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Sligo New Music Festival 2005
Model Arts and Niland Gallery
It was Schönberg who said that the public obviously had no problem with atonal music as such, as they put up with it quite readily as a background to horror films. As if to underline the point, this year's Sligo New Music Festival opened with a screening of Murnau's 1922 silent classic Nosferatu, with a live piano accompaniment composed and played by Co Armagh-born Simon Mawhinney.
As film music, it worked well; Mawhinney's playing chimed tellingly with the action at key moments but avoided the fault of trying to match events too closely. Film historians regard this as an iconic work, and if some of the younger members of the audience seemed to find it a creaky old classic, the live performance and accompanying electronic effects helped to create an otherworldly atmosphere.
New Music is seen as a rather hermetic area of our musical culture, and the choice of opener was intended to broaden its appeal. One could ask if it also served to emphasise the expressive limitations of the modernist idiom. In Mawhinney's own solo recital, again with electronics, the composer-pianist's dedication and keyboard bravura were evident, but few of the works played developed an emotional world which invited the listener to enter, an exception being Mawhinney's Stuck (both German and English pronunciations, and meanings, of "stuck" apply).
Similar reservations suggested themselves in offerings by this year's main featured artists, composer Andrew Toovey and the group Ixion (Rowland Sutherland, flutes, Andrew Smith, clarinets, Kirsten Le Strange, violin, Patrick Jones, cello, and Antony Gray, piano). Toovey has studied with both Morton Feldman and Michael Finnissy among others, but it was the latter's New Complexity which came to mind in the tense but austere swirls of sound in Shining Forth and White Fire, where what his own programme note calls "screeching flute and clarinet" made uncomfortable listening at times. I found more to enjoy in the delicate subacqueous sounds of Umber Sepia by Deirdre McKay, a Sligo New Music Festival commission receiving its first performance, in a cryptic Trio by Laurence Crane, and in Toovey's own Ja, ja, ja, ja, Nee, nee, nee, nee, which derives from his chamber opera Ubu but whose expressionist style and pounding repetitions of Weill-like harmonies suggested a satirical take on minimalism.
The opening section of Toovey's Lament, Strathspey, Reel may, to quote the composer, have "little to do with authentic Scots fiddle music", but in their way these spare, mournful sounds were apt music for the Atlantic coast.
The charm and humour of Finnissy's Judith Weir, a tribute to a fellow-composer on her 50th birthday, was a pleasant surprise given the composer's challenging New Complexity image. Weir's own Piano Trio Two showed, beside the single-minded pithiness one expects, a feeling for harmony which composers of a previous generation seem to a large extent to have missed out on.
Elsewhere, Toovey displayed a genial and refreshingly down-to-earth personality in conversation with the festival director, composer Ian Wilson, and dispensed valuable know-how at a Sunday morning workshop for young composers. No one, of course, is likely to enjoy every single piece in a weekend like this, but one was always stimulated, and one could also always appreciate the role played by dedicated new music groups such as Ixion.
Given that the pieces chosen played to the group's strengths (microtones, dense swirls of notes, complex and at times multi-layered rhythms), it was salutary to see both Toovey and the performers putting the composers right as regards unnecessarily complex notation, and to observe (with the help of the provided scores) how, in the following short concert, the players had assimilated material which had seemed intractable in the workshop. Eventually the prize was shared between two young English composers, Larry Goves and Gavin Wayte.
Dermot Gault
