Review of the evening by the celebrated Jazz pianist John Law who wanted to write something about the event, as he very much enjoyed it, but wanted it to be known that he never writes reviews as he’s “philosophically very anti critics and the whole process of making arbitrary value judgements, especially concerning music”
Jeremy Little & Adam Khan play Clapping Music.
Much of the music of the 20th century was concerned with an exploration of the particular instruments employed, so that the techniques or the extensions of techniques stood either in opposition to or assisted – depending on your point of view – the perceived content or indeed emotional impact of these pieces. So the form versus content paradigm became very important. Not just the superficial in-the-moment concept of technique or style but also the very process of the composition became almost synonymous with the meaning or, again, emotional impact.
Those who know me and know my preoccupation with striving for an ‘absolute relativism’, whereby it’s possible to hold completely opposite views at one and the same time, will appreciate that I’m not one given to making and expressing any form of opinion as absolute. Moreover I can think of a number of different points of view that completely contradict what follows. But here’s a way of looking at the music presented on Thursday the 14th at the Silk Mill in a thrilling, always engaging performance by the duo of Jeremy Little (assorted percussion) and Adam Khan (guitar, clapping).
The first piece, Cuban Landscape with Bells, by Leo Brouwer, was, for me, a perfect start to the concert. In fact, from one point of view, it couldn’t get any better. The composition, mostly (it seemed to me at the time) an exploration of guitar harmonics, was also a piece that inhabited almost exclusively the area between quiet and very quiet. A perfect, gentle start and played, on guitar by Adam Kahn, quite exquisitely.
For me this piece seemed to set the tone for the evening: an exploration of music where the technical aspects of texture or instrumental technique or the process adopted by the composer was in one sense of utmost importance in understanding the piece but – a completely different way of looking at it – which also offered the listener, in a more naïve way, the opportunity to become immersed, without employing critical faculties, in a world that was very other than the one we’d come from before the concert.
Thus, the wonderfully delicate marimba piece Il Sognio di Pacciochino, by Nebojsa Zivkovic, played ever so subtly by Jeremy, was on one level a series of juxtapositions of single lines with three and four note chord tremolos. But how wonderful and soft it sounded, in its very simplicity, and with every note clearly audible in the beautiful acoustics of the Silk Mill!
Battercada by Rachel Gledhill, for two drums, seemed to me to be a piece dominated by the technical process: a natural progression from low sounds to high, from simpler to more denser, and then reversed, with a nod to the Golden Section in the shorter second (reversed) section. And in the architectural simplicity of this process all the more powerful was the result. A very neat piece, played with consummate skill and precision (and not a little excitement!) by Jeremy Little.
And if the two performers wanted to best illustrate the 20th century obsession with music as a process then Clapping Music by Steve Reich was surely one of the best examples. The process is the music. The music is the process. Or is it? A number of us, on completion of the piece, couldn’t resist, when showing our appreciation through clapping, repeating the rhythmic phrase used in this piece (well I couldn’t anyway!). So the piece had encroached on reality..!
Cage’s famous (or is that infamous?!) 4’33” was ‘performed’ by Jeremy and Adam with almost humorous seriousness. In the empty space left by the total lack of music we were left to fill it with thoughts about form/content/process.. as well as to contemplate the marvellous artworks by Hassel Smith which hung all around (and to which the music was, ostensibly, related but, I think, only rather vaguely; rather more they sat next to each other, Art and Music, perfect dinner companions). But this emptiness was also filled by a buzzing fly, much to the amusement of Jeremy who I thought must, at any moment, simply must burst into fits of giggles. He’s a consummate professional though..
The two more extended works that stood out as being a bit different were Terry Riley’s Dias de los Muertos and George Crumb’s Canis Mundis. Both pieces were played with enormous attention to detail. The Riley I found personally the hardest piece of the evening to digest. Would it have fared better with more passionate input? Hard to say. I actually found myself thinking that, in the lack of a sustained, coherent harmonic language (some passages, for example, between marimba and guitar very spare, like a Bach two part Invention, might be followed suddenly by chords which ranged from a simple minor 6th through fuller, ‘jazz’ chords of sharp 9s to denser, more opaque ones) in this piece, at least, Riley seemed to me a bit of a dilettante. I’m sure another way of looking at this could completely contradict this view and it was just what popped into my head, on the first hearing.
The Crumb, though, a series of portraits of the composer’s dogs(!) was a minor tour de force, full of exotic sounds (such as the striking of a tamtam partly immersed in water!) and beautiful ‘eastern’ sounding scales, such as in piece number 4. And with humour too: the cries at the end from Jeremy, calling and chastising one of the dogs were really fun. And with this sudden interjection from the ‘real’ world the audience were brought out of the world we’d been in for the evening’s concert: one full of beautiful, exotic sounds, of stimulating ideas, of hypnotic chords and ringing harmonics.. a world totally unlike the buzzing festival going on outside. We’d gone beyond style and technique. And this was made possible through the wonderful skill of the performers, ably assisted by the clear acoustics of the Silk Mill and the beautiful atmosphere created there by Kate and Damon Moore.
John Law July 2011