Living Music in 2004

Michael Dungan previews the forthcoming RTÉ Living Music Festival 2004 which features contemporary French music as well as a number of Irish premieres.

This article was originally published in New Music News, February 2004.

THE inaugural RTÉ Living Music Festival took place just over a year ago. It was acknowledged a major triumph on numerous fronts including the quality of its concert programming, the profile and calibre of its invited guest performers -- particularly the London Sinfonietta -- and the high standard of many of the performances.

The effect of these achievements was to increase the vitality and currency of contemporary music to the kind of levels more readily associated with other living art forms such as writing and film. There was a subsequently much talked-about ‘buzz’ around Dublin City University’s then very new performing arts complex, The Helix, noisily emerging between events and generated by the lively, hybrid mix of those who participated. Composers and players were prominent in this mix in which diverse audiences brought together contemporary music novices dipping a toe, regular classical concert-goers curious about what the RTÉ orchestras and the Vanbrugh Quartet were playing, and, of course, the already converted.

For RTÉ the festival was both a remarkable achievement and a hugely worthwhile intensifying of commitment. By bringing together artists and this kind of mixed audience and saturating them with music not from the ‘classical museum’ -- however wonderful and valuable that music is -- but by living composers, the national broadcaster gave fresh impetus and sincerity to its traditional catch-phrase, ‘RTÉ: supporting the arts’.

Through the festival, RTÉ successfully addressed two vital and interconnected continuing needs. The first is the need and willingness of Irish audiences to experience music by the major and tangential figures of post-war and contemporary composition. The second need is that of showing how Irish new music fits into the context of the wider, international contemporary scene. But there was a question nagging at the back of many minds: was this a once-off? RTÉ’s financial commitment to the first Living Music Festival was impressive. Could it really be repeated?

The answer -- at least for 2004 and provisionally for 2005 -- is yes, it can be. Friday February 20th will see the opening of the second RTÉ Living Music Festival (20-22 February). The event will again take place in The Helix and will again be under the artistic direction of Achill-born composer Raymond Deane. A reward for his achievements in the first festival?

‘I didn’t want to do the second festival at all,’ recalls Deane. ‘I had said that I was only going to do the one. But I was persuaded by RTÉ on the grounds that at the beginning of this venture -- if this festival is to be a regular thing, an ongoing thing -- that a certain continuity would be of great benefit.’

The first festival was centred on a single composer, the late Luciano Berio. This time round, instead of having so singular a focus, Deane’s plan has been to choose a whole country and sample its contemporary music scene. He chose France.

‘I thought almost immediately of France. There’s a lot of extraordinary music being produced by French composers that is rarely heard outside France. French contemporary music, as opposed to, say, German or even Italian, just doesn’t get quite such exposure, especially in Ireland.’

For Deane, having a second home in France has been a help. ‘That facilitated the thing, making it easier for me to research the music that I might wish to programme.’

His programme now spans French composition from Debussy and Satie to Varèse and Messiaen, to the overlapping generations of French composers who are living and working today. At the festival’s heart are one giant of the French music scene and two of its leading figures: Pierre Boulez being the giant, along with Tristan Murail whose name is synonymous with the genre known as spectral music, and Pascal Dusapin -- former pupil of Messiaen, Xenakis and Donatoni -- who will attend the festival and give a public interview.

‘But if there is a cornerstone to the festival,’ says Deane, ‘and I haven’t really thought of it in those terms, then it is Boulez. Boulez is the most important of the three as far as I’m concerned. For me, the original climax of the thing was to have been Pli selon pli (with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra) at the very end. But logistics made that impossible, which was very disappointing. It is an extraordinarily difficult work to put together, with a huge amount of percussion and three harps. In the end it had to be just the three vocal pieces from Pli selon pli.

‘But the other Boulez piece which I’m most looking forward to hearing is Sur incises. It really surprised me when I first heard it because it is so unlike anything that Boulez had done since the early 1950s or late 1940s: it’s so extrovert and so hectic. It is a very, very exciting and colourful piece. Personally, I regard that as the high point of the festival.’

It comes at the midpoint of the weekend in a concert in which it is paired with Boulez’s great classic of serialism, Le marteau sans maître. The performers engaged for this concert represent a coup of artistic programming to match that of the London Sinfonietta last year: the Ensemble InterContemporain.

‘Yes,’ says Deane with obvious pleasure. ‘Approaching the Ensemble InterContemporain was the first thing we thought to do. It worked straight away! It was both the first thing we tried and the first thing we succeeded in doing, which was very encouraging right at the starting point.’

He is no less pleased with the second French ensemble which will visit the festival: Ensemble Itinéraire, major players on the French scene, co-founded thirty years ago by Tristan Murail and now under the artistic direction of pianist-composer Michaël Lévinas, both of whom have works in the concert programme.

Irish ensembles taking part, each with their own concerts, are theCrash Ensemble, Vox 21 and the National Chamber Choir, and, for the larger-scaled works, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and theRTÉ Concert Orchestra.

There are no morning concerts over the course of the weekend. Each of the three days will open with a late-afternoon event presented by Gerald Bennett, the Switzerland-based American composer and academic, one of whose pupils in Basel in the 1970s was Raymond Deane.

‘I liked him a lot and had great respect for him. He subsequently went on to become one of the founding people at IRCAM where he worked directly with Boulez and Berio and people like that. I am really happy that he will be doing it, on all kinds of personal levels as well as professional, and I think he will do it very well.’

Before the first concert, to be given by festival newcomers the National Chamber Choir, the festival opens with a fifty-minute seminar presented by Bennett and entitled ‘Boulez and Mallarmé’. The festival programme includes examples of the ‘spectral’ music which emerged in France in the 1980s and which explores timbre within the narrowest of confines, often just the sound spectrum of a single note or interval. Accordingly, on the second day, Bennett will give a seminar on spectral music, ‘which is as much a mystery to me,’ says Deane, ‘as it will be to many members of the public!’ The third and final day opens with Bennett’s public interview with leading French composer Pascal Dusapin whose music features on each of the three days, including his Apex with the RTÉ NSO in the closing concert.

This latter will be an Irish première, of which there will be some fourteen in total over the weekend. Among these are the world premières of three works commissioned from Irish composers by RTÉ for the festival. First up is the choral pieceLycanth by Jürgen Simpson (b. 1975). The title means ‘werewolf’ and the subject matter is drawn variously from the Nebuchadnezzar story in the Book of Daniel, and from To have done with the judgement of God, the notorious radio play written in 1947 by the French madman and philosopher Antonin Artaud in the aftermath of receiving electroshock therapy. The play, whose première on French radio suffered a last-minute ban and was postponed thirty years, is viciously anti-Church and anti-America, sentiments which have thrived of late due to issues such as clerical child abuse and the war in Iraq. ‘The radio play,’ says Simpson, ‘is a scary piece about contemporary America, a response to the Second World War written in 1947. Aspects of that response remain topical today.’ Lycanth is for choir, small ensemble and live electronics, and will be performed by the National Chamber Choir under artistic director Celso Antunes in a concert which also includes pieces by Varèse, Messiaen, Dusapin, and French-Canadian Denys Bouliane.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will give the première of Arbres d’alignement (‘Trees in a line’) commissioned from Ian Wilson (b. 1964). ‘It took me longer to write than I thought it would,’ says Wilson. ‘I had to do it in three goes. The structure was inspired by the idea of a Calder-type mobile, where different parts of the construction rotate at their own pace, coming in and out of view at different times from each other.’ He explains how the piece consists of five distinct strands of music, each of which has peaks and troughs of intensity occurring independently of the others. This kind of multiand writing was something he found interesting in Harrison Birtwistle’sEarthdances. ‘Arbres d’alignement is also the title of a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson showing a tree-lined French country road stretching off into apparent endlessness’, says Wilson. Jacques Mercier conducts the première in a programme which also includes music by Dukas, Dutilleux, Xenakis (the Irish première of Akrata) and Satie.

The third RTÉ commission is Morphine by Siobhán Cleary (b. 1970). It is spectral music and will be performed by the Crash Ensemble alongside Bois flotté by Murail and Entrelacs by Murail’s former pupil Yan Maresz. ‘Morphine is for five solo instruments and tape,’ explains Cleary whose It’s D Jim, but not as we know it was influenced by the spectral music of Giancinto Scelsi. ‘Each of the soloists plays in turn, and the tape takes the sound of one instrument and morphs it into the sound of the next.’

Raymond Deane speaks enthusiastically about the three commissioned composers. ‘They are three very contrasted younger composers. Ian is now rapidly approaching that dreaded stage when the Contemporary Music Centre will start referring to him as “the middle generation”! He is the most established Irish composer commissioned by the festival. Siobhán Cleary did her Masters thesis on spectral music, and I am glad to have an Irish perspective on the whole thing. Jürgen Simpson is just somebody I have great regard for, and that even before I had heard his opera, Thwaite, which I thought was terrific.’

Three other Irish composers will have work performed, includingRoger Doyle (b. 1949) who is the presenter for a late-night concert entitled Soirée Acousmatique and offering electronic music by Pierre Henry, Stephane Roy, Jacky Merit, and Doyle himself. The Crash Ensemble will perform Helicopter Duo by Justin Carroll, and the concert under conductor David Brophy by the more recently established Irish ensemble Vox 21 will include Racine radicales byJohn McLachlan (b. 1964) alongside works by Murail and Dusapin.

In all there are eight concerts, eight fusions of France and Ireland, of the wider contemporary scene with our own, of artists and audiences, of aficionados, newcomers and neutrals, of expression and response. Never mind music, this is art where it belongs: alive, on the edge, revealed before the public to be embraced or rejected. Bringing about such a riot of artistic experience is the essence of supporting the arts, support which this festival fully deserves now, next year and beyond.