THE flavour of Belfast's Sonorities Festival, now an annual event, has usually been defined by the taste of the composer in residence at Queen's University, who acts as programme director. The current holder of the post, James Clarke, chose to concentrate on music from Germany, including works from senior figures such as Helmut Lachenmann, Hans Joachim Hespos and Dieter Schnebel, whose output has gone virtually unheard in this part of the world.
Clarke, who moved to Belfast too late to have much of an input into the last Sonorities Festival, argues strongly that he put together a programme of "some of the best music being written anywhere". He also went as far as to declare his choices to be "less a question of quality than a matter almost of freedom of speech, since this music is so ignored here". The "here" can be taken to refer to his native England as well as the altogether more meagerly serviced contemporary music scene in Ireland.
Clarke uses the headline "Fog in Channel Continent cut off" to convey his feelings about what he sees as short sighted insularity, and he has publicly challenged "the deliberate avoidance of art which dares to question or subvert an established order in which what has value has financial value, in which the terms `intellectual' and `cultural' are suspect". There's nothing to be complacent about in this regard, as none of the major music related establishments on this side of the border from RTE, the National Concert Hall, the Arts Council, the Music Network, and the schools of music, downwards bothered even to show up at Sonorities.
THE best known of the "neglected" composers represented in the programme was Helmut Lachenmann, now in his early sixties. Lachenmann has argued that "composition is by no means putting together but rather a taking apart" and has characterised his work since the late 1960s as being "concerned with rigidly constructed denial, with the exclusion of what appears to me as listening expectations preformed by society. The aesthetic offer, the intensity if one wants the beauty, of music is for me inseparably bound to the efforts with which the composer opposes such predeterminations in his materials." Lachenmann's Second String Quartet, subtitled Reigen Heiliger Geister (Dance Of The Blessed Spirits), was played by the String Quartet, and also discussed in a pre concert workshop. In this work, the composer takes unorthodox string writing well beyond the usual limits even the pegs get bow strokes in the pursuit of what the quartet's leader, Irvine Arditti, characterised as an interest in "the sound of air". The group, one of the most experienced in contemporary repertoire, spent a week with the composer studying the special techniques required.
Lachenmann's piano music was played by Ian Pace, ranging from the comparatively conventional Variations On A Theme Of Schubert of 1956, through Guero, which, through scraping on the tops of the keys, turns the piano into a version of the eponymous South American percussion instrument, to Ein Kinderspiel of 1980, which fascinatingly works through material derived from children's encounters with, and inclinations towards, the keyboard.
Dieter Schnebel (born 1930) is known as a Protestant theologian as well as a composer. He divides his output into unconventional categories, among them "music for spaces", "production processes" and "radio phonics". Schnebel's anschlage-ausschlage comes from a group called Modelle (Ausarbeitungen) (which I hesitate to try to translate meaningfully). This includes a piece for solo conductor, Nostalgic, and a Concert Sans Orchestre, for a pianist and an audience".
Anschlage-ausschlage (the title can be translated as attacks decays) is a music theatre work intended to examine the rituals, relationships and foibles of concert performance. The musicians of the ensemble Apartment House seemed to allow in certain elements of unselfconsciousness this, rather like an actor dropping out of character, clouded the nature of the performance.
SCHNEBEL'S work also featured in a concert which brought to Ireland the latest incarnation of the "Bach bow", a sharply curved bow in which the hairs can be slackened to allow string players to sustain chords of four notes. By strange coincidence the latest advocate of this rare device, originally proposed as a solution to the challenges of Bach's works for solo violin and cello, carries the name Michael Bach. His playing of sets of Inventionen and Etuden, the individual pieces short, pointed, not without humour, brought to mind the peculiar fascination exerted by the work of Mauricio Kagel (a visitor to Sonorities in 1993).
Hans Joachim Hespos (born 1938) believes in the "harshness of the work of art" and provides a note for his short fur cello solo which runs ... silence sound silence participation in the respiration of the unknown".
Apartment House's Anton Lukoszevieze didn't really seem to have found the music's level, and the group's handling of the composer's disruptive HOPSzweisatzig (HOPSintomovements) had rather too much the air of a student prank.
The Swiss composer Heinz Holliger (born 1939) is altogether better known as one of the leading oboists of the day than as a composer. However, his list of compositions is extensive, and many of them are experimental in nature.
The two heard from oboist Christopher Redgate at Sonorities were Studie uber Mehrklange (Study on Multiphonics), a 1971 exploration of the currently much favoured technique of denaturing the sound of wind instruments through intentionally mis-matching the efforts of lip/wind pressure and fingering. The contemporaneous Cardiophonie requires the amplification of the performer's heartbeat, to allow the interior manifestations of effort in a performance to be externalised. "Pain" was a word that recurred in both the string quartet and oboe workshops at Sonorities, and Holliger's theatrical extravagance is to take the matter to its ultimate conclusion by having his oboist die as the result of his exertions.
Since the mid 1970s Nicolaus A Huber (born 1939, and not to be confused with the Swiss composer Klaus Huber), has concerned himself with the technique of what he calls "rhythm composition". This was heard in the narrowed, insistent material in Darnbukka for solo piano and Vor und Zuruck for solo oboe, two pieces which seem to operate on the technique that if you examine something long enough it nose in a for familiar.
THE only German composer actually present at Sonorities was Gerhard Stabler (born 1949), a pupil of N.A. Huber, who also studied with Stockhausen, Schnebel, Kagel and Ligeti. In Belfast he worked with local students and school children on pieces performable with everyday materials (paper, Sellotape, kitchen utensils), gave a rather pretentious, post John Cage style lecture, delivered two witty pieces of vocal music theatre (Rachengold and Rosenkranz) with a gusto which could have made him hoarse for a week, and refused to rise to the workshop baiting of Irvine Arditti over the demands of his string quartet, intriguingly titled strike the ear
Given the orientation of the Sonorities programming, the leading British composer to be represented was, naturally enough, Brian Ferneyhough (born 1943) whose typically complex and florid Lemma Icon Epigram was delivered (from memory whew!) with invigorating elan by Ian Pace. (It was particularly interesting to compare the very different piano styles of Pace and the German Ortwin Sturmer, who brought an unusual monumentalism to the opening concert). There were single works also from Roger Redgate (the in substantially virtuosic Ausgangspunkt for solo oboe) and Richard Barrett (the highly pressured Charon for bass clarinet, played by Apartment House's Andrew Sparling).
The Aiditti quartet's concert strayed off axis for two pieces by Iannis Xenakis, Ikhoor for string trio, and Tetras for string quartet, which held their own as irresistibly engaging, powerfully elemental stuff.
James Clarke (born 1957) was, of course, represented as well, and heard at his best in Pascal, pensee 206, in the closing concert by the Ulster Orchestra under Charles Hazlewood. The Pascal "thought" in question runs "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me", and Clarke's piece, not just short but compact, too, did manage to create something of the sensation of a vast void, infiltrated by disquieting sounds of sighing, screeching and clacking.
Other local input was less impressive. In a disappointing electro acoustic concert, Hannah Lewington's Neat made a stronger impression than works by Rhona Clarke and Bernadette Comac and in the closing concert Piers Hellawell's violin concerto, Quadruple Elegy (in the time of freedom), indulged in too much of the navel gazing of minimalism.
OVERALL, though, this Sonorities had a revealing clarity of focus that "thematic" programming in earlier years has not always yielded. It could be argued that this was a festival planned from the perspective of a particular musical ideology Marxist political views, connections with the Darmstadt summer school and a relatively select list of teachers and influences, for instance, recurred throughout the biographical notes in the printed programmes.
Yet Clarke may well be right in thinking that the music of his choice has not so much been ignored in Ireland as wilfully excluded, and, whatever the cause, this shortcoming was one in need of undoing.
It's hard to imagine, though, that there's another man in Belfast who would have chosen the repertoire he did. The irony of the situation is that the very position which brought him to Northern Ireland that of composer in residence at Queen's is currently under threat due to the withdrawal of funding by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. This was the first Sonorities of its kind. It may well also have been the last.
