The first three days of this year's IMRO/Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern Festival afforded Irish audiences an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the unique art of totally improvised music. From a reservoir of 10 musicians, sub-groupings were formed, playing the kind of minutely detailed, restlessly responsive music that can only be improvised. No score could encompass so much basic human interaction.
The series began with the duo of Barry Guy, bass, and Johannes Bauer, trombone, who immediately established an intense involvement with the vitality of the moment with playing that ranged from wild staccato blasts to butterfly-like disturbances of air. The saxophone trio of Evan Parker, Hans Koch and Mats Gustafsson used a range of extended techniques to establish a reality of expression almost shocking in its immediacy with sounds which emerged from the deepest need to be there, communicating. The meeting of Marilyn Crispell, Guy and Paul Lytton, drums was an instant melding of instincts, creating a furious, elemental, yet disciplined music whose moments of epiphany were hard won, born in fire. The brass trio of Herb Robertson, trumpet, Bauer and tuba player Per Ake Holmlander declaimed, yelped, rasped and burst with spring-like vitality and ended with an enchanting emphasis on the central constituent of the music - the simple sound of air through tubes. The unleashing of total energy from Guy, Gustafsson and Raymond Strid, percussion, seemed to move beyond mere temporality, each player pushing frantically for their instrument to yield more.
The improvised element of the Festival ended with Parker, Guy and Lytton's
nuanced exposition of sonorities and dynamics. When Marilyn Crispell joined them the dimensions were further extended with a performance that was, like everything in the Festival, focused and committed to the highest level.
One of the many appealing aspects of this year's festival was a series of open rehearsals of Barry Guy's new composition Inscape-Tableaux. Given that the members of the Barry Guy New Orchestra created totally improvised music for the first three days of the Festival, it was enlightening to see the same musicians meticulously piecing together the scored sections of a work which required immense concentration and technical virtuosity, while also incorporating open areas for chance and choice. Because the 10-piece ensemble consisted of a number of both ongoing and newly formed musical relationships, Guy chose to allow spaces for these configurations to make statements which were both integral to, and independent of, a larger seven-sectioned framework. This was made up of direct emotional episodes, exuberant bursts of pure energy, a beautiful moment of "blue hour" silence, exacting ensemble interludes, a section in which the directional decisions were cued by two conductors and a gentle hymn-like passage for bass and the piano of Marilyn Crispell, whose role was central to the success of the performance. It was a heart-speeding, moving, exhilarating performance met with a sustained standing ovation, the only appropriate reaction to this triumphant culmination of four days of extraordinary music.
