A first post in my new blog. Sometimes I will be talking about music, sometimes writing, sometimes…who knows? This one though is definitely music.
This year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has just come to an end. The 39th Festival no less. I first went to HCMF back in the mid-1980s when it was run by Richard Steinitz. One year there was a memorable visit by John Cage, another time a young John Adams. The likes of Xenakis, Berio and Birtwistle featured prominently, and I remember showing Arne Nordheim the way to the Town Hall one night when he was lost. Composers who I think of as being absolute masters of the late twentieth century. Then in 1993 I moved abroad not to return until 2010 and when I started going back to Huddersfield I found that it had changed. Or at least so it seemed.
Instead of the Big Names of contemporary music, composers likely to be featured by the BBC at the Proms for example, there was more of an emphasis on the extreme fringes of the avant-garde. Composers I had never even heard of such as Rebecca Saunders and Georg Friedrich Haas. Music that often lived in the space where contemporary classical music (for want of a better term) met experimental jazz and improvisation. And I have to admit that at first I was disappointed: Where were the heroes of my youth? And then, even more alarmingly, I started to worry that as I was growing older my tastes were starting to ossify. Although my wife thinks that I listen to “strange music”, it seemed to me that too many of the concerts were too strange even for me.
So, realising that perhaps the fault lay with me and not the music, I went to a lunchtime concert featuring the Australian group Elision and composers I didn’t know, and where I was (almost literally – it was very loud) blown away by Aaron Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries for 2 trumpets with clarinet, saxophone, trombone, contrabass, lap-steel guitar and multi-channel electronics. A composer who I had never heard of writing music of visceral power, played with stunning virtuosity by the two solo trumpets. Highly dissonant, and yet the spirit of free jazz (Ornette Coleman an influence on the music) never seemed too far away.
In short it was wonderful (as was Rebecca Saunders’ Skin in another concert) and it reminded me of the importance of taking a chance on things, and keeping open ears and an open mind. No matter how old you are.
