Music often seems to come laden with baggage. Fashion, genre, attitude – what do they have to do with the pure power of organized sound? Why are jazz, orchestral, folk and experimental music dismissed by so many as eccentric, weird and uncool? It’s rather depressing, because the answer is that music is not part of education, unless you’re lucky, and that’s why music is not often part of family life. So there’s no easy solution.
What a lamentable state of affairs! It explains why the concert by Markus Stockhausen and Tara Bouman at St. Giles Cathedral – part of the Sonic Fusion festival – was attended by just a few students and musicians probably involved with the festival, as well as Ann and me and a couple of Dutch tourists.
Hold on though. I shouldn’t be so negative. Much of the world’s population have relatively deep musical appreciation that is mostly lacking in the West. Musical participation is such an inextricable part of their societies. I’m thinking of Africa, South America, Indonesia, and the list goes on. And continental European countries have always appreciated music better than we do, so maybe the problem is mainly Britain and the USA? And that’s a paradox of course, because the USA is to me one of the most important sources of great music: jazz, avant-garde, blues and soul. I’m not into dissing my home patch, but Britain isn’t half as important in music as the DJs and pop music journalists would have you believe. They tend to exaggerate our contribution, and it’s annoying when it’s done at the expense of the Americans, which is pure ignorance.
Anyway, that we were able to experience this concert at all is great, although the festival was publicized so badly that if it weren’t for Ann picking up a North Edinburgh Arts Centre program, we’d never have known it was on. Barely any websites had it and the Scotsman appeared not to know about it either.
It was our first time in St Giles Cathedral.
What an excellent setting for a concert involving just two musicians on acoustic instruments, and they used the phenomenal acoustics of the space to great effect.
We all sat in the pews in the central nave, looking along towards the stained glass window at the front. At some point music started, but it was impossible to identify the location of the source, even what direction it was coming from. I thought at first that it was a recording, but after a couple of minutes, as the music got louder, the two musicians appeared off to the left, walking slowly side-by-side as they played, he on flugelhorn and she on clarinet. They walked behind us and then down the central aisle to the centre of the building, just in front of us.
The piece was slow, with no strong (meaning foot-tapping) sense of pulse, though it had a kind of rhythm, more akin to the swell of the sea or the flow of a soft breeze. The pauses were filled with sublime echoes, pulsations and throbbings, such was the amazing acoustical character of the great sandstone chamber we were in.
Markus then welcomed us and told us a bit about what they were going to play. The next piece, called Phoenix, was for himself on piccolo trumpet. It is an ever-developing improvised work, and this time, as he was about to begin playing, trumpet already to his lips, the church bells rang, and he immediately picked up the two-note melody to start the piece. My first thought was that this was serendipity, pure fortuitousness, and the more I think about it the more I think so. My second thought was that it was by design, that Tara had slipped out to the bell-tower to yank on the bell ropes, but that doesn’t sound feasible; and to have timed it so perfectly without looking at his watch was highly improbable as well. Anyway, the high pure tones of the trumpet resounded magnificently, and though the melody of the piece seemed rather plain at first, it began to make sense as it developed, while he walked around the church, making use of the building.
Next I think was the piece called Tara, for Tara on solo basset horn, which just looks to me like a slightly smaller bass clarinet, and sounds very similar. It was a very enjoyable, lively and sometimes quite spikey work in 6 movements, including a movement that required her to sit down, take a shoe off and use her foot in the horn’s bell to create a kind of wah-wah effect. It was all on one note and sounded very much like a didgeridoo. In the last movement Markus joined her on piano, playing simple chords sparsely while she played intervallically. This was the first time I noticed her using circular breathing, and it made me wonder again about its value, when its use is so distracting: to marvel at the skill involved is not to appreciate the art, and once you’ve noticed it you can’t ignore it, because it’s actually rather noisy. In hindsight however, I think she probably used circular breathing in the previous, didgerodoo-like movement (I remember the continous tone, and that’s one of the things that would’ve made it sound like a didgeridoo, circular breathing being essential to the playing of that instrument), and I didn’t notice it at the time.
There was a lovely and much more rhythmical piece for regular trumpet and bass clarinet (what an instrument!). It had some sublime harmonies and a distinct swing, but I don’t know what it was called. I think this was the piece which they ended just at the very moment when the church bells rang again, which obviously surprised and delighted them, as it did us.
In lieu of an intermission Markus went and got a wee cymbal, the kind you might see lying around in a primary school classroom, with a loop to hang it from the hand with.
Instead of an intermission I’d like you to just close your eyes and listen to the harmonics of this cymbal I found the other day
So I closed my eyes and listened as he played the cymbal for about 5 or 10 minutes, and was astounded to hear what seemed like 10 to 15 identifiable sounds, a mixture of crashing percussive sounds (as you’d expect) and many actual pitches, pure tones rising and combining from out of nowhere, and I swear he managed to create rhythmical effects: sounds suddenly stopped, magnified, reverberated at many different frequencies. Of course, he was showing us the natural beauty of sound: it had little to do with his skill.
The last piece was Dialogue, for me the most exciting piece, dramatic in its staging and awesome in the otherworldliness of its sounds. He was on flugelhorn and she was on bass clarinet, he somewhere in front of us behind some masonry, she behind us somewhere. They began by exchanging phrases, and later played more together, and as the piece progressed they walked very slowly towards each other to meet at the central performance spot. As Tara passed by us the deep deep woody sound of the bass clarinet was too gorgeous for words. You could really hear the reed when it was so close.
After meeting together in the middle they progressed into an amazing sonic exploration, including microtonal harmonies whose beauty was, in this musical context, revealed. I don’t really have words to describe how ecstatic I feel when I hear those sounds. They are the sound of the new, the weird, the recently discovered, like finding a whole new genus of animals.
The duo is called Moving Sounds, and they go in for what they call intuitive music. It’s quite difficult to pin down a definition for that, but in the end I guess that to produce music
intuitively, combining subconscious intellectual processes with moods and emotions, is something that you can only really achieve when you’ve become a master of your instrument. This is certainly what most improvisers aim for: to be free to channel the emotions and thoughts into sound without a barrier in between. However, I think Tara and Markus probably have a more democratic standpoint, and I think I do to. Even in my ideal world few people would become as skilled on their instruments as those two, who have dedicated their lives to music, but I believe they could participate musically in a way that is far superior to most of what now passes for pop and rock musicianship.
And I ended on a negative note. It’s just been one of those days I guess. Grrr!