z.O.R.A. Festival), festivalization is not reduced to specific, collective forms of consumption; it also means the possibility of creating specific space-times of rest and freedom.

Electric Spring, Huddersfield, 22–26 February 2017.

In the heart of the University of Huddersfield's Creative Arts Building sits the unassuming Phipps Hall, which has given itself over to five days of total electronic sound immersion. The University has grown accustomed to attracting pioneering artists in contemporary music over the last four decades, both to its in-house research centre CeReNeM, and to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival every November. The relatively younger Electric Spring Festival takes place every February and is now able to stand alongside its older sibling, offering the public an impressive and diverse programme of composers and artists specialising in electronic sound manipulation. This year was no exception. Running from 22 to 26 February, there was something to suit everyone, from improvised live-coded dance music to classic musique concrète masterpieces. From its conception in 1995, the aim of the festival has been to offer breadth and surprise to its audience.

The Presence of Julius Eastman, London Contemporary Music Festival

For four years now, the London Contemporary Music Festival has been organising some of the most exciting new music events in town. In contrast to the eclectic extravaganzas of previous years, LCMF 2016 was tightly focused: three nights only, dedicated to the work of Julius Eastman. The programme was a revelation, even for those who are aware of Eastman and his music.

Contemporary Music in Odessa: the Festival “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music” in April 2017

On April 22–23, 2017 a notable event happened in Odessa, Ukraine, – namely, the contemporary music festival “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music.” This festival has been organized since 1995by composer Karmella Tsepkolenko and her husband Oleksandr Perepelstya, who are directors of the Odessa-based Association for New Music. Every year, for two days in April, the concerts of the festival have started at 4 PM and have continued non-stop until late at night, about 3 or 4 AM, with merely short 15-minute intermissions between each concert. This year the festival “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music” in Odessa once again impressed and dazzled its audiences with its lively assortment of the most varied trends of new music and created a rare artistic environment, which was greatly appreciated by the composers and performers participating in it, as well as for the regular audiences of Odessa and among the guests from other cities and countries, who came to the city to savor the great celebration of new music. Keywords: contemporary music festivals, musical Odessa.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2016, Huddersfield

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival leaves an indelible impression on any brave soul who ventures into the chill, dark November nights across its ten days, a rite of passage challenging conceptions of the stuff music is made of. Now in its thirty-ninth year, this is one of the more established contemporary music festivals, yet it never fails to provoke and stimulate, a snapshot of current musical preoccupations. The first weekend traditionally showcases a selection of significant works, setting the tone for the subsequent week, and 2016 was no exception. Jennifer Walshe and the Arditti String Quartet opened the festival in a ‘declaration of love to life on earth’. EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2016) is an eco-treatise on the bombardment the world is suffering – a torrent of visual and vocal disturbance with the arch-complexist Arditti gamely along for the ride, a playful synergy of theatre, voice and string quartet, preparing us for what was to come over the next few days.

Georg Friedrich Haas and Rebecca Saunders premieres, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2016

The first weekend of the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival saw an eclectic and vibrant mix of musical events. Artistic director Graham McKenzie promised a festival that was going to be ‘undoubtedly characterised by the bringing together of often quite disparate forces, to create new sounds, new experiences, and new approaches to music making’, and the opening days also manifested a strong sense of artistic difference and distance as well. The presence of Georg Friedrich Haas, this year's Composer in Residence, and Rebecca Saunders seemed to fire up such underlying dynamic energies. Throughout the weekend both composers took part in public interviews and both had UK and world premieres, yet they only presented in parallel: the programming kept them apart. In turn, the weekend amplified various levels of similarity and divergence between the two composers, exposing some fascinating creative tensions.

The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik

Gesprochene Musik, by Ernst Toch (1887-1964), is a forgotten milestone in the history of electronic music. (1) A three-movement suite consisting of spoken music for choir, it is one of the few paradigmatic representatives of the genre of Gramophonmusik, which made use of prerecorded gramophone discs in a concert setting. The work was premiered in 1930 at a Berlin festival devoted to new music, in a concert featuring original works for gramophone playback by two rising stars of the German contemporary music scene, Toch and Paul Hindemith. The pieces were performed only once, yet through the intervention of a young John Cage, the score of the third movement of Gesprochene Musik, the "Geographical Fugue," appeared in Henry Cowell's journal, New Music, five years later. Although Cage published the piece in the context of a collection of music written expressly for gramophone, his version led the "Geographical Fugue" to receive a new lease of life as a purely acoustic choral showpiece performed live, which would, ironically, become Toch's most famous work. (2) Given that there was no further trace of the gramophone discs from the original concert, the first two movements of Toch's suite were long considered lost. However, Toch's original sketches were in fact fortunately preserved at the Toch Archive at UCLA. Guided by the composer's grandson, Lawrence Weschler, Christopher Caines rediscovered the sketches for "O-a" and "Ta-tam" in 2006, and created the first full edition of Gesprochene Musik as part of a project he choreographed entitled "Worklight." This was the first complete performance of Gesprochene Musik since the work's premiere in 1930. The current essay presents an introduction, contextualization, and analysis of the first two movements of Gesprochene Musik ahead of the publication of Caines's (2014) preface and edition in the current volume of this journal. In recent years, the origins of the "Geographical Fugue" have begun to receive scholarly attention. Weschler (2003) has written extensively about his grandfather's life and career, and has produced a humorous report on Toch's encounter with John Cage in California in 1935. In Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music, Mark Katz (2010, 109-23) has written about the relationship between Grammophonmusik in the context of early mechanical music and recovered various contemporaneous theories about the potential of the phonograph and gramophone to transform music composition. In a previous article (Raz 2012), I built on Katz's work in a historical and analytical discussion of Toch's "Geographical Fugue." My research contextualized Toch's compositional choices within various artistic, political, and scientific discourses of his age, focusing in particular on the relationship between experimental art and technology, postwar constructions of the body, and the influence of contemporary research on phonetics and sound reproduction. Cainess recent discovery and restoration of the lost movements of Gesprochene Musik open up exciting new avenues for research on Grammophonmusik. The relationship between the musical materials of the new movements and those of the "Geographical Fugue" can now be explored for the first time. Toch's handwritten notes within the original manuscript further reveal tantalizing hints about the compositional process of the pieces. Finally, locating Toch's work within the context of the early days of the Donaueschingen festival series, and the contemporary music scene in Weimar Berlin can enrich our understanding of the interaction between the music, technology, and society of the time. Toch, Experimental Radio, and the Contemporary Music Festival Scene Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Toch studied medicine, philosophy, and music in Vienna, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt respectively. As a young composer he achieved significant success, receiving the Frankfurt-based Mozart prize in 1909 and the Mendelssohn Stipendium from the city of Leipzig in 1910 and 1913. …

London Ear Festival

The London Ear Festival is a small contemporary chamber music festival in London, now in its fourth edition. The festival is centred on the venues of the Cello Factory (its festival hub) and the Warehouse, near Waterloo. Despite its centrality and accessibility, the festival maintains a community and village feel: a sort of musical oasis. This year's festival, running 9–13 March, was timetabled against a number of other notable concerts in London – not least those celebrating Michael Finnissy's seventieth year – and so can be commended on its ability to draw audiences despite this clash, suggesting, perhaps, that it is genuinely offering something musically different and desirable.

London Contemporary Music Festival: 13–15 2015

It seems impossible at first to review multiple nights of the London Contemporary Music Festival all at once – over the course of a week the cavernous Ambika P3 gallery hosted a sensory overload of music that, while not always new, was certainly contemporary in the atypical thematic presentations, bringing together provocative works in provocative ways. Running from 11 to 17 December, the three middle nights of LCMF all dealt with the monumental: large, long works that opened up audience perceptions by virtue of extended contemplation. The concerts on Sunday and Tuesday lasted over three hours; they weren't easy, but they prompted salient experiences.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 20 November 2015

The 2015 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (or hcmf//, a vital acronym for Twitter users) began not with a bang, but with an anti-fanfare of dense pianissimo sliding microtones, buzzy with multiphonics. The scene was thus set (by Klangforum Wien performing Substantie by Peter Jakober) for an intense opening evening of three performances that between them encapsulated some of the musical themes, trends and ideas set to play out across the ten days and 30 events to come at Britain's leading contemporary music festival.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 24–29 November 2015

Roughly midway through this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, a solo recital performance by the glissando flautist Erik Drescher somehow managed to capture simultaneously much of what makes today's hcmf// both interesting and infuriating. Drescher's choice of four pieces, obviously severely limited by the finite number of works scored for his unusual instrument, managed to forge divisions even through what seemed a somewhat partisan audience. Pairing the by-now somewhat familiar and perhaps predictable stylings of Salvatore Sciarrino's Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio with his fight to be heard over the wall of blasting electronic noise featured in Dror Feiler's Questions and Stones 3, and then again against the subtle simplicity of Alvin Lucier's Double Himalaya meant that most left in parts satisfied and in parts irritated.

AFTER #[unassigned]: an Interview with James Saunders

AbstractI have long been intrigued by the way James Saunders’ music is at home both in the more canonical new music contexts (such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Donaueschinger Musiktage or Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) and in more underground, fugitive contexts. This may be because – unlike so many composers who tip the scales to one side or another – Saunders is equally interested in relationships between sounds and relationships between people. The following text explores the ways Saunders’ work has balanced these interests; it originated in an interview initiated by Simon Reynell to accompany the CD release of Saunders’ composition assigned #15, performed by Apartment House, on Reynell's Another Timbre label. We subsequently followed up with a second interview extending the discussion to more recent work.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 21–22 November 2015

The opening weekend of hcmf// presented concerts representative of the widening sense of stylistic diversity that seems to underlie this year's curatorial strategy.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 23–24 November 2015

In keeping with now-established tradition, Monday was devoted to ‘hcmf// shorts’, a series of free, mostly bite-size concerts. The format is certainly appealing as a way to encounter a diverse range of musical worlds in one go, and it is valuable as a starting-point for those less familiar with new music; every event I attended was packed, and it was encouraging to see students, school groups and families among the attendees. Concerts in different venues were linked by Stephen Chase's participatory walking pieces, which transformed the journeys between them into enjoyable explorations of the changing acoustic environment (thanks to a route that took in tunnels, corridors, traffic and so on).

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 21–23 November 2014

hcmf// 2014 kicked off with a typically tough and knotty concert from Petr Kotik's chamber orchestra Ostravská banda, who performed a collection of UK premieres for small ensemble by Christian Wolff, three Czech composers and another American. The concert was billed as a tribute to Wolff, who was in attendance and who celebrates his eightieth birthday this year, and this acknowledgement of his status as one of the few remaining high modernists allowed the festival to begin with a celebration of the music with which it has been most closely associated. First up was Wolff's 37 Haiku, a setting of a poem (or 37 poems) by John Ashbery, sung by Thomas Buckner with an accompanying ensemble of oboe, horn, viola and cello. Like the poems, Wolff's settings are self-contained but accumulative, and, as the composer says in the programme notes, the ‘may form’ a whole. Variety is achieved through shifts within the accompanying instrumentation (some settings having none), line and fragmentation, instrumental technique, suggestions of common-practice harmony, flashes of word painting and spoken accompaniment from the instrumentalists (one haiku is spoken by the violinist, another is spoken in fragments across the ensemble). Coherence across these fragments is created simply through the presence of Wolff's mature and distinctive post-Webern sound world.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 28–30 November 2014

Sunglasses forever raised, a slowly fading graffito of Igor Stravinsky looks out from an old wooden door into the streets of Huddersfield. This feels appropriate en route to an hcmf// event, but when coming home from a thoroughly un-Stravinskian concert at midnight, passing bars bursting with young clubbers, his harsh stare disconcerts.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 24–26 November 2014

hcmf// continued its tradition of Monday's concerts being free and consisting of shorter concerts resulting from a competitive selection process. Many of the concerts had full audiences, and it is an achievement of the festival that these ‘shorts’ are seen as concerts on a par with their paid counterparts on other days. The audiences were notably more diverse on the Monday, with more students and families present, resulting in a more informal, but no less engaging, performance environment.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 26 & 27 November 2014

As a result of her wonderfully exciting performance of Unsuk Chin's Etudes at hcmf//'s ‘free Monday’ in 2013, Singaporean pianist Mei Yi Foo was invited back for her own concert this year. Given the depth, intensity and diversity of the works in her mid-week recital, it was surprising to discover that she is not a contemporary music specialist. Richard Baker's Breaking The Ground (2003) contrasted furious bass material, rhythmic and syncopated, with gentler, higher-register patterns, freer rhythmically but on repetition becoming more energised. These distinct materials are gradually drawn together, exploiting the range of the keyboard and creating a very satisfying organic unity. Thomas Adès's Still Sorrowing (1992) is an early work by the composer, its Cagean preparations gradually removed by the page-turner towards the end; a fey, elusive, dream-like piece, it shows the questionable fluidity of conception that is a hallmark of the composer's style. Jukka Tiensuu's Fantango (1984) was a powerfully swinging entertainment; despite their title and miniaturism, Kurtág's Játékok (Games) were more substantial, the pianist providing a delightfully characterful account of the concluding ‘derangement’ of Mad Girl With Flaxen Hair.

The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik

Gesprochene Musik, by Ernst Toch (1887-1964), is a forgotten milestone in the history of electronic music. (1) A three-movement suite consisting of spoken music for choir, it is one of the few paradigmatic representatives of the genre of Gramophonmusik, which made use of prerecorded gramophone discs in a concert setting. The work was premiered in 1930 at a Berlin festival devoted to new music, in a concert featuring original works for gramophone playback by two rising stars of the German contemporary music scene, Toch and Paul Hindemith. The pieces were performed only once, yet through the intervention of a young John Cage, the score of the third movement of Gesprochene Musik, the Geographical Fugue, appeared in Henry Cowell's journal, New Music, five years later. Although Cage published the piece in the context of a collection of music written expressly for gramophone, his version led the Geographical Fugue to receive a new lease of life as a purely acoustic choral showpiece performed live, which would, ironically, become Toch's most famous work. (2) Given that there was no further trace of the gramophone discs from the original concert, the first two movements of Toch's suite were long considered lost. However, Toch's original sketches were in fact fortunately preserved at the Toch Archive at UCLA. Guided by the composer's grandson, Lawrence Weschler, Christopher Caines rediscovered the sketches for O-a and Ta-tam in 2006, and created the first full edition of Gesprochene Musik as part of a project he choreographed entitled Worklight. This was the first complete performance of Gesprochene Musik since the work's premiere in 1930. The current essay presents an introduction, contextualization, and analysis of the first two movements of Gesprochene Musik ahead of the publication of Caines's (2014) preface and edition in the current volume of this journal. In recent years, the origins of the Geographical Fugue have begun to receive scholarly attention. Weschler (2003) has written extensively about his grandfather's life and career, and has produced a humorous report on Toch's encounter with John Cage in California in 1935. In Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music, Mark Katz (2010, 109-23) has written about the relationship between Grammophonmusik in the context of early mechanical music and recovered various contemporaneous theories about the potential of the phonograph and gramophone to transform music composition. In a previous article (Raz 2012), I built on Katz's work in a historical and analytical discussion of Toch's Geographical Fugue. My research contextualized Toch's compositional choices within various artistic, political, and scientific discourses of his age, focusing in particular on the relationship between experimental art and technology, postwar constructions of the body, and the influence of contemporary research on phonetics and sound reproduction. Cainess recent discovery and restoration of the lost movements of Gesprochene Musik open up exciting new avenues for research on Grammophonmusik. The relationship between the musical materials of the new movements and those of the Geographical Fugue can now be explored for the first time. Toch's handwritten notes within the original manuscript further reveal tantalizing hints about the compositional process of the pieces. Finally, locating Toch's work within the context of the early days of the Donaueschingen festival series, and the contemporary music scene in Weimar Berlin can enrich our understanding of the interaction between the music, technology, and society of the time. Toch, Experimental Radio, and the Contemporary Music Festival Scene Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Toch studied medicine, philosophy, and music in Vienna, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt respectively. As a young composer he achieved significant success, receiving the Frankfurt-based Mozart prize in 1909 and the Mendelssohn Stipendium from the city of Leipzig in 1910 and 1913. …