Heineken may not be brewed in Dundalk, but one of its most famous advertising slogans – about refreshing the parts other beers cannot reach – has more of a musical connection than just the fact that the voice-overs were done by the great Victor Borge.
The Louth Contemporary Music Society, which operates in Dundalk and Drogheda, regularly reaches out (on disc as well as in concert and through commissions) to composers and performers who don’t otherwise get much of a look-in in Ireland.
The LCMS was behind Marino Formenti’s innovative piano recital, Kurtág’s Ghosts, at last month’s Drogheda Arts Festival. Its latest project was to bring US composer Christian Wolff to the Green Church in Dundalk for a portrait concert last Saturday.
Wolff, who turned 81 in March, is the sole surviving member of the New York School, whose leading members were John Cage and Morton Feldman. Wolff, who was largely self-taught as a composer, earned a living as an academic in the field of classics before he became a professor of music. He may be the least well-known member of the New York School. Although he did have some early tuition from Cage, the latter was happy to write in a letter of recommendation that Wolff “is not known as a student of mine for the reason that I learned more from him than he from me”.
Wolff is one of those composers who likes to redraw the intersection between composition and performance, to empower performers by transferring to them a range of decisions that have traditionally been taken by composers. At the same time, he likes to make them dependent on each other in ways that are unpredictable from performance to performance.
It’s an idealistic undertaking, and many of Wolff’s scores define the process through which the musical material will be reached, rather than the material itself. What the performers are given to work with may be a set of instructions and directions, but not in the sense of a map.
Wolff’s world is one in which things that seem to be the same may not actually be the same at all. Step away from music for a moment and take the matter of travelling at 40 miles per hour. Do it in a jet taking off on a runway, on a bicycle going down a steep hill, in a high-powered luxury car, or in second gear in a small-engined car, and you will have very different experiences.
Composers have exploited the ways in which the same can be made different for centuries. There’s the technique of hocketing, in which alternate notes of a melodic line are swapped between voices. Try it with a friend on something as simple as Three Blind Mice to see how radical the change can be.
Louis Andriessen’s 1976 Hoketus makes the technique the whole point of a substantial piece. Tchaikovsky used it in the finale of his Pathétique symphony, hocketing the opening theme between first and second violins on its first appearance and giving it unbroken to the first violins on its fortissimo return.
Wolff’s concern is exactly the opposite of Tchaikovsky’s. Tchaikovsky set up a surefire scenario that guaranteed expressive richness the second time around. Wolff sets up scenarios in which, when the performers read each other’s intentions accurately and give and take and converge, surprising glows light up the music with a kind of magic. If those special moments don’t arise, the music can be dull and flat.
For Saturday’s concert, LCMS brought together the composer himself (on piano), cellist Rohan de Saram and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. The programme was not fully disclosed in advance, different to what was given on the printed programme, and not fully divulged through soft-spoken announcements that were hard and sometimes impossible to decipher.
However, the performances of the ensemble pieces, the new Occasion (Trio VII), For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964), and Exercise 13 (1973-74) all had their jewel-like glows. The standouts among the solo pieces were de Saram’s performance of Cello Song Variations (Hallelujah, I’m a bum) (1978), representing a political strand in Wolff’s work, and Schulkowsky’s of Exercise 32 (2011-12). It was a mostly low-key evening, but a memorable one.
