Music for moderns

The World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) is a venerable institution. The ISCM was founded in 1923 in the wake of a successful festival of modern chamber music held in Salzburg and attended by a sizeable proportion of the world's major composers. The idea was so good, it was felt, it had to be repeated. The new organisation would run an annual festival which would highlight "the essence of a year's musical production" and promote new music "regardless of aesthetic trends or the nationality, race, religion or political views of the composer."

The showcase festival, held in a different city each year (most recently Seoul and Copenhagen and Manchester, with Romania and Luxembourg to follow) has had its ups and downs over the years and its position now, in a world with an abundance of festivals, not to mention CDs and radio broadcasts, is very different from 75 years ago.

Yet the essential idea of openness remains at the core of the event. A six-person international jury of composers selects works from a pile of international submissions. The national committee running the event is charged with responsibility for performing as many from the shortlist as can be managed, and these are then knitted in to a programme filled out as taste, time and resources permit.

I'd never been to an ISCM festival before this year's in Manchester and had long been curious about what the ISCM World Music Days actually entailed. From afar, the programmes were hard to fathom. Unfamiliar names abounded. Major figures and pieces often seemed in short supply. And composers I'd spoken to mostly showed a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, they were in no doubt about the kudos of having a work performed, yet they mostly commented unfavourably on the general quality of the work that was featured. The jury system alone is fraught with problems. Six hundred scores to be assessed by six people in four days, is hardly a reasonable undertaking. Comprehensive assessment is out of the question. Six hundred fiv-minute pieces alone would take more than four 12-hour days to read through in real time, and few of the pieces are this short. A host of random (i.e. non-musical) factors comes to bear on what's chosen, from the need to spread the net wide (small countries have composers, too) to the (dis)advantages of the familiarity of an individual name or w

This aspect of the festival's operation was well summed up by the ISCM's first president, E.J. Dent, telling of Ravel's participation in the jury of 1928. "When it came to voting it was hard to get him to commit himself and some of the scores baffled him completely. Heinz Tiessen was praising a new symphony by a young German composer. `It's all Chinese to me,' said Ravel, `but if you tell me it's good German music I'll vote for it.' "

To their credit, the Manchester organisers took on board all but a handful of the jury's selection. Thereafter, it seems to have suffered a certain loss of nerve.

A lot of the programming could be felt to have been done by the back door method. The 75th anniversary became the occasion for an ISCM retrospective, an excuse to get in some famous, well-established historical names, Stravinsky, Ravel, Berg, Britten, Copland, Walton et al. Showcasing Manchester was at the heart of "Playing the City", a weekend of installation-style, outdoor and site-specific events hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary music. The first weekend integrated the Inter-Conservatoire Composers' Consortium Festival, which presented "leading works" by student composers from Britain's conservatoires. And, over the first six days of the nine-day festival which I attended, the reliance on student ensembles from the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) was rather too heavy. To be fair, these concerts did include jury-selected works, but also a range of non-jury sweeteners. However, the value for the students was unquestionable, as also was the success in showing off the quality of the college's wide range of performing groups. The most important music, however, was to be found elsewhere. There were big pieces from two members of the so-called "Manchester Group", Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. Maxwell Davies conducted the BBC Philharmonic in his Worldes Blis, a 1969 "motet for orchestra" which works itself out through spare, domino-connected lines to reach a discordantly unsettling climax in keeping with the end of the bleak text which inspired it, "all the bliss that is here and there comprises in the end weeping and lamentation."

Birtwistle, whose Pulse Shadows integrates two independent works, Nine Movements for String Quartet (the Arditti Quartet) and Nine Settings of Celan (soprano Claron McFadden with the Nash Ensemble under Andrea Quinn), featured in pre-concert "conversation" with John Drummond, and came across as a man of few but revealing words, uncompromising, all matter, no dressing, like his music. The ever-impressive Arditti Quartet were also heard in a recital which presented a string quartet (Berio's alluringly sketchy Glosse), a work for solo violin (Suzanne Giraud's multi-layered, microtonal slant on the solo violin study), a violin duo (James Dillon's playfully complex Traumwerk) and a string trio (by that high priest of complexity in new music, Brian Ferneyhough).

Few events of the Manchester programme sustained the intensity of expectation and reward of the Arditti's standingroom only programme. One that did was the Rosas Dance Company's Just Before, which, before it started, had all the appearance of being dwarfed by the scale of the Nynex Arena, even in the curtained-off segment that was used as its performing space. In tandem with live performances (by the Ictus Ensemble) of works by Cage, Reich, and Xenakis among others, choreographer/director Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's play with memory probes aspects of the human condition with acuity, wit and breathtaking movement.

There were breathtaking moments, too, in Joanna MacGregor's hands-across-the-centuries programme, pairing Byrd and Thomas Ades, Dowland and Birtwistle, Bach and Nancarrow, and some, too (especially the Bach, and, later, Stravinsky's Tango), where the music seemed camped up with less than happy results. Two Irish composers this year made the cut in the jury selection process (which included John Buckley in the jury line-up). The bird-song retro-pastoralism of Jane O'Leary's Mystic Play of Shadows (played by a string quartet from the RNCM) contrasted neatly with the cloudy, multi-track effects of Zygmunt Krauze's Piano Quintet which preceded it. And Raymond Deane's Alembic, blended out of the clearest of fundamental material, sounded well in the hands of the RNCM Wind Orchestra.

Overall, the concerts I heard included a preponderance of works where the underlying concepts were stronger than the pieces they yielded. The breadth of nationalities represented served more to picture the internationalism of new music rather than any national trends, though it would be interesting to know if the inclusion of three biblically-inspired, jury-selected works by South Koreans is a chance occurrence or the hint of a bigger movement. At the end of my six days in Manchester, I couldn't help but reflect on John Drummond's remark as the festival's executive chairman, that: "A glance at what was presented in Salzburg 75 years ago shows clearly that today's innovations become tomorrow's classics."

Innovation, I felt, was in short supply in the works chosen for this particular representation of what's new in music.